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. 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?"
Having lived in Mountain View & Sunnyvale, CA as well for a decade my experience was Howard County itself had quicker and better services than those cities.
It doesn't surprise me at all that their police department is competent and helpful.
Another buddy was woken up one night by a drunken stranger pounding on his door. He called the MVPD and within 5 minutes 3 squad cars showed up.
I used to live in Dallas. One night an entire floor of cars parked in my apartment garage was broken into. I called the police and reported it. Then I asked when they're coming and if I should stick around to wait for them. They told me they're not coming. The next night, the thieves returned and broke into all the cars on the next garage level.
Funding really matters. Mountain View is one of the handful of cities in the country with a triple-A municipal bond rating.
If you think preventing and solving crimes, then American police are objectively bad at their jobs. If you think of police as revenue generators, then they're good at it. Because the police spend all their time on things like traffic citations. Even the police unions occasionally say the quite part out loud, like when the NYPD union famously said that they would not arrest anyone "unless absolutely necessary". Unsurprisingly to people that have looked into policing, crime doesn't increase during police work slowdowns.
https://policescorecard.org/md/police-department/howard-coun...
"He probably was not the one who stole them."
"Isn't it still a crime to sell stolen goods?"
"Shrug."
In alot of places, police tend to take care of friends and referred people first. The top down control involved in that discourages the rank and file from doing more than required.
Steal a guys watch or TV, fine. He will go without. Steal his tools and his kids don't get Christmas. Even the most gruesome mob hitmen would turn their noses up at stealing a working man's tools.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/08/us/denver-police-raid-wrong-h...
I suspect there has to be more evidence than just the AirTag, but it is possible that the police used that tip to kick off an investigation that ultimately led to the warrant and search. Or they already started building a case. Based off the estimated 15,000 stolen tools, this theft ring was in the millions of dollars and was quite possibly already on their radar.
I suspect just one more data point would be pretty easy to manage, peek in a window, or even have the dude drive around the facility and see if the location was consistently reporting.
https://www.amazon.com/Jiobit-Real-Time-Waterproof-Encrypted...
I assume what got them to show up was that they didn’t want the bad press if the dude got shot.
I think in texas you can defend your self/loved ones/property with a gun.
In california, you can take a gun to the target range (in your trunk, unloaded). Not sure what else you can use a gun for except maybe get in trouble.
There are cities that have gotten proactive and fought against high car theft rates by handing out free Bluetooth trackers to the public and having people hide them in their car.
Big time vs. small beans
The scale seems very different to reach any such conclusion as grand-parent.
As well they should. The last thing Apple wants is some parent tracking down their kid’s stolen bicycle using an AirTag and wind up getting killed by the thief. They want people using these things the way my dad uses them: to find his car keys (or whatever else he might lose)!
Apple is well aware people use it as an anti-theft device, just as Unilever is well aware that people use Q-Tips in their ears.
Because if people would rely on that then I'm pretty certain some would go and sue Apple if they fail to retrieve their property - e.g. because a thief noticed the "you're being tracked" notification on their iPhone or Android.
OTOH I'd really really REALLY love it if all the modern cordless power tools and their batteries would come with smart tags integrated that work with Apple's, Google's and Samsung's Find My networks.
And I'd love it if I could somehow tell my iPhone, my Android and my wife's Android which tags belong to the respective other... right now when we're travelling for longer than 2h, she gets notifications from my AirPods and keychain tracker, and I get a notification on each of my devices for her stuff. Makes the anti-stalker thing pretty useless if you routinely have to ignore it.
The only reason why they can sometimes work against theft is because thieves do not realize they are being tracked. That's because Apple's anti-stalking measures are sometimes insufficient.
Hope is get to read about the thieves getting pinched soon. Who knows, that huge caper in a Canadian airport just finally yielded arrests, so my optimism has been somewhat restored in _some_ aspects of the justice system.
Would recommend airtagging: even if you aren't as lucky as I was, at least you'll have the reassurance of knowing you did what you could.
Two years ago, WhistlinDiesel youtuber used trail camera's and his air tags to bust his neighbors stealing from him. It took a few calls, but he got it done. He was smart and used the cops as mediators and didn't just go over and start yelling at the dude to get his stuff back.
That's pretty much the definition of implicit. You know, the exact opposite of explicit.
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.
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...
>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.
It's not hard, but the owner can get done for it of course.
Great stuff.
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.
Maybe there is some organization to it, one wear house, multiple people selling.
Where do you think fuckboy666 gets his stock of deodorant and drills from?
“The first mass-produced cotton swab was developed in 1923 by Polish-American Jew Leo Gerstenzang after he watched his wife attach wads of cotton to toothpicks to clean their infant's ears.”
usually, this is in regard to complaints about the anti-stalking features making airtags less useful for finding stolen things. use airtags for whatever you want, but apple has made it clear that's not their priority when making product decisions.
Probably the reason they're not in any of the hauls is because they have a reputation for not being very good, and are harder to sell/fence...
Personally, I stick with DeWalt because I like quality even though I fall under the “diyer” category. This impact driver has survived 5-6 moves, at least a handful of projects across a few years, and it’s still working as if I just picked it up from the store. Haven’t had to do any maintenance or repairs.
One of the cheaper harbor freight or off brand power tools I picked up many years ago lasted at most 1-2 yrs with only a few projects. Which is the reason I started investing in higher quality (prefer dewalt, but will buy Milwaukee).
----
As a retired tradesman (IBEW), discovering your tools have been stolen is "up there" in gut-wrenching professional experiences. My good luck meant most items stolen from me were probably just "walk aways" [leant out, never returned]. Last time my work truck was burglarized, they only stole personal effects (leaving behind thousands in rechargeables).
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.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Japan-s-Bigmotor-scandal-is-...
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.
Executives were upset about the newsletter’s coverage, so their employees set out to ruin the lives of the couple who ran the website, sending a funeral wreath, bloody pig face Halloween mask and other alarming items to their home, authorities said. The employees also sent pornographic magazines with the husband’s name on it to their neighbor’s house and planned to break into the couple’s garage to install a GPS device on their car, officials said.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jun/15/ebay-empl...
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/29/tech/ebay-exec-jail-harassmen...
Ex-eBay execs heading to prison for harassing couple behind newsletter
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
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
https://www.deere.com/en/loaders/skid-steers/334-p-skid-stee...
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.
The cops literally raided the place when it was reported
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.
Solved a long running ‘lost hunting dog’ mystery.
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1995/aug/29/dogs-tracked-d...
Would've been heartbreaking if it didn't reek of death.
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.
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 , also seem interesting.
why would they announce this without someone in custody?
Just a guess, though.
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.
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…
