16 ms·

Rail Theft Soars in California

170 points by ilamont 5y ago

Bostonian 5y ago
Ungated link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/ugly-rail-thefts-leave-tracks-130025170.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/ugly-rail-thefts-leave-tracks-130... . Politicians, prosecutors, and activists who belittle the harm of property crimes are wrong to do so.
- ldiracdelta 5y ago
  When police protection is removed from society: * the rich buy security guards and security mechanisms. * the middle class try their best to do the same on a budget. * the poor have no protection. Then a politician comes along and says, "Let's socialize the cost of security so that everyone is protected, not just the 1%" And then you get police again.
monkeybutton 5y ago
The photos look like something out of a 3rd world country.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  It is a mess, for sure. Somewhere I read they clean it up every few days. It's been happening for years. But also, those pictures were taken with a long telephoto lens from quite a ways off, which compresses distance and makes it look like an even bigger mess than it really is.
  - caf 5y ago
    Yes, the foreshortening is easy to see in this case because of the apparent spacing of the railway sleepers.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    A news report posted elsewhere in this thread[1] says the mess goes on for "miles" and thieves are there "daily". It doesn't seem to me like this is a visual distortion caused by lens type. Anecdotally, in the past few months I've had five or six packages just never show up from Amazon whereas in all the years prior that happened so rarely I don't recall any such thing. 1. https://youtube.com/watch?v=zN0CXUEMwjg https://youtube.com/watch?v=zN0CXUEMwjg
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Even close shots and shots across rather than down the tracks show tremendous amounts of packaging. John Schreiber's original Twitter thread shows plenty of cross-track, close-in, and overhead shots from both bridges and drones all lacking telephoto compression and revealing abundant strewn packaging: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1481770722271760384.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1481770722271760384.html
- walrus01 5y ago
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- throwawayay02 5y ago
  Most of the US is.
  - humaniania 5y ago
    lol what? Weird comment comrade.
- john_moscow 5y ago
  Well, for the past few decade or so, the country has been gradually destroying the underlying mechanisms that made it different from the 3rd-world countries, so you can hardly be surprised by those actions starting to bear fruit.
  - gfdgfdgfdgf 5y ago
    What policies are you talking about? The urban decay is happening in cities like LA, SF, NY and not places like Texas or Florida.
    - narrator 5y ago
      Subtle troll, or Poe's law? :D
    - john_moscow 5y ago
      The growing disconnect between the person's decisions and their economic output. Imagine you wake up at 10am and make $1K, and your neighbor wakes up at 6am and makes $2K. You could be happy with it (extra $1K not worth 4 lost hours of sleep) or could force yourself to wake up at 6am as well, or would find some compromise in between. The main thing is that if you yourself pick the tradeoff between the level of inconvenience and the pay. On the other hand, if your neighbor makes $500, while you make $450 regardless of when you wake up, you'll be extremely irritated by the unfairness. And would not notice that your employer makes $750 off each of you, while you are busy quarreling about who's more privileged. Most of the jobs in the cities are just that - standard work routine, standard pay, little room for decisions, little growth, little personal responsibility, little chance becoming financially independent. Brought to you by low interest rates fueling endless acquisitions and consolidation of bargaining power in fewer and fewer hands. 2008 was the end of the previous economic cycle where the big players got too greedy and too dumb, made stupid decisions with big money, and were destined to crash and burn, allowing the new wave of smaller companies to take their place. But the government decided that too much was at stake, and just bailed them out. Around 2012 people started noticing that something is wrong, which took the rather silly form of Occupy Wall Street. The corporate response to it was shifting of the focus to social justice and equity - term that was supposed to take into account historical inequalities, but is so loose and unquantifiable, that every person would see it slightly differently, creating endless opportunity for division. So now we have an entire generation that does not aspire wealth through personal responsibility and hard work, but rather blames someone else on having an unfair advantage and is dreaming of taking it away. That's how 3rd-world countries and dictatorships function. People are busy fighting over the leftovers from the feast left by the ruling class, and feel accomplished when they manage to steal the extra bag of potatoes their neighbor was hiding under the stairs.
- bmitc 5y ago
  There are many parts of the country I would consider so, including parts of cities, such as we see here. This is what growth optimized capitalism looks like.
  - solveit 5y ago
    Does 'capitalism' even mean anything any more? No self-respecting capitalist would allow theft in broad daylight.
    - _dw7s 5y ago
      unless it's wage theft. That's pretty much a constant for a lot of self respecting capitalists.
    - bmitc 5y ago
      At certain scales, small losses don't concern growth capitalists. It's just like companies taking fines rather than fixing the issue or doing things legally, because it's cheaper in the end.
      - hnfong 5y ago
        Problems can "grow" too. I guess people implicitly assume businesses grow faster than their problems, but given the broken window effect etc etc I'm not sure ignoring the issue here is what a capitalist should be doing..
- rasz 5y ago
  Its LA so yes. Also look up Skid Row.
hourislate 5y ago
Is this happening in any Red States? I've not heard of these kinds of issues in Texas or Florida etc. Is it just in NY and California and some other Blue states?
- awb 5y ago
  Not sure how much you can conclude based on one city. You’d need per capita package loss data on dozens of cities while also accounting for package volume per city.
- finiteseries 5y ago
  It’s 90% Chicago & LA 90% of the time, historically. There are two ports where consumer products enter the United States from the ocean/Asia: LA, and to a much lesser degree Seattle. That’s it. Both essentially lead directly to Chicago from the west coast, with very little inbetween. Eg Texas freight lines are for transporting things like animal feed and crushed gravel to export terminals with little in the way of hubs. Florida isn’t significant and its port capacity is minuscule, repeat for most of the country. Massive (unguarded) consumer products hub x population, Chicago is the only other qualifier, where rail theft is unsurprisingly also a constant issue.
dv_dt 5y ago
From the same article, while rail thefts are up 160%, “According to LAPD data through Nov. 27, property crime was up 2.6% over the same period last year but is down 6.6% from 2019.”
- Bostonian 5y ago
  When people know property crimes will not be prosecuted, they are less likely to report it. When the police know that people who commit such crimes will be released without charges, they are less likely to arrest such criminals.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Also when people know that police will do very little about a crime, why even waste time reporting it. Specially if the perpetrator is unkown.
    - rtkwe 5y ago
      One big reason is insurance requires you to file a police report in most situations before they'll do anything for you. That does only increase reporting in more affluent areas of course but there are reasons beyond the police doing their jobs.
- topspin 5y ago
  > According to LAPD This is a trustworthy source of information?
  - andrewmunsell 5y ago
    The LA Police Department?
    - wayoutthere 5y ago
dredmorbius 5y ago
Recent related discussion, 2 days ago, 598 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29930970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29930970 Twitter thread with video of package litter and opened containers on rail cars. LA Times does add significant detail and context to the story, and mentions John Schreiber's Twitter posts.
ryantgtg 5y ago
This news report from a month ago has a golden response from the sheriff https://youtube.com/watch?v=zN0CXUEMwjg https://youtube.com/watch?v=zN0CXUEMwjg It’s remarkable to me that he didn’t have any awareness of this issue. But then again, who has jurisdiction over the railways?
- olivermarks 5y ago
  https://www.up.com/aboutup/community/safety/special_agents/index.htm https://www.up.com/aboutup/community/safety/special_agents/i...
  - ryantgtg 5y ago
    That’s what I thought. I was just being lazy about confirming that. Still, it has to be a multi-agency effort, given that UP’s jurisdiction is only like 50 ft wide.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  I’ve heard the railways have their own jurisdiction but the environments around those railways sure have a way of breeding criminals, giving them cover, and contributing to all of this. It’s hard for me to view this as anything but a result of California policy and the kind of justice system promoted by folks like Gascon (LA DA) or Boudin (SF DA). After all, we don’t hear about train raids in Texas or Montana or whatever.
  - olivermarks 5y ago
    I agree and am anti Boudin/Gascon and other Soros sponsored DA's, but the destination of rail transported goods into LA, Chicago etc are typically through very poor neighborhoods. Stopping in these port and transport hub areas, whether semi trucks or trains, has always attracted crime and looting. The difference now is the centralization bottlenecks Amazon has created. Huge amounts of predictable opportunities have not gone unnoticed...
  - ryantgtg 5y ago
    > anything but But from the above quotes from the sheriff, doesn’t it also seem like that dept is asleep at the wheel? Perhaps we read into this what we already want to read into this. I do agree that our current criminal reform looks to have swung too far in one direction. But I also think the sheriff is a dick, and the dept is practically a gang enterprise.
SSLy 5y ago
As previously seen on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29930970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29930970
Gigachad 5y ago
What is the solution here? Do trains need armed security when passing through unsafe regions?
- Hokusai 5y ago
  - kfarr 5y ago
    Agreed. The solution is building more housing and expanding UBI, not guns.
    - kfarr 5y ago
      Curious why people are downvoting this. Do you really think the people stealing these goods prefer to be doing this compared to other options available to you and me?
      - ryan93 5y ago
        Yes based on the wildly different behavior between them and the average programmer. Why would you expect them to have the same preferences and inclinations in life?
      - dallashoxton 5y ago
        Because the idea that property laws shouldn't be enforced and that the response to property crime is to give the thieves more stuff (housing and UBI) is a perverse incentive and a recipe for a lawless society where criminality is rewarded. This isn't an argument against UBI or expanding housing per se, it's an argument against the people saying property laws should not be enforced because the criminals are poor.
      - john_moscow 5y ago
        People resort to stealing when they have unsatisfied ambition. When they want more than they have, and don't see a legal way to get it. If every job available to you is minimum wage where you don't make any noticeable difference, you resort to making that difference elsewhere. UBI won't solve this problem. It will skyrocket the rent/food prices due to supply/demand mechanics and further entrench stockholders/real estate owners vs. the salary/rent class. And even if you somehow solve that (somehow get free food/housing for everyone), you will still end up with plenty of depressed people with plenty of free time and a strong belief that someone else is hiding a patch of greener grass under their carpet. On the other hand, if you modify the tax rules to make corporations and large chains less viable than small businesses (i.e. forcing most of the population to work for themselves and trade with their peers, rather than following the corporate manual), people will suddenly start respecting each other more and will pressure the victim mentality folks to sober up and join the ranks. But that's not going to happen, because all 3 branches of power + the media are controlled by the shareholder class, that will swiftly redirect any dangerous leanings to the direction bringing them further profit (remember how BLM conveniently diverted the "protestor type" from Occupy Wall Street?). So don't be surprised if having a mailing address will soon count as a privilege and your workplace will offer mandatory trainings asking you to denounce it in the name of all good against all evil.
throwawaysea 5y ago
- kevingadd 5y ago
  So what you're saying is that the reason all the crime statistics are lower than in the past is because people stopped reporting these Incredibly Rampant crimes, and the solution is to bring back the people who presided over high crime rates? Why wouldn't those people suppress the crime statistics to look good if it's so easy to suppress them now? What will make them more effective now than they were before? More violence? More cops? More guns and tear gas grenades? Rail theft is an incredibly specific crime compared to something like a carjacking or a house burglary. There are only so many trains to rob and only so many rail lines. It doesn't make sense to extrapolate from it to all other crimes.
  - orangepurple 5y ago
    Crime rates are a huge lie due to under reporting. The police may intentionally "forget" to follow up on reports which coincidentally makes their stats look better than they should. I've filed reports which were promptly lost within four hours when I followed up. One of those was a hit and run.
    - kevingadd 5y ago
      It's a known problem, yes. Unless that is a new problem, however, lower crime rates are still lower crime rates. If you're arguing that under-reporting is a new or dramatically worse problem, how does switching in 'tough on crime' politicians fix under-reporting? Under-reporting is a police department policy that makes cops look good, so why would they stop doing it? If you want to fix that problem in particular, you should vote someone in who will fix it, not someone who wants to throw more people into the local lock-up. If cops have been throwing out 50% of reports forever, then 200% of a lower number is still less than 200% of a bigger number from past statistics.
      - barry-cotter 5y ago
adolph 5y ago
This is the Twitter thread from 1/13 that I think kicked off the coverage. In some ways the thread is a lot better than the LA Times article in that the latter has only a few stills and no additional context. https://twitter.com/johnschreiber/status/1481770722271760384 https://twitter.com/johnschreiber/status/1481770722271760384
Hokusai 5y ago
> recruited people living on the street to ransack the containers. This is what happens when the richest country in the world has some of the poorest populations in the world. Poor people are neither violent nor thieves. But they can be convinced to become that when inequality is so high.
- mberning 5y ago
  It could be that. Or it could be the lax prosecution of property crimes.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - awb 5y ago
    Or the difficulty in actually solving them.
  - Hokusai 5y ago
    The USA has death penalty and the highest rate of incarceration in the world. It's it the safest, thou?
    - smsm42 5y ago
      No, because having death penalty for the most heinous of crimes does not help everyday safety, if the lower level crimes are deliberately left without prosecution - which is exactly what is happening now in California.
  - ameister14 5y ago
    With 2.2 million people in jail or prison I think it's a bit ridiculous to argue that the US has lax prosecution as an issue relative to any other countries. I'll be a bit more specific - there are about 400,000 people currently incarcerated in the US for property crimes. That's higher than the per capita rate of incarceration for any crime in Canada. If the US is lax in prosecuting property crimes, then I don't think any other developed country is hard on crime.
mountainb 5y ago
Governments that aren't willing to use force to defend property inevitably wind up discovering that they have become ex-governments. Even Lenin had to dial it back to stave off the famines.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  This really has almost nothing to do with governments. The Union Pacific has mountains of specific laws that give it sweeping police powers. They could stop this instantly.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    I wouldn't say "mountains" of laws. And I wouldn't say "sweeping" police powers. I believe it does have police power on its own property, though.
  - q1w2 5y ago
    Laws are irrelevant when there's not law enforcement. Arrested individuals are being released the same day by the LA DA and court.
  - asdff 5y ago
    The UP police arrest over 100 people and they are released the next day thanks to special directives from the DAs office on these sorts of crimes. https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/14/economy/la-freight-railroad-theft/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/14/economy/la-freight-railroad-t...
- dahfizz 5y ago
  I genuinely feel like I've been scammed. All your life, you hear "the government keeps you safe", "the government builds the roads", etc etc. The roads are so bad I had to replace my bent wheels from the potholes. The government can't be bothered to stop, investigate, or prosecute rampant crime. My tap water isn't even safe to drink. And I get absolutely robbed at tax time anyway.
  - 5y ago
jorblumesea 5y ago
Feels like the country is failing to solve any real issues and is coming apart at the seams. You can blame many people, events and factors. But it's hard to ignore it anymore. Where the average person was 25 years ago and where they are now are not even comparable.
partiallypro 5y ago
A lot of the lawlessness we are seeing is a direct result of us just standing idly by last summer when Manhattan was ransacked and cities had properties burned all over with windows knocked out everywhere. I even think (controversial opinion) that that lawlessness was a "green light" for what happened on January 6th. Why wouldn't you think if you see DC helicopter video of several blocks aflame in DC that you could storm the Capitol? Seems fairly rational to me (though wrong.) I don't think the "broken window theory" is 100% right, but there is certainly something to it. Instead of letting up on drug prosections, we've let some actual criminals go free, something I simply don't understand. Minor property descrtuction and theft can snowball.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- woodruffw 5y ago
  I witnessed the 2020 protests firsthand and saw no looting or riotous behavior; only marching. Commercial theft seems to have been, overwhelmingly, performed by opportunists and not the protesters themselves, and only one actual property fire was recorded[1]. This is in direct contrast to the efficient cause of the riots during January 6th, which was political and not opportunistic in nature. Attempting to discharge the responsibility of those involved in the latter by appealing to the former is distasteful, to say the least. [1]: https://citylimits.org/2020/06/09/how-widespread-was-violence-on-new-yorks-nights-of-unrest/ https://citylimits.org/2020/06/09/how-widespread-was-violenc...
  - ui4jd73bdj 5y ago
    To me the comparison is very accurate. On both occasions there were mostly peaceful protests and some opportunist. The fact that you call one a protest and another a riot is quite telling of your bias.
    - 5y ago
cjbgkagh 5y ago
You’d think that all the empty packages on the ground would be a clue that there is package theft going on and that they should do something about it. Like avoid stopping in those areas, organize security, something. USPS recently lost my package in transit through LA, given the timing it seems likely it was stolen in one of these raids.
- jevoten 5y ago
  > Like avoid stopping in those areas That may be illegal due to various anti-discrimination laws: > But Free and other riders were baffled over proposed legislation that would lower mandatory penalties for taxi drivers who refuse to pick up certain passengers, or turn down requests to take passengers to a specific destination. https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-metro-cabbies-fines-refusing-fares-20180705-story.html https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-metro-cabbies-fines-...
  - EdwinRobbins 5y ago
    These are freight trains, so unlikely to fall under such laws.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      And they are through trains - they don't do local pickup and delivery.
  - cjbgkagh 5y ago
    I figured cargo was separate to passenger. I assume they have their reasons to stop, like making way for traffic, or waiting for more cargo. Just wish they’d prioritize alternative solutions. At this stage I’m going to have to send packages by air instead. A little harder to hijack.
  - ip26 5y ago
    Never taken cabs in New York, but that seems insane. How can cabbies be legally compelled to take fares e.g. somewhere they fear for their own safety, or on a route that will lose them money?
russellbeattie 5y ago
This stuff is a temporary problem caused by the backlog of shipping containers, giving an opportunity for some the less fortunate in L.A. to take advantage of the stopped trains. As soon as things are moving more smoothly again, the issue will go away. This isn't indicative of society's collapse, nor of the anti-work masses rising up, nor even of a catastrophic government failure. It does point out once again that California has an untenable disparity of wealth and we need to continue to work on fixing that problem.
aemreunal 5y ago
https://archive.fo/xwppc https://archive.fo/xwppc
sha256sum 5y ago
> Thieves are pilfering railroad cars in a crime that harks back to the days of horseback-riding bandits, but is fueled by a host of modern realities, including the rise of e-commerce and Southern California’s role as a hub for the movement of goods. > Union Pacific reported what it claimed was a 160% increase since December 2020 in thefts along the railroad tracks in L.A. County Both e-commerce and LA’s status as a hub are established. So why the increase now? I didn’t see a mention of economic realities driving crime, aside from the increased presence of homeless camps, such as skyrocketing costs of everything. Means: your new home in California being a tent or car by the railway tracks Motive: money. Opportunity: unguarded rails and bottlenecked supply chain America’s problems, especially the tragic amount of homelessness in CA, are becoming a lot harder to hide.
- oliv__ 5y ago
  Could it be a problem with policies rather than the country's structural failure you imply? LA alone dedicated close to $1B to fight homelessness in 2021! [1] [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/20/989015659/la-dedicates-1-billion-to-fight-homelessness https://www.npr.org/2021/04/20/989015659/la-dedicates-1-bill...
  - sha256sum 5y ago
    I’m implying that people don’t resort to theft when they can afford food, housing, medical care, and that the solution is probably a lot more complex than just throwing money at one symptom of deeper problems.
    - another_story 5y ago
      That is not true. The motives for theft are varied. Even wealthy people will steal.
    - slavboj 5y ago
      At a minimum the entire idea of "white collar crime" disproves the notion that people don't steal once they hit subsistence.
Havoc 5y ago
Deja vu Wasn't this a twitter thread like a week ago?
phendrenad2 5y ago
Easy to figure out what's going on here. Online shopping has increased dramatically, but the amount of security around packages hasn't increased proportionally. Perhaps packages are harder to secure than retail stores, so we need a more than proportional increase.
labrador 5y ago
This is one of those flashy problems that criminals come up with and then gets solved. Find an exploit, patch the exploit. I find it humorous because it give Republicans like Megan McCain to bloviate about what a shit hole California is. I'm writing from there now. Everything is fine.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tomas_nort 5y ago
paul7986 5y ago
Another reason that makes California look like not a great place to live from the sky high homelessness (i experienced that first hand WoW and in 2013) to this to the landslides, earthquakes, raging annual destructive forest fires, sky high cost of real estate... am i missing something (oh Google blatantly stealing from Sonos to MIT students)... im sure there's more. I guess the good is the nice weather and beaches... what am i missing in terms of good?
lsy 5y ago
This is a great case study in how news media manufactures hysteria over commonplace occurrences. A reporter "keeps hearing of train burglaries on the scanner" and goes to take pictures, then tweets them. What did the location look like before? We don't know. Are the reports on the scanner more common? Also not discussed. The tweets prompt reporters to start calling the usual suspects: The company experiencing losses gives one misleading comparison to locked-down 2020 and an absolute figure for losses rather than a relative comparison over time. That makes sense, because they want government and cops to step in so they don't have to cover it. Next up the reporters call LAPD, who have a political motive to imply that the problem is worse than ever, to justify increased jurisdiction and funding. And that's… pretty much where it ends. Nobody bothers to look back to 2019 or before; nobody bothers to see whether a higher percentage of rail cars are looted, or whether there are now more rail cars and online shopping in total; nobody bothers to analyze whether the increased wait times or any other factor are in play. I would love to actually understand this issue, but the article is designed to shock me with photos of debris and make me feel as if anarchy has descended upon the streets of Los Angeles, a fear-based reaction that apparently many HN commenters are susceptible to. It's dismaying and ultimately unsatisfying to read when the only goal is to drive clicks and engagement.
- gruez 5y ago
  >What did the location look like before? We don't know. I'm going to go on a limb and say that the tracks being absolutely covered in discarded envelopes isn't normal.
  - lsy 5y ago
    Good reporting involves investigation, not assuming that the first time you’re seeing something is the first time anyone is seeing it. If you’ve gone anywhere near railroad tracks in industrial parts of Los Angeles in the past decade, you’ve seen things that are hard to believe are happening, but have indeed been commonplace for years. I’m not asserting this mess is commonplace or isn’t, but it would be great if the reporter bothered to investigate whether it was, so that readers have context.
awb 5y ago
Pictures are worth way more than 1k words. The photos are disturbing and a crime by definition is an attack on our social structure and shouldn’t be ignored. But to put it in context, the rail company is reporting $5M in losses from theft last year, on $5.56B in revenue, or 0.1% of revenue. Not ideal but not massive either. However, we don’t have pictures of white collar crime, just stats: https://techjury.net/blog/white-collar-crime-statistics/ https://techjury.net/blog/white-collar-crime-statistics/ In 2021: > $56 billion were lost to white-collar crimes. > Only 3% of federal prosecutions annually are for white-collar crimes. > California lost $400.9 million to fraud. > Cybercrime damage cost is said to reach $6 trillion annually in 2021. Add to that the government corruption or wasteful spending of your choice. Imagine if these white collar criminals broke a window or littered packages during their crimes. While it’s easy to have a visceral reaction to photos of crimes, let’s not forget the unseen crimes that also affect us. And for those that are worried these crimes are going unpunished, 100 people have been arrested to date per the article.
- credit_guy 5y ago
  [flagged]
- tempnow987 5y ago
  It's interesting watching to DOJ chase facebook and basically ignore cybercrime. I include all the tech support and other scams that hit the elderly etc. Money mules, no enforcement there either.
  - ywain 5y ago
    A lot of these scams originate from outside the US though, so presumably it's a lot more difficult for the DOJ to go after them.
    - MertsA 5y ago
      And yet tons of them involve shipping packages of money to US addresses and having a mule pick it up. So many times these scams will involve trying to convince their victims that the IRS only accepts payment via iTunes gift cards. Apple doesn't settle purchases with third parties instantly and yet if you were to call up Apple minutes after giving a scammer the gift card code you'll be greeted with the following response. https://youtu.be/-DT7bX-B1Mg?t=20 https://youtu.be/-DT7bX-B1Mg?t=20 They still have every cent, they know the intermediary vendor who is laundering the money, and they'll still tell you to pound sand. All they've done is move the money from their right hand to their left and take their hefty cut in fees yet they pretend that clearly the scammers wanted those 500 limited edition seeds in some shitty Farmville ripoff and play dumb about the App developer who's very clearly in on the scam. They lose 30% to Apple and trying to convince victims that they can only accept payment in iTunes gift cards has to absolutely tank their conversion rate yet they still favor iTunes and Google Play because at the end of the day even after the huge fees they're still more likely to get more money than trying to transfer money through more traditional means. DOJ still lets them get away with it. If they started charging entities facilitating fraud triple the fees they gained from it I'd bet Apple would start caring about it real quick.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
dreen 5y ago
The title made me think this is about theft of actual rail tracks, which is a practice not unheard of in many parts of the world.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  e.g. Johannesburg commuter rail in SA
jijji 5y ago
Railroad theft sounds like a federal crime, the district attorney is partly to blame if they are charging these people under state trespassing laws instead of federal railroad laws [0] [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1991 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1991
- 72736379 5y ago
  I'm no lawyer but wouldn't the Federal District Attorney need to charge them, not the City District Attorney? In other words, I don't think the City DA has the power to charge people under federal statutes, I imagine only federal DA's do.
  - jijji 5y ago
    true
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
Things like these are omens of what is to come if inequality continues to grow. It starts as high value items and ends with things like clothing, food, and other necessities. The rich get angry at the unreliable shipping so it's all done with armed guards. The transformation is complete (it arguably already is) when people are routinely killed over necessities for survival. The future looks bleak and this will spill over and affect everyone. Or maybe I just have a pessimistic and wild imagination.
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  The optimist in me says that the elite have learned from the past and is consciously trying to avoid a "Let them eat cake" moment. The pessimist in me says that if your constantly trying to maximize share of wealth, you will inevitably go too far, even unintentionally, and trigger upheaval.

170 points by ilamont 5y ago

Ungated link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/ugly-rail-thefts-leave-tracks-130025170.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/ugly-rail-thefts-leave-tracks-130... . Politicians, prosecutors, and activists who belittle the harm of property crimes are wrong to do so.

ldiracdelta 5y ago
When police protection is removed from society: * the rich buy security guards and security mechanisms. * the middle class try their best to do the same on a budget. * the poor have no protection. Then a politician comes along and says, "Let's socialize the cost of security so that everyone is protected, not just the 1%" And then you get police again.

monkeybutton 5y ago

The photos look like something out of a 3rd world country.

rootusrootus 5y ago
It is a mess, for sure. Somewhere I read they clean it up every few days. It's been happening for years. But also, those pictures were taken with a long telephoto lens from quite a ways off, which compresses distance and makes it look like an even bigger mess than it really is.
- caf 5y ago
  Yes, the foreshortening is easy to see in this case because of the apparent spacing of the railway sleepers.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  A news report posted elsewhere in this thread[1] says the mess goes on for "miles" and thieves are there "daily". It doesn't seem to me like this is a visual distortion caused by lens type. Anecdotally, in the past few months I've had five or six packages just never show up from Amazon whereas in all the years prior that happened so rarely I don't recall any such thing. 1. https://youtube.com/watch?v=zN0CXUEMwjg https://youtube.com/watch?v=zN0CXUEMwjg
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Even close shots and shots across rather than down the tracks show tremendous amounts of packaging. John Schreiber's original Twitter thread shows plenty of cross-track, close-in, and overhead shots from both bridges and drones all lacking telephoto compression and revealing abundant strewn packaging: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1481770722271760384.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1481770722271760384.html
walrus01 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
throwawayay02 5y ago
Most of the US is.
- humaniania 5y ago
  lol what? Weird comment comrade.
john_moscow 5y ago
Well, for the past few decade or so, the country has been gradually destroying the underlying mechanisms that made it different from the 3rd-world countries, so you can hardly be surprised by those actions starting to bear fruit.
- gfdgfdgfdgf 5y ago
  What policies are you talking about? The urban decay is happening in cities like LA, SF, NY and not places like Texas or Florida.
  - narrator 5y ago
    Subtle troll, or Poe's law? :D
  - john_moscow 5y ago
    The growing disconnect between the person's decisions and their economic output. Imagine you wake up at 10am and make $1K, and your neighbor wakes up at 6am and makes $2K. You could be happy with it (extra $1K not worth 4 lost hours of sleep) or could force yourself to wake up at 6am as well, or would find some compromise in between. The main thing is that if you yourself pick the tradeoff between the level of inconvenience and the pay. On the other hand, if your neighbor makes $500, while you make $450 regardless of when you wake up, you'll be extremely irritated by the unfairness. And would not notice that your employer makes $750 off each of you, while you are busy quarreling about who's more privileged. Most of the jobs in the cities are just that - standard work routine, standard pay, little room for decisions, little growth, little personal responsibility, little chance becoming financially independent. Brought to you by low interest rates fueling endless acquisitions and consolidation of bargaining power in fewer and fewer hands. 2008 was the end of the previous economic cycle where the big players got too greedy and too dumb, made stupid decisions with big money, and were destined to crash and burn, allowing the new wave of smaller companies to take their place. But the government decided that too much was at stake, and just bailed them out. Around 2012 people started noticing that something is wrong, which took the rather silly form of Occupy Wall Street. The corporate response to it was shifting of the focus to social justice and equity - term that was supposed to take into account historical inequalities, but is so loose and unquantifiable, that every person would see it slightly differently, creating endless opportunity for division. So now we have an entire generation that does not aspire wealth through personal responsibility and hard work, but rather blames someone else on having an unfair advantage and is dreaming of taking it away. That's how 3rd-world countries and dictatorships function. People are busy fighting over the leftovers from the feast left by the ruling class, and feel accomplished when they manage to steal the extra bag of potatoes their neighbor was hiding under the stairs.
bmitc 5y ago
There are many parts of the country I would consider so, including parts of cities, such as we see here. This is what growth optimized capitalism looks like.
- solveit 5y ago
  Does 'capitalism' even mean anything any more? No self-respecting capitalist would allow theft in broad daylight.
  - _dw7s 5y ago
    unless it's wage theft. That's pretty much a constant for a lot of self respecting capitalists.
  - bmitc 5y ago
    At certain scales, small losses don't concern growth capitalists. It's just like companies taking fines rather than fixing the issue or doing things legally, because it's cheaper in the end.
    - hnfong 5y ago
      Problems can "grow" too. I guess people implicitly assume businesses grow faster than their problems, but given the broken window effect etc etc I'm not sure ignoring the issue here is what a capitalist should be doing..
rasz 5y ago
Its LA so yes. Also look up Skid Row.

hourislate 5y ago

Is this happening in any Red States? I've not heard of these kinds of issues in Texas or Florida etc. Is it just in NY and California and some other Blue states?

awb 5y ago
Not sure how much you can conclude based on one city. You’d need per capita package loss data on dozens of cities while also accounting for package volume per city.
finiteseries 5y ago
It’s 90% Chicago & LA 90% of the time, historically. There are two ports where consumer products enter the United States from the ocean/Asia: LA, and to a much lesser degree Seattle. That’s it. Both essentially lead directly to Chicago from the west coast, with very little inbetween. Eg Texas freight lines are for transporting things like animal feed and crushed gravel to export terminals with little in the way of hubs. Florida isn’t significant and its port capacity is minuscule, repeat for most of the country. Massive (unguarded) consumer products hub x population, Chicago is the only other qualifier, where rail theft is unsurprisingly also a constant issue.

dv_dt 5y ago

From the same article, while rail thefts are up 160%, “According to LAPD data through Nov. 27, property crime was up 2.6% over the same period last year but is down 6.6% from 2019.”

Bostonian 5y ago
When people know property crimes will not be prosecuted, they are less likely to report it. When the police know that people who commit such crimes will be released without charges, they are less likely to arrest such criminals.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Also when people know that police will do very little about a crime, why even waste time reporting it. Specially if the perpetrator is unkown.
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    One big reason is insurance requires you to file a police report in most situations before they'll do anything for you. That does only increase reporting in more affluent areas of course but there are reasons beyond the police doing their jobs.
topspin 5y ago
> According to LAPD This is a trustworthy source of information?
- andrewmunsell 5y ago
  The LA Police Department?
  - wayoutthere 5y ago

dredmorbius 5y ago

Recent related discussion, 2 days ago, 598 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29930970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29930970 Twitter thread with video of package litter and opened containers on rail cars. LA Times does add significant detail and context to the story, and mentions John Schreiber's Twitter posts.

ryantgtg 5y ago

This news report from a month ago has a golden response from the sheriff https://youtube.com/watch?v=zN0CXUEMwjg https://youtube.com/watch?v=zN0CXUEMwjg It’s remarkable to me that he didn’t have any awareness of this issue. But then again, who has jurisdiction over the railways?

olivermarks 5y ago
https://www.up.com/aboutup/community/safety/special_agents/index.htm https://www.up.com/aboutup/community/safety/special_agents/i...
- ryantgtg 5y ago
  That’s what I thought. I was just being lazy about confirming that. Still, it has to be a multi-agency effort, given that UP’s jurisdiction is only like 50 ft wide.
throwawaysea 5y ago
I’ve heard the railways have their own jurisdiction but the environments around those railways sure have a way of breeding criminals, giving them cover, and contributing to all of this. It’s hard for me to view this as anything but a result of California policy and the kind of justice system promoted by folks like Gascon (LA DA) or Boudin (SF DA). After all, we don’t hear about train raids in Texas or Montana or whatever.
- olivermarks 5y ago
  I agree and am anti Boudin/Gascon and other Soros sponsored DA's, but the destination of rail transported goods into LA, Chicago etc are typically through very poor neighborhoods. Stopping in these port and transport hub areas, whether semi trucks or trains, has always attracted crime and looting. The difference now is the centralization bottlenecks Amazon has created. Huge amounts of predictable opportunities have not gone unnoticed...
- ryantgtg 5y ago
  > anything but But from the above quotes from the sheriff, doesn’t it also seem like that dept is asleep at the wheel? Perhaps we read into this what we already want to read into this. I do agree that our current criminal reform looks to have swung too far in one direction. But I also think the sheriff is a dick, and the dept is practically a gang enterprise.

SSLy 5y ago

As previously seen on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29930970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29930970

Gigachad 5y ago

What is the solution here? Do trains need armed security when passing through unsafe regions?

Hokusai 5y ago
- kfarr 5y ago
  Agreed. The solution is building more housing and expanding UBI, not guns.
  - kfarr 5y ago
    Curious why people are downvoting this. Do you really think the people stealing these goods prefer to be doing this compared to other options available to you and me?
    - ryan93 5y ago
      Yes based on the wildly different behavior between them and the average programmer. Why would you expect them to have the same preferences and inclinations in life?
    - dallashoxton 5y ago
      Because the idea that property laws shouldn't be enforced and that the response to property crime is to give the thieves more stuff (housing and UBI) is a perverse incentive and a recipe for a lawless society where criminality is rewarded. This isn't an argument against UBI or expanding housing per se, it's an argument against the people saying property laws should not be enforced because the criminals are poor.
    - john_moscow 5y ago
      People resort to stealing when they have unsatisfied ambition. When they want more than they have, and don't see a legal way to get it. If every job available to you is minimum wage where you don't make any noticeable difference, you resort to making that difference elsewhere. UBI won't solve this problem. It will skyrocket the rent/food prices due to supply/demand mechanics and further entrench stockholders/real estate owners vs. the salary/rent class. And even if you somehow solve that (somehow get free food/housing for everyone), you will still end up with plenty of depressed people with plenty of free time and a strong belief that someone else is hiding a patch of greener grass under their carpet. On the other hand, if you modify the tax rules to make corporations and large chains less viable than small businesses (i.e. forcing most of the population to work for themselves and trade with their peers, rather than following the corporate manual), people will suddenly start respecting each other more and will pressure the victim mentality folks to sober up and join the ranks. But that's not going to happen, because all 3 branches of power + the media are controlled by the shareholder class, that will swiftly redirect any dangerous leanings to the direction bringing them further profit (remember how BLM conveniently diverted the "protestor type" from Occupy Wall Street?). So don't be surprised if having a mailing address will soon count as a privilege and your workplace will offer mandatory trainings asking you to denounce it in the name of all good against all evil.

throwawaysea 5y ago

kevingadd 5y ago
So what you're saying is that the reason all the crime statistics are lower than in the past is because people stopped reporting these Incredibly Rampant crimes, and the solution is to bring back the people who presided over high crime rates? Why wouldn't those people suppress the crime statistics to look good if it's so easy to suppress them now? What will make them more effective now than they were before? More violence? More cops? More guns and tear gas grenades? Rail theft is an incredibly specific crime compared to something like a carjacking or a house burglary. There are only so many trains to rob and only so many rail lines. It doesn't make sense to extrapolate from it to all other crimes.
- orangepurple 5y ago
  Crime rates are a huge lie due to under reporting. The police may intentionally "forget" to follow up on reports which coincidentally makes their stats look better than they should. I've filed reports which were promptly lost within four hours when I followed up. One of those was a hit and run.
  - kevingadd 5y ago
    It's a known problem, yes. Unless that is a new problem, however, lower crime rates are still lower crime rates. If you're arguing that under-reporting is a new or dramatically worse problem, how does switching in 'tough on crime' politicians fix under-reporting? Under-reporting is a police department policy that makes cops look good, so why would they stop doing it? If you want to fix that problem in particular, you should vote someone in who will fix it, not someone who wants to throw more people into the local lock-up. If cops have been throwing out 50% of reports forever, then 200% of a lower number is still less than 200% of a bigger number from past statistics.
    - barry-cotter 5y ago

adolph 5y ago

This is the Twitter thread from 1/13 that I think kicked off the coverage. In some ways the thread is a lot better than the LA Times article in that the latter has only a few stills and no additional context. https://twitter.com/johnschreiber/status/1481770722271760384 https://twitter.com/johnschreiber/status/1481770722271760384

Hokusai 5y ago

> recruited people living on the street to ransack the containers. This is what happens when the richest country in the world has some of the poorest populations in the world. Poor people are neither violent nor thieves. But they can be convinced to become that when inequality is so high.

mberning 5y ago
It could be that. Or it could be the lax prosecution of property crimes.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- awb 5y ago
  Or the difficulty in actually solving them.
- Hokusai 5y ago
  The USA has death penalty and the highest rate of incarceration in the world. It's it the safest, thou?
  - smsm42 5y ago
    No, because having death penalty for the most heinous of crimes does not help everyday safety, if the lower level crimes are deliberately left without prosecution - which is exactly what is happening now in California.
- ameister14 5y ago
  With 2.2 million people in jail or prison I think it's a bit ridiculous to argue that the US has lax prosecution as an issue relative to any other countries. I'll be a bit more specific - there are about 400,000 people currently incarcerated in the US for property crimes. That's higher than the per capita rate of incarceration for any crime in Canada. If the US is lax in prosecuting property crimes, then I don't think any other developed country is hard on crime.

mountainb 5y ago

Governments that aren't willing to use force to defend property inevitably wind up discovering that they have become ex-governments. Even Lenin had to dial it back to stave off the famines.

jeffbee 5y ago
This really has almost nothing to do with governments. The Union Pacific has mountains of specific laws that give it sweeping police powers. They could stop this instantly.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  I wouldn't say "mountains" of laws. And I wouldn't say "sweeping" police powers. I believe it does have police power on its own property, though.
- q1w2 5y ago
  Laws are irrelevant when there's not law enforcement. Arrested individuals are being released the same day by the LA DA and court.
- asdff 5y ago
  The UP police arrest over 100 people and they are released the next day thanks to special directives from the DAs office on these sorts of crimes. https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/14/economy/la-freight-railroad-theft/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/14/economy/la-freight-railroad-t...
dahfizz 5y ago
I genuinely feel like I've been scammed. All your life, you hear "the government keeps you safe", "the government builds the roads", etc etc. The roads are so bad I had to replace my bent wheels from the potholes. The government can't be bothered to stop, investigate, or prosecute rampant crime. My tap water isn't even safe to drink. And I get absolutely robbed at tax time anyway.
- 5y ago

jorblumesea 5y ago

Feels like the country is failing to solve any real issues and is coming apart at the seams. You can blame many people, events and factors. But it's hard to ignore it anymore. Where the average person was 25 years ago and where they are now are not even comparable.

partiallypro 5y ago

A lot of the lawlessness we are seeing is a direct result of us just standing idly by last summer when Manhattan was ransacked and cities had properties burned all over with windows knocked out everywhere. I even think (controversial opinion) that that lawlessness was a "green light" for what happened on January 6th. Why wouldn't you think if you see DC helicopter video of several blocks aflame in DC that you could storm the Capitol? Seems fairly rational to me (though wrong.) I don't think the "broken window theory" is 100% right, but there is certainly something to it. Instead of letting up on drug prosections, we've let some actual criminals go free, something I simply don't understand. Minor property descrtuction and theft can snowball.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
woodruffw 5y ago
I witnessed the 2020 protests firsthand and saw no looting or riotous behavior; only marching. Commercial theft seems to have been, overwhelmingly, performed by opportunists and not the protesters themselves, and only one actual property fire was recorded[1]. This is in direct contrast to the efficient cause of the riots during January 6th, which was political and not opportunistic in nature. Attempting to discharge the responsibility of those involved in the latter by appealing to the former is distasteful, to say the least. [1]: https://citylimits.org/2020/06/09/how-widespread-was-violence-on-new-yorks-nights-of-unrest/ https://citylimits.org/2020/06/09/how-widespread-was-violenc...
- ui4jd73bdj 5y ago
  To me the comparison is very accurate. On both occasions there were mostly peaceful protests and some opportunist. The fact that you call one a protest and another a riot is quite telling of your bias.
  - 5y ago

cjbgkagh 5y ago

You’d think that all the empty packages on the ground would be a clue that there is package theft going on and that they should do something about it. Like avoid stopping in those areas, organize security, something. USPS recently lost my package in transit through LA, given the timing it seems likely it was stolen in one of these raids.

jevoten 5y ago
> Like avoid stopping in those areas That may be illegal due to various anti-discrimination laws: > But Free and other riders were baffled over proposed legislation that would lower mandatory penalties for taxi drivers who refuse to pick up certain passengers, or turn down requests to take passengers to a specific destination. https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-metro-cabbies-fines-refusing-fares-20180705-story.html https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-metro-cabbies-fines-...
- EdwinRobbins 5y ago
  These are freight trains, so unlikely to fall under such laws.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    And they are through trains - they don't do local pickup and delivery.
- cjbgkagh 5y ago
  I figured cargo was separate to passenger. I assume they have their reasons to stop, like making way for traffic, or waiting for more cargo. Just wish they’d prioritize alternative solutions. At this stage I’m going to have to send packages by air instead. A little harder to hijack.
- ip26 5y ago
  Never taken cabs in New York, but that seems insane. How can cabbies be legally compelled to take fares e.g. somewhere they fear for their own safety, or on a route that will lose them money?

russellbeattie 5y ago

This stuff is a temporary problem caused by the backlog of shipping containers, giving an opportunity for some the less fortunate in L.A. to take advantage of the stopped trains. As soon as things are moving more smoothly again, the issue will go away. This isn't indicative of society's collapse, nor of the anti-work masses rising up, nor even of a catastrophic government failure. It does point out once again that California has an untenable disparity of wealth and we need to continue to work on fixing that problem.

aemreunal 5y ago

https://archive.fo/xwppc https://archive.fo/xwppc

sha256sum 5y ago

> Thieves are pilfering railroad cars in a crime that harks back to the days of horseback-riding bandits, but is fueled by a host of modern realities, including the rise of e-commerce and Southern California’s role as a hub for the movement of goods. > Union Pacific reported what it claimed was a 160% increase since December 2020 in thefts along the railroad tracks in L.A. County Both e-commerce and LA’s status as a hub are established. So why the increase now? I didn’t see a mention of economic realities driving crime, aside from the increased presence of homeless camps, such as skyrocketing costs of everything. Means: your new home in California being a tent or car by the railway tracks Motive: money. Opportunity: unguarded rails and bottlenecked supply chain America’s problems, especially the tragic amount of homelessness in CA, are becoming a lot harder to hide.

oliv__ 5y ago
Could it be a problem with policies rather than the country's structural failure you imply? LA alone dedicated close to $1B to fight homelessness in 2021! [1] [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/20/989015659/la-dedicates-1-billion-to-fight-homelessness https://www.npr.org/2021/04/20/989015659/la-dedicates-1-bill...
- sha256sum 5y ago
  I’m implying that people don’t resort to theft when they can afford food, housing, medical care, and that the solution is probably a lot more complex than just throwing money at one symptom of deeper problems.
  - another_story 5y ago
    That is not true. The motives for theft are varied. Even wealthy people will steal.
  - slavboj 5y ago
    At a minimum the entire idea of "white collar crime" disproves the notion that people don't steal once they hit subsistence.

Havoc 5y ago

Deja vu Wasn't this a twitter thread like a week ago?

phendrenad2 5y ago

Easy to figure out what's going on here. Online shopping has increased dramatically, but the amount of security around packages hasn't increased proportionally. Perhaps packages are harder to secure than retail stores, so we need a more than proportional increase.

labrador 5y ago

This is one of those flashy problems that criminals come up with and then gets solved. Find an exploit, patch the exploit. I find it humorous because it give Republicans like Megan McCain to bloviate about what a shit hole California is. I'm writing from there now. Everything is fine.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tomas_nort 5y ago

paul7986 5y ago

Another reason that makes California look like not a great place to live from the sky high homelessness (i experienced that first hand WoW and in 2013) to this to the landslides, earthquakes, raging annual destructive forest fires, sky high cost of real estate... am i missing something (oh Google blatantly stealing from Sonos to MIT students)... im sure there's more. I guess the good is the nice weather and beaches... what am i missing in terms of good?

lsy 5y ago

This is a great case study in how news media manufactures hysteria over commonplace occurrences. A reporter "keeps hearing of train burglaries on the scanner" and goes to take pictures, then tweets them. What did the location look like before? We don't know. Are the reports on the scanner more common? Also not discussed. The tweets prompt reporters to start calling the usual suspects: The company experiencing losses gives one misleading comparison to locked-down 2020 and an absolute figure for losses rather than a relative comparison over time. That makes sense, because they want government and cops to step in so they don't have to cover it. Next up the reporters call LAPD, who have a political motive to imply that the problem is worse than ever, to justify increased jurisdiction and funding. And that's… pretty much where it ends. Nobody bothers to look back to 2019 or before; nobody bothers to see whether a higher percentage of rail cars are looted, or whether there are now more rail cars and online shopping in total; nobody bothers to analyze whether the increased wait times or any other factor are in play. I would love to actually understand this issue, but the article is designed to shock me with photos of debris and make me feel as if anarchy has descended upon the streets of Los Angeles, a fear-based reaction that apparently many HN commenters are susceptible to. It's dismaying and ultimately unsatisfying to read when the only goal is to drive clicks and engagement.

gruez 5y ago
>What did the location look like before? We don't know. I'm going to go on a limb and say that the tracks being absolutely covered in discarded envelopes isn't normal.
- lsy 5y ago
  Good reporting involves investigation, not assuming that the first time you’re seeing something is the first time anyone is seeing it. If you’ve gone anywhere near railroad tracks in industrial parts of Los Angeles in the past decade, you’ve seen things that are hard to believe are happening, but have indeed been commonplace for years. I’m not asserting this mess is commonplace or isn’t, but it would be great if the reporter bothered to investigate whether it was, so that readers have context.

awb 5y ago

Pictures are worth way more than 1k words. The photos are disturbing and a crime by definition is an attack on our social structure and shouldn’t be ignored. But to put it in context, the rail company is reporting $5M in losses from theft last year, on $5.56B in revenue, or 0.1% of revenue. Not ideal but not massive either. However, we don’t have pictures of white collar crime, just stats: https://techjury.net/blog/white-collar-crime-statistics/ https://techjury.net/blog/white-collar-crime-statistics/ In 2021: > $56 billion were lost to white-collar crimes. > Only 3% of federal prosecutions annually are for white-collar crimes. > California lost $400.9 million to fraud. > Cybercrime damage cost is said to reach $6 trillion annually in 2021. Add to that the government corruption or wasteful spending of your choice. Imagine if these white collar criminals broke a window or littered packages during their crimes. While it’s easy to have a visceral reaction to photos of crimes, let’s not forget the unseen crimes that also affect us. And for those that are worried these crimes are going unpunished, 100 people have been arrested to date per the article.

credit_guy 5y ago
[flagged]
tempnow987 5y ago
It's interesting watching to DOJ chase facebook and basically ignore cybercrime. I include all the tech support and other scams that hit the elderly etc. Money mules, no enforcement there either.
- ywain 5y ago
  A lot of these scams originate from outside the US though, so presumably it's a lot more difficult for the DOJ to go after them.
  - MertsA 5y ago
    And yet tons of them involve shipping packages of money to US addresses and having a mule pick it up. So many times these scams will involve trying to convince their victims that the IRS only accepts payment via iTunes gift cards. Apple doesn't settle purchases with third parties instantly and yet if you were to call up Apple minutes after giving a scammer the gift card code you'll be greeted with the following response. https://youtu.be/-DT7bX-B1Mg?t=20 https://youtu.be/-DT7bX-B1Mg?t=20 They still have every cent, they know the intermediary vendor who is laundering the money, and they'll still tell you to pound sand. All they've done is move the money from their right hand to their left and take their hefty cut in fees yet they pretend that clearly the scammers wanted those 500 limited edition seeds in some shitty Farmville ripoff and play dumb about the App developer who's very clearly in on the scam. They lose 30% to Apple and trying to convince victims that they can only accept payment in iTunes gift cards has to absolutely tank their conversion rate yet they still favor iTunes and Google Play because at the end of the day even after the huge fees they're still more likely to get more money than trying to transfer money through more traditional means. DOJ still lets them get away with it. If they started charging entities facilitating fraud triple the fees they gained from it I'd bet Apple would start caring about it real quick.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

dreen 5y ago

The title made me think this is about theft of actual rail tracks, which is a practice not unheard of in many parts of the world.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
selimthegrim 5y ago
e.g. Johannesburg commuter rail in SA

jijji 5y ago

Railroad theft sounds like a federal crime, the district attorney is partly to blame if they are charging these people under state trespassing laws instead of federal railroad laws [0] [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1991 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1991

72736379 5y ago
I'm no lawyer but wouldn't the Federal District Attorney need to charge them, not the City District Attorney? In other words, I don't think the City DA has the power to charge people under federal statutes, I imagine only federal DA's do.
- jijji 5y ago
  true

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

Things like these are omens of what is to come if inequality continues to grow. It starts as high value items and ends with things like clothing, food, and other necessities. The rich get angry at the unreliable shipping so it's all done with armed guards. The transformation is complete (it arguably already is) when people are routinely killed over necessities for survival. The future looks bleak and this will spill over and affect everyone. Or maybe I just have a pessimistic and wild imagination.

monkeybutton 5y ago
The optimist in me says that the elite have learned from the past and is consciously trying to avoid a "Let them eat cake" moment. The pessimist in me says that if your constantly trying to maximize share of wealth, you will inevitably go too far, even unintentionally, and trigger upheaval.