Stopping Porch Pirates
 

Apologize if a Q. Some of my neighbors had stuff stolen off their porch in the past week. This guy is a former NASA scientist who is a true "mad scientist" with a brilliant way to punish porch pirates and reward people who do the right thing. 18 minutes, but very entertaining. Careful, some language...
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I've seen this before. I think of it everytime I see a package somewhere. I think it's hilarious.

Goddamn thieves!

It should blow up at the end and kill the thief. That would be funny.

I have no sympathy for any thief no matter what happens to them.

instead of fart spray, he should've tried to get his hands on some government grade ebola virus.

I’m always amazed at the mentality of porch pirates.

How do they know what’s in the Package is worth potentially going to jail for?

I mean, what if it’s a box of underwear??

Poetry.

I walked by a vagrant today who was sleeping on the median, and he had stolen one of the sandwich board signs from a restaurant. It was sitting there leaning against a tree. I think some of those people are more interested in the act of stealing than in gaining anything of value.

also, never buy a sandwich from a homeless guy. no matter how awesome the sign he might have is.


I'll never do that again.

In my neighborhood, someone stole the huge, metal, multi-home mailbox.

People are strange. I imagine that is 50 counts of felony mail theft.

My God

I saw one the other day where an Amazon driver delivered a package. He then took a picture that he uploaded that showed it was delivered. Then he took the package and left.

Did all of this right in front of a Ring doorbell. Should be pretty easy to track him down and Fire his ass.

In a lot of places, cops won't do shit about it so it's pretty much risk-free.

I’ve seen this before but it’s still great.

Geezus

I’ve never been that hungry.

People saying they've seen this before, it's a new video. Likely not the one you saw about a year ago.

Thank you

Yep, this ones' even better.

LMAO

I was just playing off of Rain Man's comment about a homeless guy who somehow had a sandwich board from a restaurant.



I keed, I keeeed.

ED-209 is a more effective deterrent.

What about butt pirates?

We know you don't want to stop those

Dude. I look out for all the members of CP.

The only way to be sure they don’t do it again is to use pipe bombs not glitter ones

If there is anything that is of one of the least concerns to society, it is the existence of porch pirates. They aren't even near aa common as people act like they are. They are just fun to talk about.

personally, I think his time could've been better used rigging a device to explode about 5 to 10lbs of dog poo upon opening.

This is part 2 with many upgrades including worse fart smell, a voice countdown, and police radio traffic.

This guy has some other cool videos as well.

Dog poo is bad but cat poo is worse..

Tell that to the guy who is sitting on my toilet seat right now.

Seriously, my wife ordered a new seat for our toilet a couple of weeks ago, and apparently someone stole the package. It's listed as being delivered, but we never got it and my wife is having to do a stolen package claim of some sort.

We have had a few in our neighborhood. Caught both of them. Yes....caught.

We have a development facebook page (started by me) that warns people if something is going on. The fact that there are cameras everywhere helps. One guy got a face, and a car, and a partial plate. Boom. done.

https://www.kare11.com/article/news/...d/89-553147789

:LOL:

"SOMEBODY TURN IT OFF!!!!!"

Excellent!! Waterboard those MFers..

I feel like Amazon/Fed Ex/USPS just leave shit at my door expecting me to deliver it to the right address.

Too many times i get packages arriving that are for my neighbors on the Cul De Sac. It's like they pull up, look around and go, "Eh **** it, we'll through it in this guy's yard and they'll figure it out".

I live in one of those places. The police force here exists only to generate revenue for the city.

No doubt one of those high-end computerized Japanese bidet toilet seats.:clap:

I have a different plan.


I want to put a midget wearing a leprechaun outfit into a box with a sack of pb&j, some juice boxes and when the thief opens the box I want him to leap out and beat them to death with a claw hammer while yammering about stolen lucky charms.

I wish.

I was in Japan last year, and I must say, those things are far more pleasant than I would've ever thought.

Dude runs like he's got a load in his pants. Guessing he needs those diapers more than you do!

Just set the fence to open when the box on the porch, leaves the porch.

Just think of bragging as you show pictures of the dogs licking their chops as the thief is stuck sitting on the porch until you get home

That dude that was telling someone that he bought them some really nice headphones - "They're BOSE!" - right before opening the package is going to have some explaining to do.

Last weekend, after looking at the NextDoor.com site for my sleepy and safe suburban neighborhood, I started thinking porch pirates were eyeing every other delivery, based on the scare posts from edgy neighbors, so i finally got around to setting up the garage-door opener we had installed this summer so that it can be opened and closed remotely by my smartphone and by Amazon delivery drivers in cases when I request In-Garage delivery. Turned out to be very easy to set up, using Wi-Fi.

With the cheapness of cameras-I don't know why more people DON'T have them.

I have 4. Not because I am paranoid-just because they are available.

The whole thought process of going up on someones porch & and stealing is so alien to me.

Then again, I grew up when most people's front doors were open during the day..

Version 3.0 has arrived!

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I want to see one created by the unabomber

Yes!!

Instead of going through all this bullshit he should have just hired Billay to beat the shit out of them.

18 minutes to get to the package exploding? Who has time for that.

Frustrating he isn't using fecal paint instead of glitter on these thieves.

Is this guy on the hook in anyway if someone somehow got injured?

Didn't realize glitter box and squirrel-proof bird feeder were the same guy.

I felt kind of sad for the little kid whose mother was training him to be a criminal. He's going to end up in jail solely because he has a terrible mother.

Yeah, that was particularly depressing.

Probably.

That depends upon a wide variety of factors. He clearly designed the fake package to be non-injurious and has done this many times without any injury.

To be on the hook, the exploding glitter bomb would have to be the proximate cause of any injuries. While proximate cause is a nebulous concept, you can use 'foreseeability' as a rough substitute. That is, were the injuries foreseeable?

So, say the guy grabs the package, takes it into a remote area and then lights it on fire. The heat makes the fart spray containers explode because they are under pressure. The explosion drives shrapnel into his brain and he has permanent brain injury. Is that foreseeable? Doubtful. Most of the people who would take the box are going to be opening it, not setting it on fire unopened.

However, let's say that the glitter bomb delays going off. Somebody takes the package and then opens it and begins to wonder what it is. He bends down and looks at it only for the glitter bomb to go off. He gets glitter in his eye, it scratches his eye and he suffers injuries. Could the maker be on the hook? This is more foreseeable than the guy who put it in the fire, but he may or may not recover, depending.

Many states have a doctrine called comparative or contributory negligence. That is, if the injured party is more at fault than the negligent party, the injured party gets no recovery. So let's say that Ford trucks have a weakness in a weld for the safety cage. Some one is drunk and challenges another drunken idiot to a race along a narrow dirt road that skirts a mountain edge. This guy loses control of the truck and the truck rolls down the mountain. The weld doesn't hold, the passenger compartment is crushed and he suffers injuries. There are variations on how this works, depending on state law, but in some states if the injured guy is at all at fault, then the other party (Ford) doesn't have to pay anything. Even if the jury finds 90% of the injuries are Ford's fault. In other jurisdictions, Ford only has to pay if a jury finds Ford is more responsible than the injured party. So if Ford is 55% at fault and the drunk guy is 45% at fault, Ford owes money, but only 55% of the damages. If the jury finds that the drunk guy is 50.1% at fault or more, then Ford owes no money. And in the remaining states, Ford owes money if the jury finds they are at fault in any way but those damages are reduced by what portion of fault is Ford's. So if the jury finds that the guys' damages are $1.5M but that guy was 90% at fault, Ford would only have to pay 10%, or $150,000.

There may be other permutations to this formula but those are the rough models that would apply. If the guy I described above suffered eye injury, and that eye injury were foreseeable, then if it went to trial, a jury would decide if the glitter bomb maker bore any responsibility and, if so, what percentage. And the court would then issue a decision based upon that. The fact that the injured guy stole the package is not a complete defense but it certainly would be considered. I say it's not a complete defense because there are numerous cases from many years ago involving people who would set up trap guns to shoot burglars while they were away. The courts ruled that using such violence against burglars was not reasonable since nobody was going to be home and as a general rule, you cannot use deadly force to protect property (there are limited exceptions in a very few states, but I'm not going to spell out each exception. Just take my word for it that you cannot use deadly force to protect property. And shooting a burglar who is in your house in the middle of the night is protecting the lives of you and your family, NOT your property.)

Given those cases, it is doubtful that the theft would be a complete legal defense. That is, the court would likely not dismiss the case merely because the injured person stole the package since you do not have the right to injure a person for theft, but I could certainly see a jury saying, "He stole the package. He's 80% at fault." And then the judge would have to say that he either doesn't get money or doesn't get much money.

I know that's a long answer, but there are a whole bunch of issues involved. This answer skims the surface. This answer is also why when you ask a lawyer a question like this, the answer typically is, "It depends." I don't do personal injury cases so there are undoubtedly issues I am not even aware of or raising.

If you're going to steal something off someone's porch you should easily accept the risk of your face being blown off or at the very least your eyes being blown out of their sockets and you are blind your entire life. EOS.

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version 4.0

had a couple of Walmart delivered boxes disappear off my front porch a few weeks ago, got the notification they were delivered and even the picture, but when i got home no boxes. Was annoyed, but I contacted Walmart and had them send me two more boxes for no extra charge.

The contents of the two boxes I had stolen? Ten bags of pine cat litter. Enjoy that shit asshole.

Imagine how annoyed your cats were

The dual funnel thing is pretty genius... and love how they even automated the flower bed thing in the front to move over the package every night. LMAO

It's still pretty funny, but I do kind of wish there were some real consequences here. I don't fully understand why the cops aren't more involved.

I think what's even sadder is that there are cameras everywhere, and people still do it with no regards to consequences that they would face.

If it's an actual post office box, that is, one owned by the U.S.P.S., then it's a federal offense. Whether it's mail theft depends upon whether any mail was actually in the P.O. Box.

That's not the real issue, though. Typically those thefts go after mail and then use the stolen mail for a wide variety of things. If the mail has any identifying information, people fill out fake tax returns so they can get a check. THey literally just file a second return for Joe Blow using all of his information, usually a 1040EZ, and list enough that doesn't have to be independently verified so that they can get $5-10K from the government. They use the information to get enough of a fake ID to cash the check. Maybe they succeed 1 time in 10 but the last case I had like this, the ring got about $500,000 from fake tax returns. Compared to that, the theft of the mail boxes wasn't even prosecuted.

You might think, "Doesn't the IRS recognize that someone has already paid taxes and been issued a refund?" The answer to that is, "Not always."

By the way, this is a really good reason to get your mail at a UPS store or private mail service place. Your physical address is generally kept secret. There's surveillance of your mail system at all time, whether people there or security cameras after hours. And any packages are held behind the counter so they can't be stolen by porch pirates.

He should incorporate CS Gas along with the Fart Spray. That stuff is nasty.

Mark Rober is a genius as well as a very cool individual.


https://youtu.be/5z9DMBlvBeY

how about CS gas and the exploding ink packets they use for bank robbery money....for that matter, release Norovirus mist.

let the thieves think about what they've done, dyed blue with explosive diarrhea.

I like the idea! The only thing that stands in the way is he uses biodegradable glitter thus not long term. Is there a "washable" ink packets?

If it was me, I would use the worst glitter and permanent ink.

I'm sure the issue is liability for damaging anything permanently. Even if you think that the porch pirates deserve it, you can't legally retaliate against a crime with a crime. Not to mention that there would sometimes be collateral damage in cases like the pawn shop.

I'm pretty lucky where I live - only once in 20+ years has anything been taken off my porch. My neighborhood is nice enough that we don't have a bunch of lowlifes, but ordinary enough that we don't attract unwanted attention. It's all townhouses/condos, so there are a ton of windows overlooking the street and little to no cover for anyone up to no good.

Point well made.

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Oh God.. I can't wait to watch this

Watch this one afterwards.

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That was excellent!

What Hog said. Awesome stuff.

Those bastards got my mom for $1000 about a year before she died at 89. Old people are really vulnerable.

I'd much more prefer a cruise missile.

I have never been porch pirated in my life

That was great. The British guy at the end of the video that puts the callers in chipmunk mode is legendary. I've watched a few of his videos and he really ****s with those dirtbags.

I would pay tax dollars to fund the work of those people. It would be great if they would ruin the lives of every scumbag at those companies in any way that would entertain us. And I can be entertained by some pretty gory stuff.

Is that code for Raiders fans?