11mo ago

California woman fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief

A Southern California woman fed up with her packages getting stolen out of her post office box sent an Apple AirTag to the address and cleverly tracked down the suspected thief, police said.

The woman had had several items stolen from her mailbox at the Los Alamos Post Office already when she thought of the idea, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office said Tuesday. Apple’s $29 AirTags have become popular items since their 2021 release, helping users keep tabs on the location of anything from their lost keys to wallets and luggage.

On Monday morning, sheriff’s deputies were called to the post office where the woman told officials her mail had been stolen again — including the package with the AirTag.

49 comments

The sheriff’s department commended the mail theft victim for contacting law enforcement so they could apprehend the suspects rather than attempting to contact them on her own.
They should have been congratulating her because she did their job for them.
- I'm just glad they did something about it.
  Some police departments won't even be bothered to do anything about petty theft even if you give them a name, picture and address of the perpetrator.
  
  Isn't interference with mail a fairly hefty offense over there?
  
  Came to say exactly this. Lots of articles about police doing fuckall when trackers show the location of stolen property.
  
  In regards to mail theft, that's usually because it's outside of their purview; The USPS has its own dedicated police force that you should contact instead. If any part of your shipment was run through USPS, (it probably was, because FedEx and UPS both contract out a bunch of stuff to USPS), then they'll investigate it as if it had been stolen directly from the USPS. And those investigators do not fuck around. Calling your local cops will be met with apathy, because there's an entire federal department that could be dealing with it instead.
- Law enforcement budgets are tight. 30 dollars is too much when they have to buy military equipment instead.
  
  Oh they're given the military equipment. But the new cruisers they buy and then the cost to paint and modify them to win the Best Looking Cruiser Competition is pretty high.
- A friend of mine had his phone snatched on the bus, so he had me call his phone and pretend to be the phone company, telling the thief that he'd won a new phone and I just needed his address.
  The police were very happy that we'd done their job for them, and they got his phone back.
  
  LOOOL. Something similarly stupid happened to a friend of mine. His phone got stolen in a nightclub but it was a rather unusual phone. He saw it for sale a few days later on our equivalent of craigslist and offered to buy it. Thing is the guy was a professional fighter and he turned up with a good friend who was a bouncer and also fought out of the same club.
  Anyway....The person selling it was the bouncer from the club it had been stolen from. Someone would go around robbing phones from the club then sell them to the bouncer at a hefty discount and he would then sell them on. He apologised profusely and tried to explain his way out of it yada yada.
  Friend got his phone back anyway.
- Honest question, are there any reasons why a private citizen performing this sort of thing would be legally less of a problem than the state?
  From a philosphical perspective I'm all for catching mail thieves. But I would get a little twitchy hearing that the police are mailing tracking devices. And I would be more or less ok with a private citizen helping to "catch the bad guy" with their security camera, but I do not want police surveillance cameras on my street, thank you very much.
  
  We had a possible breakin on my street, and police noticed my doorbell camera. They politely asked if I could check whether it picked something up, and I showed him a picture possibility (complainants said oh yeah that was us).
  I was ok with it because it was a request, the cam only shows public areas, and it never left my control. I don’t know what would have happened if it went anywhere, but I could have said no, and I could have said nothing was picked up. This was all reasonable cooperation with no overreach or privacy invasion
- Na, they were too busy being pisssed of they couldn't just say "nothing we can do, there's no way to track the thief down" and walk away like usual.
...why wasn't this handled by the Postal Inspectors?
I assumed someone repeatedly breaking into PO boxes is something they would actually want to investigate...?
- Budget, probably. Republicans have been trying to strangle the USPS for years.
  
  Postal Inspectors are Federal Law enforcement, and while you could argue that their budget hasn't kept up with inflation, it hasn't been cut either.
  Point is, while I'll always support the need for the US Post Office, and support employees who work in any capacity to deliver mail, I can't be as charitable with the USPIS when they have the manpower to spare for warrantless surveillance programs.
Are post boxes at the post office not locked in the US? Do you not have to identify yourself or have a key? How can they keep stealing her mail not from her porch or something but from the actual postoffice?
- They are locked, but as anyone who has watched 20 seconds or more of the Lockpicking Lawyer, the locks are trivially easy to defeat. Typically they are in an unsupervised area of the post office and most of the time there "isn't budget" to even cover them with cameras, as if a premeditated thief would not just show up wearing a disguise anyway.
- Never seen one without a key lock or combo lock. Could've been an inside job.
- Serious. What’s the point of even having a post box?
  
  The last town I lived in didn't do door-to-door mail for ANYONE. If you want your mail, come to the post office.
  Private carriers like Fedex/Purolator are a bit more accommodating, but tracking down your regular letter mail was your problem.
  The post office worker's would get super pissed off if you received mail with your actual address on it instead of the PO box too. Taking 10sec to type it into the computer to match street address with PO box was the end of the world apparently...
  
  USPS doesn't deliver to the house everywhere, so you're stuck with a PO Box.
  
  Drugs
  
  There are other answers, but privacy as well. Some people who do business online may not want to give their home address out.
  
  I live in a different country than the one I receive mail in
  
  My parents have one because it's more secure than an unlocked box on their street. My grandma had one because her town was small but spread out and it made more sense for the USPS to deliver to a central location rather than driving to each house.
The band Native Howl just had their gear ripped off while on tour. They also had an AirTag in with the gear but the charge died while they were tracking the thief down
What happened to the beeping anti-stalking feature?
- Takes three days of separation from the owner to kick in, IIRC.
- Yeah that's what I was wondering as well. I still have one lying around in a drawer somewhere (don't have an iphone, it's not mine). Every time I open the drawer it beeps at me, and nowadays my android phone even notifies me of one following me as well.
What I don't understand is how they were able to open her PO Box without the key.
I haven't received an unopened new debit card/credit card from the USPS in over a decade. Postal employees all need raises and better working conditions to combat this and organized fraud by postal workers.
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