The Crime Rings Stealing Everything from Purses to Power Tools | Hacker News Reader

The Crime Rings Stealing Everything from Purses to Power Tools

newyorker.com

37 pointslaurex85 comments

The issue is reporting. Where I live about 4 years ago they stopped prosecuting people who steal less than 500$. My friend who is a cop said they eventually stopped arresting them because its unethical to arrest someone for a crime they won't be prosecuted for. Then stores stopped calling the cops. This resulted in more crime but less reported crime for burglary.

The only statics you can really count on is Car thefts and murders. There was a surge in murders in starting in 2020 which has leveled off but it was still high.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...

The same is true for car thefts

https://www.statista.com/statistics/191216/reported-motor-ve...

I think it reliable to say the US experienced a large surge in crime starting in 2020.

The issue is the economic and societal problems that drive desperation and widening inequality. It is symptomatic of the short-term thinking and opportunistic nature of an economic model that inherently ignores the implications of its incentives and how their impacts will affect all stakeholders other than investors and their share prices. Let’s not pretend that more incarceration and law enforcement encounters will fix anything, they’re much more likely to further exacerbate the root problem.

I’d happily pay more in tax to jail every thief in the country.

Be careful that you yourself or some of your relatives don't end up in jail for white collar crime with that approach. You know less about others than you think.

I think white collar crime should be prosecuted, even if it might æffect me or my relatives. Is that controversial now?

I was talking more about the misguided approach of "trying to get every last criminal" by being overzealous in policing.

Par for the course for HN to misinterpret it, of course.

Certainly the courts should still exist under this hypothetical.

How much more would you pay?

It’s organized gangs that have found a loophole: commit “greasy crimes” at scale where the individual crimes are below a threshold. This is similar to the epidemic of small hit large scale online scams and mail fraud, but in person.

It’s a new kind of organized crime enabled by digital technology.

I'd make the case your viewpoint is symptomatic of the power of bad ideas. In this case, specifically accepting the idea that individuals do not have responsibility for their own actions or for how they relate to the people around them.

It also, in a weird way, infantilizes and removes agency from marginalized people. You can in fact be both marginalized and honest, and most marginalized people are.

And the rich can, in fact, be rich and not steal. Maybe we should put our efforts towards stopping the infantilization of the rich thieves that are responsible for the vast majority of theft in this country? Or are we only gonna clutch our pearls at the petty crime?

We could also acknowledge two problems simultaneously, without downplaying or minimizing either. That way, neither you nor your imaginary rhetorical opponent is "clutching their pearls".

Ridiculous of you to act like this denies their responsibility. When the rich steal millions from the poor daily we should absolutely expect an increase in crime. To blame this solely on the poor is a denial of the responsibility of the rich.

I mean, can't it be both? Individuals have personal agency and are responsible for their own actions. Individuals also respond to incentives which, in aggregate, alter the observed distribution of those individual decisions. The problem can be addressed at both levels.

You're partly correct - people are getting more desparate and hopeless because their prospects are grim, and nihilistic because they feel their lives have no meaning. That's a problem and crime will continue to get worse as these feelings pervade American society.

But also, we need to arrest and prosecute criminals, because not doing so encourages crime. It accelerates the downward spiral.

Sure. On the other hand, arresting 11 specific people reduced bike theft by 90% in London: https://www.itv.com/news/2024-02-26/a-police-sting-uncovered...

When crime gets to the point where a police tactic as simple as "putting out a bait bicycle, waiting for it to get stolen, and then following it to a warehouse of stolen bicycles" results in a huge reduction of actual crime committed, then maybe the solution isn't purely about wealth inequality.

Sure sure but when it turns out 90% of crime is from 11 people it stops making sense to pass laws punishing all people of a certain class and/or giving police incredible amounts of power with little or no oversight.

Well a lot of the sub-$500 petty theft are done by junkies trying to get their fix for the day, and with opiate addiction getting worse, not better, in the US, there are many of these types and the day-by-day thefts add up over the years. Throwing a repeat offender in jail for a couple weeks is often the only time a junkie will kick, so it kind of does solves the root problem for these individuals. Even some hard-ass jurisdictions have half way houses.

Source: me, an ex junkie, and had junkie friends. Go ahead and write this off as an anecdote, but it's an anecdote repeated thousands upon thousands of times.

Most people affected by economic and social problems do not resort to theft to solve their problems. In fact, they are probably far more likely to be a victim - either directly out of sheer proximity or indirectly as stores close and opportunities fade away due to all the theft being allowed in their community.

We arrested more people for 30 years and crime went down. There is loads of data that more police in the right places deter crime. All my LEO friends know who that are arresting because they arrest the same people over and over. Crime is driven by a small number of bad actors.

I remember what ten years ago in San Francisco the cops found a guy shot to death in Bayview. Cops suspicion was he broke into the wrong car and a gang member shot him.

Guy had been arrested over a hundred times for breaking into cars in the previous couple of years. So this guy was breaking into several cars a day every day for years and only stopped when someone shot him.

I definitely feel that old school habitual criminal laws were over strict and subject to abuse. But not having them at all is also bad.

Drugs drive theft, not inequality.

Anecdotally most of theives I have known of here in New Zealand (Christchurch) are driven by wanting to buy hard drugs.

In my experience poorer people here seem to have fairly strict morals against theft.

Theft is defacto legal in America. It’s too dangerous to prosecute theft; if you do, you could be accused of racial policing, which would cause riots.

Better to legalize theft. The police here won’t even respond to car theft other than to help file an insurance claim.

I don't have anything to contribute to the theory, but an anecdote: for a couple weeks last month in NYC, seemingly every street tout had sealed boxes of Apple AirPods sitting on their blankets, next to their fake bags, watches, etc. Other guys were specializing in the trade, standing on street corners holding 2-3 boxes of AirPods, but nothing else.

These appeared to be legit products, but obviously stolen. Where did these come from? Why weren't the sellers arrested on sight? Is it that hard to know that Apple hasn't authorized the corner blanket guy as a reseller? Is possession of stolen goods no longer a crime?

I was low-key hoping that the police had some kind of sting running to get the source of the theft, but...who knows?

So many questions.

AirPods fakes are extremely, extremely convincing these days. I would be surprised if they were real stolen products from the Apple Store.

If so, these were exceptional fakes, down to the quality of the packaging.

Yup, and you can even buy them for $10-20 off sites like Aliexpress or Temu. They even do the popup for pairing when you open them. The audio quality and ANC is not so great, as far as I know, though.

Are stolen iPhones even usable with cellular networks?

> Apple hasn't authorized the corner blanket guy as a reseller

They are like Apple store geniuses in a more federated architecture.

The counterfeit/replica market for electronics, especially Apple stuff, has gotten really, really good. You often won't be able to easily tell just from the sealed box if it is a fake or not -- though opening usually offers some clues because the counterfeits often don't have the same attention to detail with the opening tab stickers and whatnot. And the stuff that is often hardest to tell, at least with a cursory glance, are AirPods and AirPods Max headphones.

Because I have some friends who don't listen to me and insist on buying things from Facebook Marketplace, I've seen some very convincing looking AirPods Max headphones (you can tell they are fake because of markings inside the ear cups amongst other things, they also usually feel lower quality but that's hard to judge if you aren't familiar with the real things) that will often pair exactly like legit AirPods because the reps have managed to either clone the H1 chip or reverse-engineer the pairing process. The fakes often have real (stolen) serial numbers on the boxes so if you aren't familiar with how Apple does their plastic sealing and just ran a serial number off the box to see if it was legit through the Apple serial number checker, you'd probably think they were legit until you opened them up.

At this point, I would guess that at least 90% of the "sold as new" AirPods and AirPods Max on eBay are fakes.

This is very different from the old-school world of grey-market cameras sold off of street corners in New York that were often legit but were either fenced and/or from foreign markets without official support/warranty.

The rep handbag game has become incredibly good too, to the point that there is now a subculture of people (some who could even afford the legit offerings) who collect and pay real money for the reps that are largely indistinguishable from the real thing -- but that might cost $800 instead of $18,000.

> The rep handbag game has become incredibly good too, to the point that there is now a subculture of people (some who could even afford the legit offerings) who collect and pay real money for the reps that are largely indistinguishable from the real thing -- but that might cost $800 instead of $18,000.

To add another product category, replica watches are almost indistinguishable from real watches these days, Rolex are probably the most widely counterfeit watch brand.

A good replica sub goes for $1,000 while the real watch is around $10,000

Replica watch subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/RepTime/

Rolex Submariner Legit vs Replica Video: https://youtu.be/oYY0bI_Aiqc

Yeah...but your average street tout doesn't have a $1,000 replica Rolex on a blanket -- they have a $20 Rolox. Also, those fake bags, watches, etc. don't have packaging. These "AirPods" came with boxes that were basically exactly like the real thing.

Obviously, any New Yorker knows about knockoffs, but these were qualitatively different. They were also prevalent for a week or two, and then seemingly disappeared...as if there was a sudden crackdown or something.

The fake bags definitely have packaging. Fake documents, fake dust covers, fake Hermes boxes. They go all out in some cases. Usually not for the $30 hand bags sold on the street (though you’d be surprised as to the fake documents some of the Louis Vuitton's have inside), but the higher-end reps can be astonishing. A $30 bag masquerading as a $1000+ bag on a street corner isn’t going to have the same accoutrements that a $30 pair of fake AirPods masquerading as a $150 pair will. But a fake $800 bag masquerading as a $18,000 bag will usually come with the goods. Same is true for watches. It’s just the cheapest stuff sold on the street in those categories don’t bother.

The fake AirPods box thing I’ve seen for a long time, again, the tell is usually small differences in font/printing and how they do the pull tabs. The box fit is often different too, but since most of these are presented sealed, people don’t know.

Maybe this really was a ring of fenced goods, who knows. But my guess having seen these things for years is that they were almost certainly a big group of the very common fake AirPods that proliferate eBay and Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp and the like and that are probably incredibly popular in foreign markets where the official products are both more expensive and a greater percentage of GDP.

Agreed. They have equal right to resources and they are just exercising their rights. By denying snatchers or thieves of iPhones etc one is excluding them from modern information economy.

Can you give an actual example of this happening? Because it seems all the riots come from needlessly killing people rather than arresting them for stealing.

People get killed in the process of enforcing laws. All laws are eventually enforce by violence and that violence kills people. The state house rep who wanted to tax cigarettes didn't mean to have Eric Gardner killed but given a large number of police encounters it was bound to happen.

The way police responded to 2020 was to pull back because in general its a numbers game. Given enough encounters bad outcomes will happen. Pulling back plus the insanity of 2020 caused a rise in crime. Police are starting to reengage and crime is starting to go down.

Very weird retelling of the events surrounding Eric Gardner's death. The riots weren't because cops were arresting him, they weren't even surrounding the fact he died. The riots were about the fact that you had 3 cops choking him to death even after they already had him subdued while he repeatedly tried to say he couldn't breathe and given the history of cop killings, all 3 were going to walk away with no repercussions.

If I write enough code, bugs are going to happen but when bugs happen we have a review and triage the issue, yet when cops kill people suggesting that they need better training or more oversight is suddenly an insane proposal.

They need tons more training but no one wants to pay for that. We underfund police compared to other OECD nations. We also have a much more dangerous environment for them to operate in.

The individual actions are terrible and every effort should be leveraged to reduce thoes outliers but they will still occur. In 2020 we as a society to put a lot less emphasis on enforcing social order and that causes crime.

> They need tons more training but no one wants to pay for that.

No one agrees on what type of training they need.

> We underfund police compared to other OECD nations.

This is just not true. The US spends 32 billion dollars on policing[0] while the UK spends 433 million euros[1]. Even if adjusted for PPP that still massively puts the US ahead.

[0] https://www.lexipol.com/resources/blog/2023-doj-budget-highl...

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/police-funding-for-...

They increased funding by 433 million

£15,877 million in police funding for England and Wales has been agreed for the financial year ending March 2022 overall funding has increased nominally by £433m (2.8%) compared with the previous financial year

My mistake I read that number wrong. The most recent number I can find is that during the 2022-2023 budget year, the UK spent around 25 billion pounds which puts them closer to the US when compared in USD but still under. Which begs the question, what do you consider well-funded?

So per capita the UK spends more than 4x as much?

No. The number I quoted is how much the US spends federally on funding the DOJ. It does not include state and local budgets.

Its about 190B which is about on par so I was wrong. From my experience with friends who are LEO they get about 1 week of training a year which isn't enough.

> which would cause riots

What a thing to just state as fact with confidence, this is like older individuals lamenting how nobody wants to work anymore. It must just feel good to say?

This might be somewhat true in some costal cities where there was a deliberate policy choice to make petty theft a misdemeanor (and thus encourage more crime), but this is just flat out not true where I live in the south. Theft is still very much prosecuted and not tolerated. I have never seen anyone just walk out with bags of stolen goods here, and our store aisles are not covered in locked plexiglass. Decline is a choice.

It’s not in coastal cities either, except where the police stopped enforcing the law as a negotiating tactic. For example, in San Francisco note how the work stoppage was focused on getting rid of a DA who threatened to prosecute a police officer who shot an unarmed man:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/02/today-in-acab-2/

These charts really show how overblown the murder/car theft issues are now. Higher than pre-pandemic yes, but still relatively low.

Relatively low...meaning slightly lower than 1994, when crime was so high that even black community leaders called for more police, and then Senator Joe Biden wrote "the largest crime bill in the history of the United States" that funded 100,000 more police officers and $10 billion for additional prisons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_Crime_Control_and_Law_...

But up 50% from the early 2010s.

Yes so stop freaking out over relatively low crime. Remember the lessons from that time.

Lowering Crime was the lesson I took away from it.

How do you lower crime?

Reduction in the rate of murders seems like a good metric.

a 50% rise in murder rate represent thousands of people I don't think we should discount it. I also think the rise in theft that people talk about anecdotally effects how people feel about living in cities. The us accepts a very large amount of disorder and that effects the overall trust in the society.

Just an FYI. Crime is awful. If your poor and your stuff gets stolen that devastating having to pay more to secure you belongings is a real burden. Nothing makes an area poor like crime. The single most valuable things governments do is law and order the fact that we forgot that in 2020 should be distressing to everyone.

We didn't forget that in 2020. An increase in crime is a pretty normal side effect of a global pandemic. We are lucky that it stayed so tame despite police not doing their jobs because they are pissy about having some accountability.

The UK did not experience a surge in murders despite also experiencing a pandemic.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/GBR/uni....

Neither did Kuwait. Canada, however, did have an increase. Global rates overall did increase.

>The issue is reporting. Where I live about 4 years ago they stopped prosecuting people who steal less than 500$. My friend who is a cop said they eventually stopped arresting them because its unethical to arrest someone for a crime they won't be prosecuted for. Then stores stopped calling the cops. This resulted in more crime but less reported crime for burglary.

"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it". —Jeff Bezos <https://sports.yahoo.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-explains-2123...>

What a convenient way to dismiss all data.

I had my bag stolen with clothes + work laptop out of my rental car in San Francisco, from the trunk, while parked in an underground garage with security on patrol.

SF has an especially bad problem with shoplifting and robberies, but it's happening in a lot of other places too.

A friend who worked in a senior position at a FAANG had his phone stolen while it was unlocked, and within minutes they had disabled Find My. They had full access to his work accounts + private data + identity documents for several hours, so he has to get everything replaced. Crazy that for most folks the most valuable assets isn't the device itself but the information on it, and criminals have started to realize that.

I deleted by bank app from my cell phone for this reason alone.

Don't bank apps require logging even explicitly even if the phone is unlocked?

Apparently not all cash apps do. My bank apps require some form of login but things like Venmo do not.

Yeah almost all finance apps do. Used to work at Robinhood and this was actually my feature, otherwise we'd just see ridiculous levels of fraud and have to end up eating the cost of it.

I’m more concerned about how you’d go about disabling Find My on a locked device that doesn’t have an user replaceable battery either.

(I’m not disputing your experience, I just want to know because I can’t find any info on how to disable it on a locked device.)

They said the device was unlocked when they stole it.

Unless there was an edit, the GP says the phone was unlocked. I'm guessing the recent iOS changes about not allowing Find My disabled when it is away from known locations was made specifically for this situation.

Find My always requires the Apple ID and password. Almost every recent phone I’ve owned has been traded in at the end and I have to put my password in to disable Find My.

Apple also requires it if you need them to work on your phone/computer at the store. I did it last month.

It was unlocked. Still, you typically need the iCloud password to disable Find My.

Mug person, preferably while intoxicated. Use face I'd to get access to phone.

The amount of times as a tech fixing some crap on folks devices I just pick their crapples up and face Id myself into their phones for a auth pass before they even realize what has happened is too many. Face ID is a hella big security hole. People are slow to react. You can be in and auth'd before they even ask "hey what are doing?"

Yeah it was unlocked. My friend said what they did initially was to completely disconnect it from all cellular networks so Find My couldn't remotely disable it. This also meant they couldn't connect to cloud services but there was enough data/documents stored on the device that they still were able to get his SSN, Passport, cached messages, etc.

You cannot turn off Find My without entering your Apple ID password. The option to turn off Find My is disabled if stolen device protection is enabled.

If you can get the PIN (shoulder surfing, social engineering) you can reset/change the Apple ID password.

Reportedly then you can add a second face to Face ID with Set Up Alternate Appearance and get access to everything, but I have not seen that confirmed.

"unload boosted goods at a swap meet, or at a store where illicit items are “washed” by commingling them with legitimate ones. Pilfered commodities often wind up online."

I do feel like one way to at least prevent resale would be for Target, et. al to work with the manufacturers to put more prominent markings that are custom to their retail outlet (i.e. stickers which signify Target). That way if I order skincare products or a t-shirt from Amazon and I see that the manufacturer labels have Target on them I can report it to Amazon.

I feel like Amazon, eBay, etc. are all key to the increase in the ease of reselling lifted items.

So various crime groups are coming together and leveraging the synergies.

Lots of synergies indeed. And gig workers!

https://archive.is/0VVna

"We" need to stop thinking about "crime" as something negative.

It's a job, just a job. Some poor hungry person has to do a dangerous job so they can feed their family. Simple as.

If you are the "victim" of a crime the wise thing to do is not resist, just report the loss to insurance and get compensated, knowing that hungry people have been fed and sheltered for whatever slight inconvenience you have experienced.

Perhaps even feel some gratitude that the lucky draw of your birth to privileged people means you don't have the job title of criminal?

My wife's face was smashed in to steal her purse. The people who stole her purse were not hungry.

Its not a job and most people who experience crime do not have insurance. Policing and public safety are our most important social service. Crime destroys people lives and safety. People who commit crime especially violent crime should have their lives destroyed.

Last December NYT: Is Shoplifting Really Surging? https://archive.ph/lJxHA

> Conservative media has promoted these videos as evidence of disorder in liberal cities and under President Biden.

Numerous other media emissions similarly re-assured us that crime is down! There's no organized theft rings! and so on.

It's so hard to keep up with History today.

Crime can be down and there also can be organized theft rings. Do you see why?

The most obvious reason why is that by crime you mean reported crime, and by reported crime you mean reported crime reported to the FBI.

(E.G., https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/08/15/see-if-police-...)

There seems to be an essential confusion between police refusing to investigate low-level theft without bodily harm (non-felony shoplifting, snatch-and-run, hit-and-run without injury) and the resulting (and inaccurate) lower crime rates. While not necessarily true of more serious (high-value or violent crimes) it is entirely possible for actual minor crime rates to rise while reported crime rates decrease.

Sure, but the parent I responded to seems to be trying to make an "aha!" here based on the fact that there are in fact crime rings, that crime is not actually down, which is a completely fallacious conclusion.

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