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Carpenter's AirTags help uncover 'massive' case of stolen tools in Maryland
- k2enemy 2y agoThat is a huge inventory. How do stolen tools get fenced? Sent abroad? Craigslist and FB marketplace? I've bought some used tools from online classifieds, but it always seems to be a homeowner or business owner selling one or two things.
- INTPenis 2y agoI have no idea but I remember the Sopranos episode where Christopher's father in law owns a hardware store and sells fenced goods out of it. It's not hard, but the owner can get done for it of course.
- papercrane 2y agoThat seems like the mostly likely way, at least for the new items stolen from retail. Trying to sell on craiglist/FB marketplace doesn't seem like it would scale. An unscrupulous hardware store owner could mix the stolen goods in with their stock to pad their margins. The tools could also be used as stock for 3rd party seller on Amazon.
- dylan604 2y agoThe Amazon marketplace seller is what I thought would be the most used route. Selling overseas would require hardware changes with the plugs I would think which would probably not be something they're willing to do. Unless it's common to use adapters or have people make that mode themselves as part of the "but it was cheap"??? Amazon marketplace is one of the best fences of all time.
- MisterTea 2y ago> Selling overseas would require hardware changes with the plugs Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela, and a few other Central/South American countries can plug these tools right into the wall.
- dylan604 2y agoFor whatever reasons, my mind equates overseas with Europe and even Eastern Europe more specifically when it comes to trading in illicit wares. In my mind, any where in the Americas just isn't overseas. But you are absolutely right in that a lot of stolen items do end up in that part of the world.
- closewith 2y agoNone of those countries are overseas from the US. Maybe there's a case to be made for Venuzeuela and Colombia because of the Darien Gap, but that's pushing it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lupire 2y agoYou seem to be ignoring concavity.
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoChina exports lots of stuff to the USA and those containers go back empty. They can easily be filled up with stolen iPhones and catalytic converters for recycling, so that they aren’t all empty. Power tools probably not though.
- dylan604 2y agoI thought the empties carried all of the stolen cars to their new homes.
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- ornornor 2y agoAmazon comingled inventory would be the perfect vehicle for the perfect crime. They can’t even tell who shipped what, it’s basically like a cryptocurrency tumbler but for real world goods!
- NegativeLatency 2y agoIn fact it already is, lots of stuff is stolen and sold this way.
- bredren 2y agoI just read (by audiobook) two great fiction works by Colson Whitehead that include some of these ideas, Crook Manifesto then is prequel Harlem Shuffle. Great stuff.
- tdumitrescu 2y agoNitpicking: Crook Manifesto is the sequel to Harlem Shuffle, which came out years earlier. There's a third installment planned.
- bredren 2y agoAh, yes. I didn’t know about the third planned. CM I thought was brilliantly written. Just a joy to follow down each little flashback.
- throwaway81523 2y agoYeah there was a camera store in SF busted for doing the same. https://sfist.com/2021/12/21/tenderloin-camera-shop-was-front-for-retail-theft-resale-operation-according-to/ https://sfist.com/2021/12/21/tenderloin-camera-shop-was-fron... It was selling stolen clothing. Odd that it wasn't stolen cameras. I think I actually visited that store once or twice (before the bust) and it seemed like a nice little shop, though I didn't see how it could stay in business. I guess now I know.
- roflchoppa 2y agoProbably a mix of online and FB. Our local flea market has stuff tables of tools like this. Some tools are sold for like half the price. Maybe there is some organization to it, one wear house, multiple people selling.
- kube-system 2y agoEvery flea market I have ever been to in my life always has some guy with a huge amount of lightly used and heavily assorted high-dollar power tools. Before Home Depot started putting tools in cages, I used to see a lot of craigslist/marketplace/etc postings for brand new and unopened tools, posted at amazing prices.
- jeffbee 2y agoYeah, and then people act like the flea market is some precious cornerstone of the local culture. In my city there is a flea market that has dozens of freshly stolen bikes every week. There's a fund where people buy back the bikes and reunite them with their owners. Unfortunately, there's no fund supporting violence against these bike thieves.
- consumer451 2y agoViolence for property crime is a bit 18th century, no? I've been robbed, and wanted to inflict violence in the heat of the moment, but cooler heads... prison would be fine, and you know, civilized.
- throwup238 2y agoPrison in the US is hardly civilized.
- skyyler 2y agoDepends highly on the region. Most US prisons look like daycare compared to Japanese prisons, wrt prisoner treatment. (The prisons in the southeast US are an exception to this)
- throwup238 2y agoI don't really mean it in the quality of life sense as prison is pretty awful in most of the world, especially in developing countries. The 13th amendment codifies slavery into our prison system and few things are as barbaric in my mind. It's basically a few small rungs down from sacrificing prisoners to Quetzalcoatl and the rain gods, which is graphic but no more dehumanizing. States with prolific death penalties just skip the religious angle. There was an article on HN recently with a photo of a prison work detail in Louisiana that looked like it was straight out of Django Unchained: https://www.apr.org/news/2024-01-29/prisoners-in-alabama-and-louisiana-sue-over-forced-prison-labor https://www.apr.org/news/2024-01-29/prisoners-in-alabama-and...
- MisterTea 2y agoA former coworker came to the USA from Chile with a degree in Molecular Biology but couldn't find work in that field because of his language barrier. Instead he got a shitty job and build a small export company that sold used appliances and other goods from the USA to Chile. A big chunk were things like air conditioners, refrigerators, and washing machines. Even though Chile is a 50Hz 220V country 60Hz stuff will run off a transformer though sub-optimally which for most people is better than nothing. BUT he also found a more lucrative path by selling gun parts (mostly ammo parts like shell casings) hidden within said appliances. So there is an international market for this kind of stuff.
- wnevets 2y ago> That is a huge inventory. How do stolen tools get fenced? Sold in bulk to someone overseas is my theory, way too much effort and risk selling this stuff piecemeal online or locally. You can see something similar happening with stolen cars in the US. [1] [1] https://abc7ny.com/stolen-cars-tri-state-port-of-newark-west-africa/13589119/ https://abc7ny.com/stolen-cars-tri-state-port-of-newark-west...
- gwbas1c 2y agoMakes me wonder if they were having trouble selling? It seems "poor business" to let stolen items sit for up to a decade.
- dhosek 2y agoWhen I was car shopping back 20 years ago, there was a 18-year-old car with low milage and a salvage title offered for sale that the seller claimed had been stolen and sat in a warehouse for over a decade. I think a lot of theft in general ends up being “poor business.”
- gwbas1c 2y agoI'm going to assume that whoever's doing the stealing is being paid; as opposed to merely amassing a warehouse of tools collecting dust. So, how is the money coming in to pay the thieves? How is the money coming in to continue to pay for the storage units to store the tools? It doesn't make sense.
- duxup 2y agoFrom the article they note that some of the things they found were VERY old, sounds strange but maybe they hadn't gotten to that part / were not able to move that much stuff: >Some were stolen as long ago as 2014 Weird situation near me, some local folks where stealing construction stuff were found not far from me and ... they found everything stolen over the course of a few years. If a generator and some tools were taken, there they were, all of them together. It appeared they straight up had no plan / active effort to sell everything.
- sidewndr46 2y agoHere in Texas you can just look on Facebook marketplace. Included is photos of garages and living rooms filled to the brim with new in the box name brand tools
- Spooky23 2y agoeBay and Amazon. Where do you think fuckboy666 gets his stock of deodorant and drills from?
- educasean 2y agoIt required the victim to take matters into his own hands and invest inyo buying multiple AirTags in order to sort out the burglary. I wonder how many of these burglary cases just sat there gathering dust and for how long.
- duxup 2y agoI mean let's say tools vanish from a job site. That's not a heavily evidence laden situation. Not like there will be muddy tracks to the warehouse.
- rdtsc 2y ago> He called police, who got a search warrant Kind of sad, that I was surprised they did that. It's definitely a local thing. I'd expect the police to shrug, and say it's too bad, just file a report to use for insurance. I remember people saying "so what if you have tags, police won't do anything and you shouldn't be confronting thieves anyway". Apple, on the other hand, is also explicit about tags not to be used as an anti-theft device. The word "theft" doesn't appear even once on https://www.apple.com/airtag https://www.apple.com/airtag. It would be interesting if they still released a puff piece as a response: "Oh look, a carpenter `found` his tools in the next state, in a warehouse along with other tools. We don't know how they ended up there, but isn't that great?"
- tamimio 2y agoMy guess is the carpenter knows someone that knows someone in the police department that they actually did something, but in a normal situation, definitely they won’t bother.
- FireBeyond 2y agoYeah, I pointed the police to someone who was selling fifty plus obviously stolen MacBooks and iPhones, including mine (all described as "locked", "no charger, no accessories", etc., etc.) and the could not possibly care less. "He probably was not the one who stole them." "Isn't it still a crime to sell stolen goods?" "Shrug."
- ToucanLoucan 2y agoThe roots of police departments are the paid security forces of business owners, and their values as organizations reflect this. Business owners worked with local governments to create police departments to socialize some of the cost of securing their private property; their rented homes, their warehouses, their stores. And they reflect this to this day. Individual property crime doesn't mean shit. A criminal can sell your Macbook if they like, but if they steal from Apple itself? Oh man there will be hell to pay.
- dylan604 2y agoThe logistics of this is kind of interesting to me. Even if each of the victims reported them to the police, the value of the items from each theft wouldn't add up to much in the grand scheme of things. Construction equipment might raise more of an eyebrow, but the hand tools would even be noticed. Unless...someone was collecting all of those reports and analyzing them bigData style, o wait, we're talking about the police here. Of course it was a civilian victim tired of the cops being unable to do anything. I say unable vs unwilling even though I'd also suggest unwilling, but I digress. It's the kind of theft ring that would just not motivate anyone to look at anything. I wouldn't be surprised to see that this has been going on for a really long time. It's kind of genius
- chucksta 2y ago> Even if each of the victims reported them to the police, the value of the items from each theft wouldn't add up to much in the grand scheme of things. I don't think you know how expensive commercial power tools and accessories are.. They cited 15k items with a range of 3-5 million. At 3 million that's $200 an item. Hardly peanuts. The article also says the tools likely came from a variety of sources
- dylan604 2y agoI don't think you know anything about me to claim I don't know the value of tools commercial or not. I have quite the collection, come from a family of construction where my grandfather was a custom cabinet maker where I grew up in his woodshop. It's amazing how people just assume so wildly wrong. Even at $200, that doesn't even qualify as anything more than a misdemeanor. The police are just not going to care if the victim even bother reporting it. I've had my battery powered lawn equipment stolen within the time it took me to push my mower to the front of the house and then walk back to the garage to grab the now stolen items. Of course I didn't report it to the police. Why would I waste my time as well as theirs? I even specifically qualified some equipment like construction equipment would potentially raise an eyebrow implying their value is more than my weekend warrior power tools. Talking about totally being so far off base, and missing the point that you even attempt to use math to get to. However, even your math totally misses the point. If you think $200 gets the police excited, you are grossly putting too much faith in the system. It doesn't matter at all that somebody else thinks $200 is hardly peanuts. It doesn't move the needle at all in motivating someone doing some investigating. That is the point I was making. It's the perfect crime to run for a long time as even if it is reported, nobody is going to do anything about it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tamimio 2y agoDid the carpenter alter the tags?! Afaik they beep sounds around other unpaired iphones, additionally, using apps like AirGuard can alarm you about such ones.
- mcpherrinm 2y agoIf they were in a storage unit, the thief may not have stuck around long enough to notice. And it sounds like this happened pretty soon after theft, so they wouldn’t have started to beep.
- bagels 2y agoIt takes 3 minutes to remove the speaker. There are great tutorials on youtube. I've only purchased airtags for use as theft recovery, and if they beep it defeats the purpose.
- swah 2y agoI also have one on a office key (useful, it vanishes every few months), umbrella (useful, its left in restaurants and vanishes in the car trunk), laptop bag (useless so far, I never forget about it), and car (waiting for it to be robbed but its old)
- gnicholas 2y agoDon’t iPhones pop up notifications if there’s an AirTag that doesn’t belong to you following you around?
- ssl-3 2y agoThey do. And they'll even use RF locating techniques to draw an arrow on the screen that points at the AirTag (so that it can be found and destroyed). Taking the speakers out of AirTags doesn't really improve the situation much; at best, it seems kind of naive.
- duxup 2y agoDid the thieves bring their phone with them to steal from numerous job sites as far back as 2014? That would seem like a poor choice. If the same thieves are taking everything they might be "smart" enough to NOT bring a personal tracking device with them.
- kstrauser 2y ago"But AirTags aren't for finding stolen things!", someone asserts every time someone mentions wanting to use AirTags for finding stolen things.
- TimeBearingDown 2y agoIt’s not optimal for that purpose due to the anti-stalking features, but it’s better than nothing.
- supportengineer 2y agoThere has to be a shady operator somewhere with no scruples, who sees the market demand for this use-case.
- throwanem 2y agoGPS trackers with SIM slots and cell radios have been available for ages, and easily enough found for purchase that I don't think mentioning them here adds meaningful risk. AirTags distinguish on Apple's UI polish - including the care for stalking mitigation - and platform integration, rather than their basic functionality.
- adolph 2y agoAlso and perhaps most importantly battery life.
- jkestner 2y agoDogcow the Bounty Hunter
- LeoPanthera 2y agoAnd q-tips aren't for cleaning ears, but what you gonna do.
- kstrauser 2y agoOh, I totally use them for the same thing. It's more that whenever this comes up, some people inevitably go off on tangents about how that's not what AirTags are used for, and we're crazy for using them for this (incredibly obvious) application.
- wingspar 2y agoOff topic, but reminds me of the lost hunting dog whose tracking collar was found in a big gator, along with a lot of other collars. Solved a long running ‘lost hunting dog’ mystery. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1995/aug/29/dogs-tracked-down-electronic-tracking-collars/ https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1995/aug/29/dogs-tracked-d...
- dolmen 2y agoTotally on topic.
- EngCanMan 2y agoThe most surprising part of that story, when I read it, was that it was from 29 years ago.
- bobmcnamara 2y agoUsed to work at a dog tracking company. We had someone return a week old collar, torn to shreds with bio goo on it. Reason: no longer had a dog. Would've been heartbreaking if it didn't reek of death.
- bozhark 2y agoDid they happen to Govern South Dakota?
- bobmcnamara 2y agoBrutal.
- jhund 2y agoIn the video that shows the stolen tools in the warehouse, there are hardly any Ryobi tools (HomeDepot's cheap tool brand). This is in stark contrast to many of the recent woodworking videos on Youtube that feature craftspeople using Ryobi tools (without explicitly mentioning an HD sponsorship). The thieves know a good tool, and HD is trying to fool the rest of us that their Ryobi tools are any good.
- hfe 2y agoWhat is the brand with the best reputation these days?
- midtake 2y agoTools are weird like text editors where people get religious about some brands over others. But if your hustle is fencing the most reputable and easy-to-move tools, you would probably want to acquire the standard ones you see in Home Depot and Lowe's, such as Dewalt, Milwaukee, Craftsman, etc. Reputation-wise they're all about the same. Personally I like Makita.
- ARandomerDude 2y ago> Tools are weird like text editors where people get religious about some brands over others. That’s because time is money.
- rocqua 2y agoMilwaukee seems to have a strong reputation. in Europe, mafell too.
- NegativeLatency 2y agoPick the color you like best of the reputable manufactures.
- anthomtb 2y agoI spent hours researching the various pro-sumer level brands when upgrading my tool collection this winter. And settled on Milwaukee. Because red. Ok fine, their track saw played a part. But mostly red.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- m463 2y ago> Though none of the prolific thieves has been arrested yet, why would they announce this without someone in custody?
- elicash 2y agoEither they ran into a wall investigating and needed public help, or to get victims back what was stolen? Or, it says they expect charges soon, so maybe they waited until the investigation was over. Just a guess, though.
- ipsum2 2y agoThe thieves would've gotten away with it if they had iPhones. They would receive notification saying an airtag was traveling with them.
- bluefirebrand 2y agoWhich has a benefit of alerting you if a stalker has planted an airtag on you or your car or something
- Kuinox 2y agoI had alerts on my Pixel 6 that an AirTag was following me, so not really.
- bahmboo 2y agoAndroid phones do this also ("unknown tracker is traveling with you")
- keraf 2y agoGood luck finding the air tag among 15'000 tools
- thedougd 2y agoThe presence of an iPhone is what gave them away, reporting the location of the AirTags to the Find My network.
- exabrial 2y agoLol on hacker news i was blasted for suggesting the primary use of air tags was recovering stolen goods. Ah last laugh feels good once in awhile.
- Kerb_ 2y agoBut it's not the primary use... If the thieves had iPhones they woulda been altered that they were being tracked. It's a good use, but not one that should be relied on
- bryanrasmussen 2y agoI don't get it - how could you be this well organized about your criminal business and yet not have process to find and remove tags before leaving at your storage for all your other crimes. Sloppy.
- cynusx 2y agoCriminals don't tend to be the highest IQ segment of society
- bryanrasmussen 2y agocriminals don't tend to be this well organized either, once you have a well organized criminal they start to develop processes etc. in the same way that other organized individuals do. I'm thinking probably an underling getting paid a small amount delivered stuff and whoever was supposed to handle it messed up the same way people mess up deployments or other things.
- greenish_shores 2y agoTo everyone talking about anti-tracking features. https://github.com/positive-security/find-you https://github.com/positive-security/find-you "A modified version of OpenHaystack to showcase the possibility of building a stealth AirTag clone that bypasses all of Apple's tracking protection features." Other projects from them, like https://github.com/positive-security/send-my https://github.com/positive-security/send-my , also seem interesting.
- ec109685 2y agoImpressive. Here is the blog post (also linked from their github) that talks about the bypass (the tldr; is that they rotate through public keys in a deterministic way, so Apple’s protections think it’s a new device each time and thus don’t warn about a persistent tracker). https://positive.security/blog/find-you https://positive.security/blog/find-you
- robbyiq999 2y agoThere’s obviously a use case referencing something like this article. It would be nice to see some kind of officiating this particular use case of protecting your property, perhaps you could register your tag, pay a fee and deposit / signing a waiver to prevent the stalking use case. It would also be nice to see police go after missing items which have been officially tagged. But I’m also not a huge fan of big brother in general. So maybe forget about it
- nothercastle 2y agoThe cops get to keep all the stolen goods and auction them off. Ofcourse they are happy for this huge haul. Most of these tools will never find their original owner.
- pseingatl 2y agoWhat was the point? The thieves stole the tools, put them in storage lockers, and then...did nothing? Didn't fence them, sell them on E-Bay, what was the point? They had storage lockers all over the place filled with tools...what was the point of the thefts??
- 55555 2y agoeither it was NIMBYs preventing construction in their neighborhoods or the goods in the warehouse represent a small fraction of all they’ve ever stolen. given the scale being stored, I think they’re a fence, not the thieves themselves, which means they paid upfront for all those tools, which means they must be selling quite a bit to have that cash available for reinvestment.
- marc 2y agoI had my Apple Pro Display XDR stolen from the office in Lisbon, Portugal. They also stole my AirPods Max which has Find My technology built in. It happened over the weekend and when I found out about the burglary about 2 days later I checked the Find My app. I saw my AirPods Max was in a small town about 3 hours away from my office. I informed the police and they said there’s nothing they could do about it due to privacy concerns. Ugh. I considered going there myself, but it being in a foreign country, not knowing the language, having no transportation, and not knowing what or who I’d find when I arrive, I ultimately decided to not risk it and never ended up going. A few days later the signal went offline. Months after that it showed up on the map again. It was in Moldova at a shopping mall known for selling electronic parts. I don’t know what happened to my Apple Pro Display XDR, but if you ever see one for sale in Portugal please send me a message :D BTW, interesting side story: They didn’t just steal my display and headphones, but also many computers from other offices. Multiple floors except one. I guess they didn’t have time for that one. A week later they came back to rob that other floor as well.
- ForOldHack 2y agoThe carpenters at the top end, those that have receipts, and serial numbers, may see a few tools, but for the vast majority of day workers, they will see nothing, not even a notification that the police will auction everything off, and will have to buy everything again, for maybe the third or fifth time.
- almazzz 2y ago[dead]
- bookofjoe 2y agohttps://archive.ph/ec54N https://archive.ph/ec54N
- bhouston 2y agoA good Hollywood caper story would end with this being ultimately engineered by the tool vendors themselves in order to stimulate more demand for their goods.
- brookst 2y agoThat would be a good Hollywood ending. Sadly the world has become so credulous that people probably believe nutty conspiracy theories like that today. When two seconds of thought would make anyone realize that the conspiracy story is insane: professionals working at a company literally paying for criminal acts targeting their own customers, in support of a sales increase they could never get credit for, and which would bankrupt the company overnight if it ever came to light. But critical thinking seems nearly extinct, and the thrill of having figured it all out seems irresistible.
- brailsafe 2y agoCompared to some stuff that actually seems to happen, the only leap of imagination I see here is that it would bankrupt the company overnight, or that it would matter to the people involved. Not to say that it's even remotely likely, but all you need is for someone with a vested interest to find a cost effective way to boost sales. Depending on how desperate people and the broader economy are, and how little people care about risk, it's not exactly that farfetched that people will go to insane measures. People will try and pull off ridiculous schemes/crines for relatively small amounts of cash or even social media points and shoulder huge amounts of risk, and then turn around and buy nonsense with it, that's just America. The person stealing doesn't need to know who hired them, nobody else at the company needs to know did the hiring, shareholders are happy.
- Aloisius 2y ago> The person stealing doesn't need to know who hired them I think you're vastly underestimating how difficult it is to anonymously recruit and pay thousands of thieves from all over the country to target one particular brand and ensure they actually do the job. Maybe one could offer some sort of buy-back program to maybe induce this behavior, but that would be quite expensive.
- intrasight 2y agoWow! That is a lot of tools.
- cmclaughlin 2y agoThe article states… Though none of the prolific thieves has been arrested yet, Der said, “we are investigating several suspects for their roles in this massive theft scheme and expect charges soon.” I wonder who owns and/or rents that warehouse…