27 ms·
Train robbery for Amazon packages? More common than you think
- graphe 3y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20240124062144/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/magazine/train-robbery-amazon-packages.html http://web.archive.org/web/20240124062144/https://www.nytime...
- wkat4242 3y agoWow they must want my shower curtain rings and dental floss so bad
- MilStdJunkie 3y agoSpeaking academically, of course, I would think you'd station some dudes with binoculars at the loading dock and ID which car has the good stuff. Then send (quadruple-encrypted, on dark web, etc, etc) that info to the guys breaking in, so you can get out fast with as much valuable stuff as possible. Risking that kind of crime for a couple hundred bucks doesn't seem too worth it. In fact, I could see the spotters for these sorts of operations making out like gangbusters, since they can sell the info to lots of ne'er-do-wells.
- popcalc 3y agoI can guarantee that NONE of these crime rings understand what encryption is. Generally people intelligent enough to know OPSEC are intelligent enough to know how reckless and risky this type of crime is. The smarter move is setting up a fence with plausible deniability. eBay must profit more from retail and supply chain theft than any other single entity in existence.
- fragmede 3y agoAmazon is trying to compete in this area too!
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoThe most extreme type of modern train theft occurs when thieves cut the air-compression brake hoses that run between train cars, thereby triggering an emergency braking system. When that happens, the engineer stays in the cab and the conductor walks the length of the stopped train, trying to locate the source of the problem. (Thieves can also stop a train by decoupling some of its cars.) Of course, if a train is miles long, that walk takes a while. In the meantime, the pilferers unload. Way more brazen than I had imagined. I was foolishly just thinking these were people sneaking into train yards at night.
- geodel 3y ago> I was foolishly just thinking these were people sneaking into train yards at night. That would be theft not robbery.
- irrational 3y agoOr burglary. My understanding is robbery is theft that involves violence or the threat of violence. Burglary is theft that does not involved violence or the threat of violence.
- michaelmrose 3y agoBurglary is entering a property with the intend to commit a crime. Theft is intentionally depriving someone permanently of their property. Robbery is doing so through violence or intimidation.
- justsomehnguy 3y agoSo this should be under Offenses Against the Public Safety, Unlawful impairment of operation of railroads, not even telling about thousands of losses for the railroad itself. Yet nobody does nothing.
- colpabar 3y ago[flagged]
- olliej 3y agoI feel there have been plenty of stories about smash and grab stuff in apple stores but surely the trucks carrying shipping container of new apple products must be valuable targets
- gumby 3y agoI thought smash and grab at apple had almost vanished because the valuable stuff won't operate if stolen. I know the display units won't work, and ones already set up have varying (but generally pretty high) levels of resuse security (which has made them less likely to be stolen on the street). I assume apple can prevent an uninitialized phone stolen in its box from being initialized. You can walk into an apple store and walk out with a $100 power supply. I assume that happens so infrequently that they just don't care.
- bequanna 3y agoCan’t Apple just remote brick stolen items? I thought they were doing this with stolen merchandise.
- RegnisGnaw 3y agoHow? The $100 power supply? The $150 dock?
- olliej 3y agoMy original comment was thinking of the things that have high resale value - e.g. the actual computers, phones, etc but from other comments it sounds like they've got sufficient methods in place to make such devices worthless (I guess they could treat them like gift cards are nowadays where until the sale is registered the initial activation fails but if were in charge of such a system I'd be incredibly worried about accidentally screwing up for paying customers)
- RegnisGnaw 3y agoThe $100 charger and $150 docks are way easier to sell. At the local flea market, you can see people selling stolen stuff from the local pharmacy. There are obvious 4 or 8 packs of razor blades that are stolen (with the sticker that says "For sale at Shoppers Drug Mart only" on them).
- legitster 3y agoThe pictures of the pollution and mess the thieves leave behind is really heartbreaking. The article meanders around the point without getting to it. But our society just really has no effective way stop nonviolent crime. The police have bigger problems. The train and shipping companies would rather just pay for the insurance. The only people who care are the insurance companies but they have no authority. If you ask the question - how much crime could the average person get away if they wanted to, the answer is a lot. In a way it's almost reassuring how little crime there is right now.
- wincy 3y agoDepends on where you live. In my city in the Midwest, some people tried to push three shopping carts of merchandise out of a TJ Maxx, drove into a cop car that was trying to stop them, then drove down the highway toward the police HQ (I’m guessing on accident), and as they tried to escape crashed into another car and flipped their vehicle. This feels like a lot for shoplifting. At the same time, as a law abiding citizen this coming down hard on crime sure makes my life easier. My TJ Maxx doesn’t have boards on the windows and they don’t have off duty cops posted at the door, unlike the Target I visited on my trip last year to the SF Bay Area. So the question is which society do we want to live in, or is there an optimal middle ground?
- bigstrat2003 3y agoSpeaking for myself, I would rather have the scenario you live in and it isn't even close. I'm not without sympathy for people who are less fortunate in life, and I do think we should help them. But I'm not willing to tolerate crime as the cost of doing so.
- cbsmith 3y ago> The only people who care are the insurance companies but they have no authority. That's not strictly true. Usually there are terms attached to insurance agreements, and there's a lot of flexibility there in terms of discounts you can provide to insurees who employ useful mitigations.
- snypher 3y ago
- cogman10 3y agoTheft will always happen, it'll happen more when it's made easy. The actual issue here is train companies have cut staff down to almost nothing while simultaneously increasing train length to miles and miles. (And they are trying to cut staff even further). A train with 2 miles worth of cargo and 2 people to defend it ends up being SUPER easy for a thief to target and rob. It takes an hour just for someone to figure out what's happening to the train. What's the solution? How about the train companies employ more people, install more cameras, or shorten their trains? Or they can use their insurance to cover the cost of lost goods (as they are almost certainly already doing). Train companies are trying to operate like the dollar general and are putting on surprised pikachu faces when they get robbed like a dollar general store. Almost certainly what they want to happen is the offloading of their security problems onto the public. We the public should not be subsidizing private monopolies because their bad business decisions make them particularly vulnerable to crime. A company that earns 25 billion dollars of revenue a year can afford moving back to older business practices to avoid theft.
- Baader-Meinhof 3y agoI'm not disagreeing with your overall point but this reads a bit like victim blaming. "Those sexy trains were manned so skimpily, and going down those long routes all alone at night, they were just asking for it!"
- huytersd 3y agoI think you’re making the exact opposite point you’re trying to make that’s reaching back to skimpily dressed women in a way you don’t intend.
- cogman10 3y agoCertainly, because it is. I don't think it's wrong to view companies responsibilities as being different from those of an individual. For example, if a company chooses to ignore a RCE vulnerability in their software for years, are they to blame when that vulnerability is exploited? I'd say absolutely they are.
- 3y ago
- darth_avocado 3y agoI know this is way too common in the LA area. I would be curious how much of these happen in different parts of the country. I would assume LA is more than half of these thefts.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoI don't know about currently, but this used to happen in southeast California. Thieves would get on the train at Yermo (just east of Barstow), and wait until it got to Cima Hill (quite a steep grade, and in the middle of nowhere). While climbing the hill, the train would slow down to maybe 8 MPH. They would break into containers while the train was moving, and just throw stuff overboard. People driving on the parallel road would pick up the stuff and drive off.
- atourgates 3y agoI found this to be a fascinating article, and the problem is illustrative of problems in our society on a number of levels. The biggest problem is of course, societal. One anecdote from an anti-theft taskforce in the article showed that less than 5% of the thefts were prepretrated by organized groups, and the other 95% were from "passers-by or unhoused people living near the tracks in R.V.s or makeshift structures". People on the margins of society, who see an opportunity to make some money. Ideally, we'd fix the problem of unhoused people on the margins of society and we'd eliminate the vast majority of thefts like this. But of course, that's a much harder problem to solve. Much easier, then, to respond with bigger locks, and more security cameras, and GPS trackers and more security guards in vulnerable hotspots. While those measures might work (to an extent) to solve the immediate problem, they don't work to make the society that I'd like to live in. I'd much rather live in a more equitable society that works to eliminate homelessness, and the conditions that lead to this type of theft, then one that just prevents it with punatitive measures and thorough enforcement.
- programjames 3y agoSomeone else said it was 5% of arrests, not thefts. If so, I would expect organized groups to be less likely to get caught, and to steal much more in each robbery.
- justsomehnguy 3y agoYep, just have a mole at the rail yard to report where the sweetest things are => come quick, take exactly you need, get out.
- happytiger 3y agoFolks living in a tent aren’t typically the ones getting caught with a warehouse and 18m or 30M in stolen goods, which has happened in LA and Chicago respectively. These are organized crime rings running fencing operations at heart. The same thing is happening in agriculture, though it’s really under reported.
- m463 3y agoI wodner if that is possible. It seems sort of a boil-the-ocean technique though. Is what you want really to make the cargo less valuable in comparison to the wealth of the people near its route? I suspect that even with full employment, there will still be theft. I think even in really decent societies like japan, there are still homeless people, and also the yakuza.
- focusedone 3y agoThis paragraph: >I left the encampment discombobulated by the mismatch between the perpetrators (down-and-out men living in tents stealing goods someone else had already nabbed and discarded), and the victim (a multinational company valued at more than $1.5 trillion). The stuff had been taken unlawfully, yes, but part of the reason these companies manufacture items for so much less in Asia and then transport them thousands of miles in ships and trains and trucks is so they don’t have to pay the costs associated with adhering to environmental and labor laws here. Also, I was flummoxed trying to imagine how a man living in a tent would go about selling a stolen pet-grooming vacuum cleaner. What even is a pet-grooming vacuum cleaner?
- michaelmrose 3y agoits a vacuum cleaner with an attachment you run through your pets hair so it can suck up loose fur that would otherwise end up in your carpet and everywhere else. If they have a phone I presume they could list it on ebay or facebook market for some portion of its new cost and take it in a shopping cart to a pack and ship place or haul shit to an unscrupulous pawn shop. There was a pawn shop owner in WA who was actually sending out homeless folks with shopping lists of things to steal.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zarzavat 3y agoAmazon is an economic parasite. It has destroyed the small business economy so thoroughly that you are forced to use it (I wonder if Gen Z realizes that you used to be able to buy things in places other than Amazon), flooded the market with fakes and fraudulent listings, and provides only exploitative sweatshop jobs where you will be stack ranked on how long it takes for you to urinate. Good to see them reaping what they sow, even if it’s only a pinprick.
- topaz0 3y ago"Forced" is a bit strong -- I haven't ordered anything from amazon for years.
- jimnotgym 3y agoIf anyone from the New York Times is reading, I'm about to cancel my subscription. Despite being a paying subscriber the site insists on serving me a cookie banner and a 'read in the app' overlay after I started reading. Don't interrupt my tiny amount of Fxxking reading time. You ruin the whole experience
- InCityDreams 3y agoIf anyone from the New York Times is reading, the last bit was "Don't interrupt my tiny amount of Fucking reading time. You ruin the whole experience." "Fucking", in case you're not fucking literate.
- jimnotgym 3y agoSorry, what was the point you were making?
- phendrenad2 3y agoTo be fair, you can blame the cookie banner on the EU and California. If the laws were actually grounded in reality maybe they could skip the banner for paying customers who are logged-in (and therefore have already accepted cookies). However, because the laws are dumb, the website has to worry that someone is letting their friend read the website on their PC, in which case they had better show a banner! Every time! Just in case!
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y agoAt least in the EU, the cookie banners aren't mandatory. They're required only if you want to set cookies that aren't necessary, or collect data that isn't necessary.
- phendrenad2 3y agoTechnically, the only required data is 'GET / HTTP/1.0', so if you don't throw away all of the bytes after that, perhaps the law applies to you. I don't know, I'm not a lawyer.
- karaterobot 3y agoFrom time to time an Amazon delivery is canceled a couple days after it was scheduled to be delivered. It never occurred to me that the cause might be train robbery. I think I would get a kick out of knowing if it been reported lost due to land pirates.
- overstay8930 3y agoWhat does unhoused mean? Is that just homeless but more offensive or something? I'd be pissed if someone called me unhoused, it's like implying I'm incapable of taking care of myself or something.
- irrational 3y agoI've noticed this recently too. It seems to be a euphemism for homeless. I have no idea why unhoused would be considered preferable to homeless.
- jballer 3y ago> "Un–" is used to indicate negation, as Newspeak has no non-political antonyms. For example, the standard English words warm and hot are replaced by uncold, and the moral concept communicated with the word bad is expressed as ungood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
- gradascent 3y agoBecause it shifts the burden (or at least appearance) of responsibility from those experiencing homelessness to the government orgs tasked with housing them.
- thegrimmest 3y agoWrongly so I’d argue. It’s your own responsibility to secure a place for yourself (to live, and in society generally). Failure to do this is personal, not collective.
- irrational 3y agoUh... how does "unhoused" do that? Or, I don't see how unhoused is synonymous with "the government has not provided these people with a house". The opposite of unhoused would be housed. Is everyone that is housed in that position because the government provided a house for them?
- zilti 3y ago
- sandworm101 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_police https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_police If they arent going to pay for bulls, the railroads can pay the extra insurance premiums. Private railroad police (bulls) were once common. We can bring them back. Public, sworn, railroad police are common in some cities and could also be expanded to police cargo trains. >> Through his detective business, Allan Pinkerton met George B. McClellan, the president of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad and Illinois Central Railroad, as well as its attorney, Abraham Lincoln. With Lincoln's encouragement, Pinkerton began supplying detectives for the railroad.
- arsome 3y agoJudging by some freight hopping videos, they're still around on cargo trains, perhaps just less numerous.
- kccqzy 3y ago> Later, the detectives would look up all the recovered loot on Amazon and tally up its total value, which exceeded the $950 minimum required for a charge of felony grand theft in California. (The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office declined to file a felony charge and referred the case to the city attorney’s office, which filed a misdemeanor instead.) This is something I don't understand. I thought the $950 limit was the limit by which a felony charge had to be filed. But apparently, there's prosecutorial discretion in filing these felony charges even when above the limit? This felt like the biggest demotivators for cops and detectives: they could respond to 911 calls and take someone into custody, and then calculate the value of the stolen goods to make sure it reaches $950, and then just no felony charges afterwards?
- jrockway 3y agoIsn't that like tracking down Al Capone for bootlegging liquor, and then only charging him with tax evasion?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nness 3y agoWasn't Capone successfully jailed for tax evasion?
- wizerdrobe 3y agoWhich is kind of weird, because it’s used as a “crime doesn’t pay, the good guys win” and on one hand, sure, Al Capone is a bad guy. On the other hand it highlights the power of the government to harass someone they don’t like, suspect of crime, and can’t prove via unrelated arms of the government. That they’ll just lawfully harass you on all possible ways until they either bankrupt you or find something you’ve done.
- jrockway 3y agoYeah, but the post I'm replying to suggests that police are demoralized when the original charge is not what prosecutors actually bring in court. Ultimately, the prosecutor needs a charge that they can prosecute (get a plea bargain, or convince 12 peers of the defendant) and I think the cops understand that. In the case of Capone, it was just easier to prosecute tax evasion; "here's his bank balance, here's the tax we think is due, here's the tax he paid". In the case of shoplifting, plea-ing out a misdemeanor is probably easier than convincing a jury of a felony charge. Like, all they probably have is a grainy video of the suspect. Are you convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that that's the person sitting in the defendant's chair? If one juror thinks "no, I'm not sure", then everyone who commited the crime goes free. Also, realistically, $950 shouldn't be the threshold between a felony and a misdemeanor. That can't be a number that was adjusted for inflation. $950 isn't much money these days.
- WeylandYutani 3y agoThe packages are insured, Amazon/DHL/UPS/etc are billion eurodollar corporations... Victimless crime? Except for the poor bastard security guards I suppose.
- Ekaros 3y agoInsurance is not magic money out of thin air... It means everyone ends up paying more in one way or other to cover those costs.
- alkonaut 3y ago"paying more in one way or other " I think is the key here. You can pay more for the gadget because it has more insurance, or because you bought it at a local retailer, or because there is more tax to keep more people in prisons, or to keep fewer people living in tents by railroads.
- curiouscavalier 3y agoTrain-delivered inventory is an interesting topic in general. Where I used to live there was a railroad salvage that essentially sold re-possessed freight from train cars. The owners of the freight either failed to pay the freight charges, never picked up the inventory or it was taken as abandoned for some other reason. I'm not sure how well this made sense as a business model, but they seemed to make it work.
- fortran77 3y ago> Piracy is an age-old occupation, particularly prevalent in places and times when large gaps have separated the rich and the poor. The NY Times says it's not the fault of criminality, but of income inequity! > But filched cargo can be hard to get a handle on; it shape-shifts, in effect. If you’re buying brand-new speakers from someone’s trunk in a parking lot, you can probably deduce that there’s a good chance they were ripped off. But the anonymity of the internet essentially launders stuff. What a bad example! The "Speakers from the van" scam usually involved cheap "AliExpress" Speakers that the seller makes the buyer _think_ are expensive, misappropriated speakers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_van_speaker_scam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_van_speaker_scam It's sad what's happened to the NY Times. I dropped my subscription two months ago -- and I had subscribed continiously since 1980.
- thimkerbell 3y agoJust trains?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- LAC-Tech 3y agoThe western worlds tolerance for crime is insanely high. I know a lot of people like to romanticise it (perhaps political extremists seeing it as "direct action"), or excuse it, or gaslight people into thinking it's not an issue. But it effects everyone. Prices go up, criminal violence is incentivized, and it has a knock on effect in the communities it happens in - I can guarantee you violent feuds stem from control of stolen railway cargo. If there are now have literal railway bandits - does that not make you take a step back? Like is this acceptable to you? And if it is - how can those of us who don't find it acceptable separate from them physically, and as fast as possible? Because I will never accept this. I'm not a pig, and I do not relish rolling around in the mud.
- AndyMcConachie 3y agoSo let me get this straight. Local municipalities pay cops and lots of other staff to protect Amazon's cargo, but Amazon barely pays any taxes. If Amazon is going to exist off the largess of society's hard working public workforce they should pay their fare share in taxes.
- topaz0 3y agoIn my experience this kind of story should be treated with extreme skepticism. Not that the specific thefts it describes didn't take place, just that they are likely to be blown out of proportion. Not unusual for this to be a story pushed behind the scenes by the entities that stand to profit from the attention, such as the railroads and shippers that would benefit from society devoting more resources to solving their problems for them. Would not be surprised if the (anonymous) "expert on supply chain risks" (who offers an estimate of the size of the problem that is much higher than those of the relevant law enforcement agencies) specifically has the job of making a fuss about this in the media. See e.g. the widespread credulous reporting of "organized retail theft" numbers last year that turned out to be basically made up based on misinterpreting previous (baseless) numbers from earlier reports from the same retail lobbying organization.
- matteoraso 3y agoTotally agree. Some quick math shows how much of a non-issue this really is. The article says that 20,000,000 containers are shipped to LA every year, which comes to 54,794 containers a day. The article follows that by saying that 90 containers are opened every day to steal from. Even if we assume that every one of these containers were opened on a train, that's only 0.16% of all containers. You're only going to be able to steal a small portion of the container as well, since they're too big to load onto a car. Amazon probably loses more packages to mishandling than these Butch Cassidy wannabes.