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Crime Apple

How an Apple AirTag Helped Police Recover 15,000 Stolen Power Tools (msn.com) 89

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Twice before, this Virginia carpenter had awoken in the predawn to start his work day only to find one of his vans broken into. Tools he depends on for a living had been stolen, and there was little hope of retrieving them. Determined to shut down thieves, he said, he bought a bunch of Apple AirTags and hid the locator devices in some of his larger tools that hadn't been pilfered. Next time, he figured, he would track them.

It worked.

On Jan. 22, after a third break-in and theft, the carpenter said, he drove around D.C.'s Maryland suburbs for hours, following an intermittent blip on his iPhone, until he arrived at a storage facility in Howard County. He called police, who got a search warrant, and what they found in the locker was far more than just one contractor's nail guns and miter saws.

The storage unit, stuffed with purloined power tools, led detectives to similar caches in other places in the next four months — 12 locations in all, 11 of them in Howard County — and the recovery of about 15,000 saws, drills, sanders, grinders, generators, batteries, air compressors and other portable (meaning easily stealable) construction equipment worth an estimated $3 million to $5 million, authorities said.

Some were stolen as long ago as 2014, a police spokesperson told the Washington Post, coming from "hundreds if not thousands" of victims...
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How an Apple AirTag Helped Police Recover 15,000 Stolen Power Tools

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  • by LondoMollari ( 172563 ) on Saturday June 01, 2024 @09:49AM (#64515327) Homepage

    So these tools were stolen a long time ago - as long as 2014. Now that’s a serious collector because I figured they would have all been sold on the black market!

    Step 1, steal power tools.
    Step 2,
    Step 3, PROFIT!

    • Sounds like an insurance scam to me. Selling stolen items increases the risk of being caught. 1. Have âoethiefâ steal tools 2. âoeVictimâ files an insurance claim 3. Both âoethiefâ and âoevictimâ profit!
      • Don't rule out kleptomania.

        • There's also "wait until you have a shipping container full, then sell to a different country".
          Also, Ebay, and all that. But you can have a complex system where they try to not sell the stolen tools too soon but end up losing track of what's 'aged' enough to not be actively sought anymore, have tools that aren't "hot" at the moment, thus ripe for sale, maybe the stealing party is behind the selling party, etc...

          IE they may be competent at stealing, but not selling their stolen goods expediently. And what

      • That doesn't fit why it all came crashing down. It was a victim who cracked the case.
      • Sounds like restraint of trade to me /s
    • It makes sense not to sell the tools if:
      You are a handyman trying to sabotage your competitors.
    • Maybe it's the tool companies paying people to steal them so that they get more business? /s probably

      After all it costs money to store so many stolen items for so long. And I assume thieves will junk the item / break and sell for scrap if they don't have a buyer for those items. They probably not going to wait weeks, months or longer for a buyer / fence.

    • by LesFerg ( 452838 )
      Or the thieves track who makes black market purchases, then steal them back afterwards, to make another sale. Rinse and repeat.
  • by bubblyceiling ( 7940768 ) on Saturday June 01, 2024 @10:03AM (#64515353)
    All New, from the makers of Planned Obsolescence, get ready for

    THEFT OBSOLESCENCE
    • THEFT OBSOLESCENCE

      At todays prices, I can only assume you’re referring to the manufacturer stealing any need to pay THAT much for crapware.

      • Tools are actually so much cheaper than they were 30 years ago. They're one of the things (similar to clothes) that have dropped the most in price. And they're also much better, due to battery technology being so much better. Cordless tools were extremely limited 30 years ago.

        I know you can still pay a lot for Snap-On etc. if you want, but I doubt there's anybody for whom they're the best value vs. mid-priced tools. People will always talk in vague terms about them breaking, but in practice they rarel

        • But today's midpriced tools are very affordable compared to the past.

          On the surface, you appear to be speaking accurately.

          But when you dig deeper, all I need is a 100-year old power outlet on an extension cord to power a 40-year old drill. A drill that still works perfectly. Compare that to every cordless drill that you might have purchased since they became popular. Planned Obsolescence in battery greed alone tells me you’ve had to buy another 3-5 drills in that same 40 years. “Affordable” becomes quite questionable when you look at what should have be

          • by hawk ( 1151 )

            >all I need is a 100-year old power outlet on an extension cord to power a 40-year old drill.

            almost.

            You're almost certainly going to need an adaptor to put a 1980s plug into a 1920s socket.

            • Doing a bit of googling, at least in the USA it's likely compatible. Our electrical plugs were first designed by Hubbell, 1904. The third grounding plug was added in 1928. So, 1924, 100 years old, it likely has a plug compatible. It wouldn't have a ground wire, it predates that.

              On the other hand, he's experiencing serious survivor bias (that like 99.9% of the drills of the time already died), that the surviving tools would be the "professional" version of the time - costing several hundred to even thous

              • by hawk ( 1151 )

                The pins, though.

                I. certainly wasn't exhaustive, but the pre-war plugs I found images for had different pins than todays'.

                It could be, but I just couldn't find any suggestion of existence of the the current plug back to the 20s. By postwar, it appears ubiquitous. (and I don't think that there *was* a universal plug prior to it--various angles for blade type pins, round pins, round pins with indentations . . .

                I really am curious to find out when it was introduced, and when it was made the standard.

                As for

                • The pins, though.

                  Remember, it's extremely likely that in the last 80 years or so that the cord has been replaced at least once. That would be a logical time to put a plug on it that fits modern outlets.

                  So it'd be a bit of a drill of thesus.

                  As for those old batteries, there are a handful of sites with rather detailed instructions on disassembly of packs, testing the individual cells, and replacing them, for the various battery technologies. (it sees that often there is only one cell that went bad), with the rest in series just fine.

                  That's what I'm talking about. I proposed to my brother to disassemble some of his old packs and replace the cells, but he declined.

                  As is, until Milwaukee (our tool maker of choice) decides to go away from the M12/M18 system, our tools can get replacement batteries. And they're likely

          • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

            On the surface, you appear to be speaking accurately.

            But when you dig deeper, all I need is a 100-year old power outlet on an extension cord to power a 40-year old drill. A drill that still works perfectly. Compare that to every cordless drill that you might have purchased since they became popular. Planned Obsolescence in battery greed alone tells me youâ(TM)ve had to buy another 3-5 drills in that same 40 years. âoeAffordableâ becomes quite questionable when you look at what should have bee

            • I bought into the black & decker ecosystem, which works great but was maybe 1 rung too low because they don't offer all the tools I want. But then I learned I could use my batteries in Porter Cable tools just by trimming a little tab of plastic from the tool. And then I found a adapter for $15 to let me use my batteries with Ryobi tools. So, it's worth checking around for compatibility options, at least in the common 18v-20v range.
          • I resisted cordless tools at first. Then I had a series of harbor freight NiCad drills because the advantages of cordless were too much to resist, but those batteries didn't last.

            But about 7 years ago I bought into the black & decker lithium stuff and I still have and use the battery I got with my first tool, and an off-brand replacemen/spare is $25 on amazon. Well past the point of being a good value even though they won't last forever.

            OK, are my grandkids going to be hanging any of my B&D re

    • Each device comes with a key that has a battery that's good for 3 years, then it dies and the tool becomes useless.

      Or a certain number of uses. The hammer head disintegrates after 1000 strikes.

      • by stooo ( 2202012 )

        Not really.
        Lithium ion batteries can deliver much more power peaks.
        But those are still very harshly misused in a power tool.
        Get one with bigger batteries, it will last longer.

        • by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

          My take was the irony of the built in obsolescence many things have.

          • by stooo ( 2202012 )

            Batteries have always had limited lifetime, that is not planned obsolescence.
            Lithium ones are much better, as long as kept at average temperatures, and reasonable SOC.

  • by davide marney ( 231845 ) on Saturday June 01, 2024 @10:04AM (#64515359) Journal

    I think this is an A+ effort to team up the community with the police. We should definitely start doing everything we can to help these dirtbags get caught.

    However, there is no mention of how the police were able to get a search warrant. What questions did they ask to establish that the owner was legit? How long did it take to get the warrant? Who did the owner talk to? Was the owner present at the search? This is something we all need to replicate to make this technique work. The police obviously need to conduct the search, citizens should never confront possible criminals on their own.

    Note that in this case no suspects have been caught yet. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of victims. If you haven't put your name on your tools or tagged them in some way, it's probably pretty unlikely you'll be able to recover your stolen goods without a lot of work.

    • The police did absolutely nothing other than sit on their fat asses.
    • by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Saturday June 01, 2024 @10:25AM (#64515401)

      If you do all their work for them, without breaking the law to do so, then you can hand everything over to the cops at the last minute. They love an easy win. In this case, the carpenter could have done his own surveillance on the location and taken pictures of those who entered it. Maybe planted a camera across the street that logged recordings of whoever got too close to the entrance.

      You'd think that would the be cops' job, but if you want to be sure it's done you have to do it yourself. Because the cops had no idea there was such a big bust to make, and they weren't likely to do more than log a theft report for a couple of tools.

      As for how to replicate this? If you have a tagged item stolen, the proof of ownership - at least enough proof for an investigation - is that you have a tag on the item that you can track. "My property was stolen, it's valued at roughly $x, and I have a tracker on it that places it at an address I can provide to you" is probably enough of a statement at a cop shop to get someone to knock on a door. If there's a known theft ring working in the area, it might get bumped up from constables to detectives and result in a proper raid. (IANACop, but I've worked with them and on their systems enough to say this is roughly how I'd expect it to go... could still be wrong)

      • If you do all their work for them, without breaking the law to do so, then you can hand everything over to the cops at the last minute. They love an easy win. In this case, the carpenter could have done his own surveillance on the location and taken pictures of those who entered it. Maybe planted a camera across the street that logged recordings of whoever got too close to the entrance.

        You'd think that would the be cops' job, but if you want to be sure it's done you have to do it yourself. Because the cops had no idea there was such a big bust to make, and they weren't likely to do more than log a theft report for a couple of tools.

        Just to be clear, you want the victim to circumvent the police and do all the work for them for free. You sure do make the police sound like a bunch of lazy, incompetent, worthless and extremely overpaid "professionals". That is if you call doing nothing and collecting a paycheck for free a profession. I think the cops are the real welfare queens.

    • Okay, citizens normally have very limited powers to go onto somebody else's property to recover their own. But police have much more power that way.

      Search warrant is merely "probable cause", which is anything above "fishing expedition", evidence wise. Here the police can identify the crime: Theft of the guy's tools, and location: The airtag says that it is in the warehouse. That's enough to get a search warrant easy from most judges.

      It's definitely not the "beyond a reasonable doubt" of criminal court,

      • The AirTag evidence is enough to persuade most judges to grant a search warrant because it absolutely does meet the definition of "probable cause."

    • by Hall ( 962 )
      I've read time and time again that police will not use any type of "Find my...." tracker because they simply aren't accurate enough. Yes, can be 99-100% correct in location many times but other times they are not.
      • That probably depends on the police in question, and the use in question.

        Is it enough for police bait setups? Like when they put out a car, bike, or whatever intending for it to be stolen and enable them to track the thieves down? No.
        Is it enough to get a search warrant to look at a place? Depending on the department, absolutely. Some departments wouldn't even bother if you have a top of the line lojack system. Others are happy to get a warrant to search a building that has evidence of your stuff being

  • We don't find out why the carpenter chose not to give out his name until the seventh paragraph. This detail should've been mentioned earlier.

    Also, the author's calling AirTags a "GPS tracker" led to an embarrassing correction:

    "A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to AirTags as GPS devices. They are a type of locator device, but they are not GPS trackers. The article has been corrected.

  • The same people have been stealing for over 10 years and obviously have never been close to being caught. What are the police good for?
    • by slarabee ( 184347 ) on Saturday June 01, 2024 @12:16PM (#64515625)

      The same people have been stealing for over 10 years and obviously have never been close to being caught.

      You, and a few others including the police spokesman, are making an assumption. "Some were stolen as long ago as 2014, he said."

      Two options here are:
      1. Criminals stole a tool in 2014 and then stored it for a decade.
      2. Criminals stole a tool in 2014. It got fenced. (insert up to a decade of tool use) It got stolen again and found in one of the storage units. Police look up some identifying mark/serial number and find the 2014 stolen goods report.

      I lean toward number two just because unless these storage units were under the control of some kinda weird collecting kleptomaniac, thieves for profit just don't seem like the sort to sit on stolen goods for a decade.

      What are the police good for?

      Just from this article I would point out the 11 additional caches of stolen goods they found, the 80 victims they have been able to identify for return of property and their website which has 140 submissions they are validating for additional victim identifcation.

      • #1, as the AC mentions, makes a lot more sense if you look at the size of their inventory and assume a bit of laziness. If they didn't find a buyer quickly enough, it might have gotten chucked back into storage for later/mass sale and forgotten.

        Because just dumping the tools into the dumpster would attract notice, perhaps that of police, with resulting investigation and risk to them.

  • Here's the lesson: Don't steal stuff until you have a reliable fence. If these morons knew enough to offload their heists within, say, a week, they'd still be running free.

    • Donâ(TM)t worry, given this is the DC area, they will probably be free next week regardless.

    • by garote ( 682822 ) on Saturday June 01, 2024 @03:27PM (#64516101) Homepage

      Pretty sure that in this case it was the fence getting caught, not the original thief.
      In my home city, this sort of stuff operates like so:

      Petty criminal or drug addict needs quick untraceable cash in a big way.

      With nothing better to do, he hangs out around construction sites and waits until 4:00am, then fills a giant bag with tools and sticks it on a bicycle and wheels it away.

      Thief returns to a local homeless encampment or a disused park and hides the goods. The fence comes by on an irregular schedule and buys the loot for pennies on the dollar.

      Fence takes the loot to a storage location somewhere entirely separate from their own property/neighborhood and stores it.

      Some time much later, an accomplice comes by and collects some of the loot and relocates it and proceeds to

      1. sell it at an open market (quite a distance from where it was stolen)
      2. list it on a craigslist-like bartering site (quite a distance from where it was stolen) (there are quite a few of these you may not know about, and they are 99% criminal activity)
      3. package and ship it out of the country
      4. drive it out of the country (usually to a Mexico border city)

      Construction site tools are a common site at flea markets where I live. Huge arrays of them, all used, all cheap, all stolen from some place a hundred miles away or more.

      The most common theft target though is bicycles. A miscreant/addict can get a couple hundred dollars for one well-chosen bike, and all the fence needs to do is chuck it in a cargo van with 300 others and drive across the country, then slowly sell them at a flea market for a 500% profit.

  • Per direct quote from the linked article. This is why theft is only increasing. No punishment, no consequences.

    15,000 tools and that doesn't include the tools that are the police department. I usually am not one to blame police but an entire theft ring and they don't have a clue about it. The even bigger problem is that if they do catch this ring and put hands on them, nothing of consequence will happen because society has decided no one can be left behind or harmed for any reason. This is the start of the end folks. You thought the Roman empire fell hard.
    • by garote ( 682822 )

      Wait, are you the same guy who says the system is "rigged" against Donald Trump???

    • You intentionally chopped off that sentence to make it sound like the exact opposite of what it actually says. You are being dishonest and should be ashamed.

      FTFA: "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.”"

      • Sothey aren't sure of any suspects yet and made no arrests, and it's been 8 days.

        You're the one being dishonest, the cops are useless at teats on a bull.

    • The even bigger problem is that if they do catch this ring and put hands on them, nothing of consequence will happen because society has decided no one can be left behind or harmed for any reason.

      Just out of curiosity... if your statement is true, then is every other country on this planet more lenient than the USA? Per-capita, more Americans are incarcerated than any other jurisdiction on this planet.

      How do these two truths fit together?

  • Now the thieves will get a fancy notification saying "you are being tracked".
    • So then they ditch the tool and you get it back eventually from the ditch.

      Or they tinfoil plate their thiefing sacks

    • by hawk ( 1151 )

      a handful of thieves will do that, yes.

      But Hawkins First Law: criminals are stupid, and we would be in serious trouble if they, as a group, had what we mistakenly consider "average intelligence."

      This also relates to why it makes good financial sense for taxpayers to keep the blue collar and white collar criminals in separate prisons . . .

  • > until he arrived at a storage facility in Howard County. He called police, who got a search warrant

    Police, investigating theft? That happens any more?

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