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...
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...
Working link (Score:1)
His collection is bigger than yours (Score:4)
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!
Re: His collection is bigger than yours (Score:2)
Re: His collection is bigger than yours (Score:2)
Don't rule out kleptomania.
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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
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Don't underestimate the power of capitalism (Score:2)
You are a handyman trying to sabotage your competitors.
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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.
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Speaking of minorities, I note the suspects didn't have their pictures posted or names mentioned. What does that usually tell us?
Re:How useless are the police? (Score:4, Funny)
Speaking of minorities, I note the suspects didn't have their pictures posted or names mentioned. What does that usually tell us?
That the thieves were probably members of the great white Aryan master race that teeters on the brink of extinction through racial replacement in the USA?
Re: How useless are the police? (Score:2)
Maybe this is why.
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Coming from a country where it's not common to post pictures of criminals if you're not specifically looking for them with no idea WHERE to look this comment makes no sense. Are you saying the cops are overreaching in their corrupt power grab by ... not posting pictures of people they don't yet know with certainty are guilty?
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For those thinking insurance scam tradespeople having already high premiums raised even further does not warrant making a claim on most of those tools. Considering given the a
Re: How useless are the police? (Score:2)
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TO THE COWARD PIG WHO FUCKING DOWNVOTED THIS, i'm waiting for you reply. You scumbag mother fucker!
Hi,
Cant, I'm busy fucking a mother.
Regards,
THE COWARD PIG WHO DOWNVOTED YOUR POST BETWEEN F***S
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Best part of /.
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Re:How useless are the police? (Score:5, Informative)
It's true that there is a lot of crime that police don't catch. This is one of the prices we pay for living in a free society. Our constitution *deliberately* makes it hard for police to arrest people, because when police can *easily* arrest people, it leads to hell on earth. One of the core principles our founding fathers believed in, was that crime is evil, but an even greater evil is the government being able to imprison people unjustly.
The thing going FOR the police, is that criminals can never just stop with one crime. They will keep doing it, and doing it, and doing it, until ultimately they get caught. Sometimes it takes years, and that's bad, but even worse is an assumption of guilt.
Based on your comments, I'm guessing you don't actually *want* the police to be more efficient in their pursuit of criminals, you just have a chip on your shoulder about police.
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Why bother too hard policing when the courts will just have them back out within days. Even if convicted they will just be out in a few months. Nothing is more demoralizing to your job than having to catch the same players over and over. In the end it becomes pointless.
Unless the system is redesigned to actually remove criminals permanently it is fruitless and wasteful busywork.
Now available at your nearest hardware store (Score:3)
THEFT OBSOLESCENCE
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THEFT OBSOLESCENCE
At todays prices, I can only assume you’re referring to the manufacturer stealing any need to pay THAT much for crapware.
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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
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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
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>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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
Re: Now available at your nearest hardware store (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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My take was the irony of the built in obsolescence many things have.
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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.
An important missing detail (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Re:An important missing detail (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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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.
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Want, no. Is it true, mostly so far as I know.
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I suspect your mom used to refer to you as special. It was a euphemism, not a compliment.
California allows video recording in public spaces with no reasonable expectation of privacy. Like a street outside a building. Dumbass.
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They may be easy to detect, but thieves tend to be lazy, and air tags are cheap.
The problem with catching the thieves by camera is that they might cover their faces and license plate while doing the crime. Use a stolen/fake plate. Not keep the stolen goods in any locations associated with their name, etc... Even if you get their faces, unless they're already known, facial recognition isn't generally advanced enough to find them.
Anyway, I don't see how some rando saying they have an airtag thingy would be enough to get a warrant but LE/judges are lazy and there are no consequences for violating the constitution so why not. Seems to happen frequently and they get it wrong all the time.
"Probable Cause" is the standard for a search warrant. That's basically "any
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The best thing is to have the AirTag built into the device itself. Now that Google has an open standard for this, we are seeing products with tags built in. Sony make some Bluetooth headphones that have one, for example.
Because the tag is built into the device, can't be disabled, and can't be separated from it, the thief being able to detect it is irrelevant. The only winning move is not to steal it in the first place.
Once Chinese manufacturers start producing 10 cent chips that act as tags, every electroni
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Then the fix for criminals becomes trivial: Spend a hundred bucks on a pack of 1000 tags and carry it around in a big block, handily overwhelming the report rate of all the tag detectors in the area, drowning out any signal from whatever's stolen, even if the item is as large as a car.
Or, you know, stuff the item into a five dollar RF-proof bag.
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Okay but who is going to buy your stolen headphones knowing that the rightful owner will be able to track them down?
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Well, the short answer is, anyone who lives sufficiently far away from the owner that tracking them down would not be worth the cost of the item.
Like say, over an international border.
The longer answer is, anyone who has any interest in whatever component parts can be stripped off the device independent of the tracking chip. Which, barring very clever design, it almost the entire device.
Was re: Thieves sawing the catalytic converters out from under cars in my neighborhood, driving them en-masse to recycler
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Considerig half the nation now believes the justice system is rigged because someone who falsified business records, violated campaign finance rules, and lied about sleeping with a porn star which started the whole thing, I don't think those people have anything to do with "liberal" prosecutor's office. Put another way, one of the jurors in the trial indicated they only got their news [imgur.com] from a failing web site owned by the convicted felon and even they voted to convict on all 34 counts. How guilty does one
Probable Cause (Score:2)
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,
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The AirTag evidence is enough to persuade most judges to grant a search warrant because it absolutely does meet the definition of "probable cause."
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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
Anonymous carpenter (Score:1)
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.
Still waiting.... (Score:1)
Re:Still waiting.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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#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.
The lesson learned here (Score:2)
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.
Re: The lesson learned here (Score:1, Troll)
Donâ(TM)t worry, given this is the DC area, they will probably be free next week regardless.
Re:The lesson learned here (Score:4, Informative)
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.
"none of the prolific thieves has been arrested" (Score:3)
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.
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Wait, are you the same guy who says the system is "rigged" against Donald Trump???
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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.”"
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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.
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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?
Sadly the new antitracking features will end this (Score:2)
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So then they ditch the tool and you get it back eventually from the ditch.
Or they tinfoil plate their thiefing sacks
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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 . . .
Sus... (Score:2)
> 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?