13 ms·

Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief

103 points by achristmascarl 2y ago

everybodyknows 2y ago
> stolen out of her mailbox at the Los Alamos Post Office All the P.O. mailboxes I've ever seen have locks. What's going on? Was the thief actually a USPS employee?
- cozzyd 2y ago
  my condo building was hit once by someone who stole a USPS master key...
- slayed0 2y ago
  I had the exact same question. This seems like a much bigger crime than the story is letting on. Also, shouldn't this be handled at least jointly by a federal agency? I didn't see any mention of federal charges.
  - bsimpson 2y ago
    I feel like fucking with the Post Office is one of those things that sounds minor but can be a big fucking deal. Your petty theft just became a literal federal case, complete with a police force whose whole job is to protect the integrity of the mail.
- plorg 2y ago
  Some mailboxes at least used to have a common key. Alternately it's probably not that difficult to pick the lock.
- MisterTea 2y ago
  Aren't there two locks? One, a master keyed lock for post office employees to fill the boxes and the other is individually keyed for customer access. Perhaps the crooks obtained a master key by either bribing an employee, cloned one, or stole one. Back in high school a friend was obsessed with the MTA subway and had a neighbor who was an MTA employee. He somehow convinced them to hand over their keys which had both the strait and S shaped ward keys to the subway cars and the pad locks in the stations. He duplicated the warded keys using nails and sheet metal and the padlock key using just a nail and a file. We both had sets of keys and could unlock anything we wanted. All it took was one irresponsible employee handing their keys to a 16 YO.
  - bena 2y ago
    It depends on the setup. Ideally, they're in a building and back-loaded, in which case, they might not even be closed on the backside. Because access to the back is secured. But for other types of boxes, like outdoor boxes, there's usually another lock along the frame that causes the entire front (or back, depending) to swing open so the mail carrier can efficiently deliver to multiple boxes.
  - DaSHacka 2y ago
    > All it took was one irresponsible employee handing their keys to a 16 YO. Sometimes not even. As a semi-related personal story, many years ago in university some friends and I set out to reverse-engineer the master keys. All it took was buying 10x of the same blank from an online retailer for ~$12, cutting 6/7 positions to the same dephs of our dorm keys, then iterating the last remaining position down one depth at a time (starting from a 0-cut) in the last remaining position. Rinse and repeat until we had iterated all 7 positions across our 7 sacrificial blanks, and with a little napkin math, we were left with the bitting for the TMK. Cut the TMK bitting onto a new blank, and we now had the literal keys to the kingdom. Many harmless fun times were had, steam tunnels, roofs, and penthouses explored, but had we been actually malicious the potential for damage or theft would have been huge. I think those with the skills and smarts to perform sophisticated attacks typically set their sights higher in life than petty burglary, with most actual burglars resorting to more simple means like brute-force and violence. I'd be very surprised if these burglars picked locks on the mailboxes or duplicated postal keys instead of having found some dumb bypass born due to a simple oversight in the mailbox's design.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      > steam tunnels, roofs, and penthouses explored, Most of those should be explicitly open anyway. If a steam tunnel isn't safe for a few students to be in maintenance should need extra training to enter it as well. Roofs are too valuable spaces to make off limits (this is a rant should apply to all flat-top buildings). A penthouse might be a private space if so stay out, but many of them serve public functions at a university and should be open.
- honkycat 2y ago
  A LOT of locks out there are pathetically easy to bypass even by an amateur picker.
- purplejacket 2y ago
  Just do a search for "The Lock Picking Lawyer," you'll have loads of fun seeing what he can do, sometimes with the most minimal of tools (like a thin strip of metal cut from a soda can).
- ProllyInfamous 2y ago
  The "key" which opens the entire PO Box "front" is extremely easy to obtain; and if you don't have one, a crowbar/lockpicks [used just once] will simultaneously open entire ~250 box panels.
  - xsmasher 2y ago
    I know many apartment building mailboxes have a front key, but shouldn't PO Boxes at the post office be filled from the BACK?
    - ProllyInfamous 2y ago
      Not every post office has a "back," albeit many due. Many of the ones with backs still have keyed fronts; apartment complexes are notorious for front-access break-ins.
- bryan0 2y ago
  The locks have keys which are stolen: https://www.scrippsnews.com/us-news/us-mail-theft-often-begins-with-a-stolen-key https://www.scrippsnews.com/us-news/us-mail-theft-often-begi...
- madaxe_again 2y ago
  Most PO Box locks can be opened and then closed without trace with a flathead screwdriver. They’re usually just cheap little insert locks held in place by a nut.
- voxic11 2y ago
  Locks keep honest people honest. They are pretty universally easy to bypass if you are willing to put a little work into it.
bko 2y ago
I've come to believe that acceptance of crime is a choice by officials. Many low level crimes I've witnessed are trivial to catch. For instance, find out where porch thieves like to hit. Plant a package there and park a patrol car there for a few hours and chances are you'll catch someone. Or put in a tracker. A cop can get a bike stolen in hours in the right neighborhoods in NYC. If a youtuber can park their car with a ps4 in the trunk and record someone breaking in just a few hours later, I don't see why police can't do this. And it's only a handful of people engaged in this low level crime. Arrest a few. And if they have a dozen prior arrests, like many of them do, keep them in jail for a while. And if they're doing anti-social crimes like punching random women in the street, remove them from society and let them cool off for a few years (it's almost always 18-29 yos). Soon the economics doesn't make sense or the worst are spending their most chaotic years in prison. It's quite simple and effective. But for whatever reason, police or prosecutors are uninterested in stopping this type of crime.
- hypeatei 2y ago
  I think it heavily depends on what local district attorneys policies are. Police may not see a point in taking a risk by apprehending someone just for them to be released hours later anyway. Not a huge fan of US police departments in general but this isn't necessarily all on them.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - longbrass 2y ago
    One contributor is the fact that law enforcement rarely strikes but used their FOP and “union” organizations to slow, or sandbag work as a negotiation tactic. With membership that is largely unaccountable the blue wall is a political tool to leverage public funds by threat of crime and alternatively allowing or shutting down private unionization efforts. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-power-helped-increase-abuses https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-po... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/police-unions-minneapolis-kroll.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/police-unions-minneapo... https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/06/police-unions-spend-millions-lobbying-to-retain-their-sway-over-big-us-cities-and-state-governments/ https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/06/police-unions-spend... https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/historical-overview-police-unionization-united-states https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/historic...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dachworker 2y ago
I never lived in a country where the delivery guy just leaves your shit out in the open. Why is this common in the US, when in most "safe" EU countries, people would never trust such a practice? Seems like an anti-consumer practice enforced by industry on the consumer. No, packages should not be stolen from people's porch. But realistically, it's very hard to stop this crime of opportunity.
- thallium205 2y ago
  This appears to be stolen from a PO Box which is secured with a lock. The thieves defeated this.
  - dachworker 2y ago
    Thanks, should have read the article. I stand corrected.
- ghaff 2y ago
  It depends where you live. I get stuff left by my door or garage or in the mailbox all the time and I would absolutely hate it if signatures were always required or if I had to go somewhere to pick up a package multiple times a week. I have rarely had things misdelivered and the neighbor has gotten it to me. It's just not a problem in a lot of places in the US.
- sethammons 2y ago
  in this case, it was stolen from her post office box, a small locker with a key. and fwiw, I've never had a package stolen, but we also live in a good area, and the packages are out in the open. Sometimes they will be set behind a railing. We came home from a vacation once to like 15 packages piled up
- acheron 2y ago
  This is nonsense. I mean, I WFH now but when I worked outside the home there was a pattern of 1) UPS guy tries to deliver package 2) nobody is home, because it is 1PM 3) I have to go to UPS distribution center to pick it up Finally I got them to just leave the package in the first place, but it took awhile. Nobody steals packages off the porch, because I don't live in a shithole.
hindsightbias 2y ago
Mail theft is a federal crime, why is the Sheriff involved.
- kayodelycaon 2y ago
  Because stealing things is illegal in every state I know of.
  - 0x457 2y ago
    Stealing things is illegal in every state - yes. However, stealing mail is a federal crime. There is a difference between stealing UPS package and stealing USPS package.
    - kayodelycaon 2y ago
      The same action can be illegal in multiple ways and across multiple jurisdictions. Murder is a federal crime, for example.
- garrettgarcia 2y ago
  Because it's the sheriff's job to enforce the law...
tempsy 2y ago
I'm wondering how we haven't solved "securely leaving packages" at this point. Having to coordinate with delivery drivers is difficult if you're not home, which is often the case unless you're WFH. Seems like every front door should be designed in some way to securely leave packages by now.
1propionyl 2y ago
I'm glad the sheriff actually did something, my experience with a stolen Apple Watch has been that police will not act if the location is a multi-floor multi-unit dwelling (e.g. a house converted into a duplex), since they don't know which unit to issue a search warrant for and won't issue one for the entire building. The underlying issue here is that AirTags do not provide any sort of altitude information. The X/Y resolution is fine grained enough to identify an apartment, but it's not possible to determine what floor it's on without you going in person and using FindMy yourself there, on site, which may be unsafe. Police may provide an escort for you for this, but you have to be persistent and on top of it, they won't follow up with you.
- bsimpson 2y ago
  Sounds like the victim got lucky that the thieves were in a relatively small town. I can't imagine SFPD taking you seriously if you said "someone stole my thing and here is the pin on my map where they are."
- ssl-3 2y ago
  AirTags don't really provide any information at all except for a periodic 32-bit BLE beacon for any iPhones (or iWhatevers) that may be nearby, and sometimes participation in some fairly magic (largely undocumented) UWB RF tricks in Precision Finding mode with a compatible device. The AirTag itself has no idea where it is. It doesn't have GPS or any other ways for it to determine its own location. It has essentially nothing to provide.

> stolen out of her mailbox at the Los Alamos Post Office All the P.O. mailboxes I've ever seen have locks. What's going on? Was the thief actually a USPS employee?

cozzyd 2y ago
my condo building was hit once by someone who stole a USPS master key...
slayed0 2y ago
I had the exact same question. This seems like a much bigger crime than the story is letting on. Also, shouldn't this be handled at least jointly by a federal agency? I didn't see any mention of federal charges.
- bsimpson 2y ago
  I feel like fucking with the Post Office is one of those things that sounds minor but can be a big fucking deal. Your petty theft just became a literal federal case, complete with a police force whose whole job is to protect the integrity of the mail.
plorg 2y ago
Some mailboxes at least used to have a common key. Alternately it's probably not that difficult to pick the lock.
MisterTea 2y ago
Aren't there two locks? One, a master keyed lock for post office employees to fill the boxes and the other is individually keyed for customer access. Perhaps the crooks obtained a master key by either bribing an employee, cloned one, or stole one. Back in high school a friend was obsessed with the MTA subway and had a neighbor who was an MTA employee. He somehow convinced them to hand over their keys which had both the strait and S shaped ward keys to the subway cars and the pad locks in the stations. He duplicated the warded keys using nails and sheet metal and the padlock key using just a nail and a file. We both had sets of keys and could unlock anything we wanted. All it took was one irresponsible employee handing their keys to a 16 YO.
- bena 2y ago
  It depends on the setup. Ideally, they're in a building and back-loaded, in which case, they might not even be closed on the backside. Because access to the back is secured. But for other types of boxes, like outdoor boxes, there's usually another lock along the frame that causes the entire front (or back, depending) to swing open so the mail carrier can efficiently deliver to multiple boxes.
- DaSHacka 2y ago
  > All it took was one irresponsible employee handing their keys to a 16 YO. Sometimes not even. As a semi-related personal story, many years ago in university some friends and I set out to reverse-engineer the master keys. All it took was buying 10x of the same blank from an online retailer for ~$12, cutting 6/7 positions to the same dephs of our dorm keys, then iterating the last remaining position down one depth at a time (starting from a 0-cut) in the last remaining position. Rinse and repeat until we had iterated all 7 positions across our 7 sacrificial blanks, and with a little napkin math, we were left with the bitting for the TMK. Cut the TMK bitting onto a new blank, and we now had the literal keys to the kingdom. Many harmless fun times were had, steam tunnels, roofs, and penthouses explored, but had we been actually malicious the potential for damage or theft would have been huge. I think those with the skills and smarts to perform sophisticated attacks typically set their sights higher in life than petty burglary, with most actual burglars resorting to more simple means like brute-force and violence. I'd be very surprised if these burglars picked locks on the mailboxes or duplicated postal keys instead of having found some dumb bypass born due to a simple oversight in the mailbox's design.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    > steam tunnels, roofs, and penthouses explored, Most of those should be explicitly open anyway. If a steam tunnel isn't safe for a few students to be in maintenance should need extra training to enter it as well. Roofs are too valuable spaces to make off limits (this is a rant should apply to all flat-top buildings). A penthouse might be a private space if so stay out, but many of them serve public functions at a university and should be open.
honkycat 2y ago
A LOT of locks out there are pathetically easy to bypass even by an amateur picker.
purplejacket 2y ago
Just do a search for "The Lock Picking Lawyer," you'll have loads of fun seeing what he can do, sometimes with the most minimal of tools (like a thin strip of metal cut from a soda can).
ProllyInfamous 2y ago
The "key" which opens the entire PO Box "front" is extremely easy to obtain; and if you don't have one, a crowbar/lockpicks [used just once] will simultaneously open entire ~250 box panels.
- xsmasher 2y ago
  I know many apartment building mailboxes have a front key, but shouldn't PO Boxes at the post office be filled from the BACK?
  - ProllyInfamous 2y ago
    Not every post office has a "back," albeit many due. Many of the ones with backs still have keyed fronts; apartment complexes are notorious for front-access break-ins.
bryan0 2y ago
The locks have keys which are stolen: https://www.scrippsnews.com/us-news/us-mail-theft-often-begins-with-a-stolen-key https://www.scrippsnews.com/us-news/us-mail-theft-often-begi...
madaxe_again 2y ago
Most PO Box locks can be opened and then closed without trace with a flathead screwdriver. They’re usually just cheap little insert locks held in place by a nut.
voxic11 2y ago
Locks keep honest people honest. They are pretty universally easy to bypass if you are willing to put a little work into it.

bko 2y ago

I've come to believe that acceptance of crime is a choice by officials. Many low level crimes I've witnessed are trivial to catch. For instance, find out where porch thieves like to hit. Plant a package there and park a patrol car there for a few hours and chances are you'll catch someone. Or put in a tracker. A cop can get a bike stolen in hours in the right neighborhoods in NYC. If a youtuber can park their car with a ps4 in the trunk and record someone breaking in just a few hours later, I don't see why police can't do this. And it's only a handful of people engaged in this low level crime. Arrest a few. And if they have a dozen prior arrests, like many of them do, keep them in jail for a while. And if they're doing anti-social crimes like punching random women in the street, remove them from society and let them cool off for a few years (it's almost always 18-29 yos). Soon the economics doesn't make sense or the worst are spending their most chaotic years in prison. It's quite simple and effective. But for whatever reason, police or prosecutors are uninterested in stopping this type of crime.

hypeatei 2y ago
I think it heavily depends on what local district attorneys policies are. Police may not see a point in taking a risk by apprehending someone just for them to be released hours later anyway. Not a huge fan of US police departments in general but this isn't necessarily all on them.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- longbrass 2y ago
  One contributor is the fact that law enforcement rarely strikes but used their FOP and “union” organizations to slow, or sandbag work as a negotiation tactic. With membership that is largely unaccountable the blue wall is a political tool to leverage public funds by threat of crime and alternatively allowing or shutting down private unionization efforts. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-power-helped-increase-abuses https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-po... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/police-unions-minneapolis-kroll.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/police-unions-minneapo... https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/06/police-unions-spend-millions-lobbying-to-retain-their-sway-over-big-us-cities-and-state-governments/ https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/06/police-unions-spend... https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/historical-overview-police-unionization-united-states https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/historic...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dachworker 2y ago

I never lived in a country where the delivery guy just leaves your shit out in the open. Why is this common in the US, when in most "safe" EU countries, people would never trust such a practice? Seems like an anti-consumer practice enforced by industry on the consumer. No, packages should not be stolen from people's porch. But realistically, it's very hard to stop this crime of opportunity.

thallium205 2y ago
This appears to be stolen from a PO Box which is secured with a lock. The thieves defeated this.
- dachworker 2y ago
  Thanks, should have read the article. I stand corrected.
ghaff 2y ago
It depends where you live. I get stuff left by my door or garage or in the mailbox all the time and I would absolutely hate it if signatures were always required or if I had to go somewhere to pick up a package multiple times a week. I have rarely had things misdelivered and the neighbor has gotten it to me. It's just not a problem in a lot of places in the US.
sethammons 2y ago
in this case, it was stolen from her post office box, a small locker with a key. and fwiw, I've never had a package stolen, but we also live in a good area, and the packages are out in the open. Sometimes they will be set behind a railing. We came home from a vacation once to like 15 packages piled up
acheron 2y ago
This is nonsense. I mean, I WFH now but when I worked outside the home there was a pattern of 1) UPS guy tries to deliver package 2) nobody is home, because it is 1PM 3) I have to go to UPS distribution center to pick it up Finally I got them to just leave the package in the first place, but it took awhile. Nobody steals packages off the porch, because I don't live in a shithole.

hindsightbias 2y ago

Mail theft is a federal crime, why is the Sheriff involved.

kayodelycaon 2y ago
Because stealing things is illegal in every state I know of.
- 0x457 2y ago
  Stealing things is illegal in every state - yes. However, stealing mail is a federal crime. There is a difference between stealing UPS package and stealing USPS package.
  - kayodelycaon 2y ago
    The same action can be illegal in multiple ways and across multiple jurisdictions. Murder is a federal crime, for example.
garrettgarcia 2y ago
Because it's the sheriff's job to enforce the law...

tempsy 2y ago

I'm wondering how we haven't solved "securely leaving packages" at this point. Having to coordinate with delivery drivers is difficult if you're not home, which is often the case unless you're WFH. Seems like every front door should be designed in some way to securely leave packages by now.

1propionyl 2y ago

I'm glad the sheriff actually did something, my experience with a stolen Apple Watch has been that police will not act if the location is a multi-floor multi-unit dwelling (e.g. a house converted into a duplex), since they don't know which unit to issue a search warrant for and won't issue one for the entire building. The underlying issue here is that AirTags do not provide any sort of altitude information. The X/Y resolution is fine grained enough to identify an apartment, but it's not possible to determine what floor it's on without you going in person and using FindMy yourself there, on site, which may be unsafe. Police may provide an escort for you for this, but you have to be persistent and on top of it, they won't follow up with you.

bsimpson 2y ago
Sounds like the victim got lucky that the thieves were in a relatively small town. I can't imagine SFPD taking you seriously if you said "someone stole my thing and here is the pin on my map where they are."
ssl-3 2y ago
AirTags don't really provide any information at all except for a periodic 32-bit BLE beacon for any iPhones (or iWhatevers) that may be nearby, and sometimes participation in some fairly magic (largely undocumented) UWB RF tricks in Precision Finding mode with a compatible device. The AirTag itself has no idea where it is. It doesn't have GPS or any other ways for it to determine its own location. It has essentially nothing to provide.