As online sales boom — especially in the crapshoot that has been 2020 — so too, have the shenanigans of porch pirates everywhere.
I can’t go a day without seeing posts in my neighborhood Facebook group reporting another package stolen off a porch by a person bundled up in a hat and mask, not even trying to be sneaky.
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They aren’t even the fun kind of pirate. No eye patches or parrots or peg legs to be seen.
They’re just another neighbor who’s probably perfectly friendly when you run into them on the street, but has secretly stolen your biweekly Subscribe & Save delivery of toilet paper and diapers for the last three months.
Laurie Pringle, a 54-year-old resident of Hamilton, Ontario, was one of those regular victims.
In about three years, she had lost about a dozen packages to porch pirates, and many of her neighbors had suffered the same.
So she decided to leave a special present for the next pirate to scope out her porch.
She wasn’t alone in her planning. The neighbors in her row of houses were all in on the trick.
At first, they planned to fill the box with dog poo, but the time it would take to collect enough to fill a box was an issue.
But then as she was cleaning the litter box, she has a lightbulb moment.
Instead of carefully scooping out the clumps from the litter box, Laurie just dumped the whole contents into a nearby Amazon box.
Then she taped it up and placed it on the porch with the Amazon logo clearly visible to passersby.
It took only 40 minutes for someone to swipe it, and she even caught video of the guy on her doorbell cam.
Laurie said she didn’t bother to report it to the police, opting to post on social media instead.
Previous attempts to report stolen packages didn’t result in much, so she’s lost faith in her local police.
Hamilton does have a porch theft program, called Operation Ama-gone, which has caught many repeat offenders. However, Constable Krista-Lee Ernst told the CBC that porch thefts aren’t reported to police much, because it’s often easy for victims to simply report it to the online store and get a refund or replacement.
h/t: CBC
