Carpenter's AirTags help uncover 'massive' case of stolen tools in Maryland
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Kind of sad, that I was surprised they did that. It's definitely a local thing. I'd expect the police to shrug, and say it's too bad, just file a report to use for insurance.
I remember people saying "so what if you have tags, police won't do anything and you shouldn't be confronting thieves anyway".
Apple, on the other hand, is also explicit about tags not to be used as an anti-theft device. The word "theft" doesn't appear even once on https://www.apple.com/airtag. It would be interesting if they still released a puff piece as a response: "Oh look, a carpenter `found` his tools in the next state, in a warehouse along with other tools. We don't know how they ended up there, but isn't that great?"
Having lived in Mountain View & Sunnyvale, CA as well for a decade my experience was Howard County itself had quicker and better services than those cities.
It doesn't surprise me at all that their police department is competent and helpful.
Called the cops. They responded by sending a helicopter over 15 minutes later. It shined it's spotlight around for a moment and then flew away.
"job well done" - LAPD probably.
The couple of times I've interacted with them, it's been painfully obvious to me that they feel like they need to put on a performance for me, even if it's clear that it's an unsolvable crime. (In both cases, it was a property crime worth reporting, but also one with literally no evidence to follow up on.) I honestly wonder if some of the less well resourced people in my neighborhood even get a similar time of day from the police - my impression is that they probably don't.
If a cop is making $30/hr, and we allow "pennies" to be as much as $0.25, they would have to complete the entire dusting for fingerprints process in 30 seconds.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11988510/case-of-former-san-jose-p...
I had a break in. Thieves took my check books, and tried to cash one in at a payday loan place at a neighbouring city. The payday place called me, and of course, I told them not to.
I called my police department with additional information, and they told me to file a report in the neighbouring city instead... And of course, the other police department told me to file with my police department as the original crime did not take place in their city...
And oh, I also had airtags that were taken so I knew which building the thieves took my stuff to. But because it is a multi-tenant building, the police wouldn't do anything. I offered to trigger the sound to narrow it down, but they didn't allow that either... Eventually, the thieves found the airtags and threw them out.
Anyway, I contacted my representatives to give police more help to help in cases like mine, but crickets is what I heard back. Not even an acknowledgement.
The same thing works with stolen goods tracked via AirTags: the police will almost laugh in your face when you request their help with retrieving the gear, but if you call the police (not 911) and tell them you are about to confront the thief in a physical altercation, they’ll be there within five minutes.
You can imagine an alternative system where if someone steals your cat the government has to pay for that.
Not exactly batman level detective work here, this case was cracked because it was handed to them on a silver platter.
Another buddy was woken up one night by a drunken stranger pounding on his door. He called the MVPD and within 5 minutes 3 squad cars showed up.
I used to live in Dallas. One night an entire floor of cars parked in my apartment garage was broken into. I called the police and reported it. Then I asked when they're coming and if I should stick around to wait for them. They told me they're not coming. The next night, the thieves returned and broke into all the cars on the next garage level.
Funding really matters. Mountain View is one of the handful of cities in the country with a triple-A municipal bond rating.
Having Google headquartered there probably helped their finances.
It's a struggle for cities to pass/raise business taxes... the businesses threaten to leave, and the cities back down.
If you think preventing and solving crimes, then American police are objectively bad at their jobs. If you think of police as revenue generators, then they're good at it. Because the police spend all their time on things like traffic citations. Even the police unions occasionally say the quite part out loud, like when the NYPD union famously said that they would not arrest anyone "unless absolutely necessary". Unsurprisingly to people that have looked into policing, crime doesn't increase during police work slowdowns.
(if only real cops could get that kind of response time/clearance rate!)
like that’s just a shitty argument yourself, you lost the argument on the facts so you’re complaining about how the presentation. Lazy argumentation, it’s a way to attack the messenger(‘s presentation) instead of addressing the argument.
It’s the highbrow version of “minor spelling mistake!!!!”.
Fucking chill. This is a website, few of us are politicians and our opinions barely matter.
sealioning is right, bringing it up in the first place was a distraction, by design. if you don't want to discuss copaganda, get mad about the fact someone used the word copaganda rather than contradicting its existence or usage.
that's why tone arguments are a logical fallacy - they're an ad-hominem, you're attacking the speaker rather than the argument. it's far too easy to let this all slide into "well I would have agreed with you but now you've gone and offended me with your tone!!!" as a way to slam the door on a discussion you're losing.
as difficult as it is, the mature thing is to simply accept that this is a way that people legitimately feel about cops and their marketing/relations with the public, and that they feel there's very good evidence and backing for it. It's unfortunate that you feel offended, but you can't derail the discussion because of that.
(moreover, the idea that we have to inherently respect the cops as social guardians and blah blah is very much a neoliberal perspective to begin with. minority communities tend not to have such rose-colored perspectives on the issue etc. People who have their property stolen at gunpoint at the roadside by cops tend to have a different perspective too. This is not some universal norm that is violated here.)
I am ambivalent on the topics in question. I could be persuaded either way by facts. But once someone reveals strong emotion motivates their argument, I am distrustful of their “facts.”
Sure, that might be quintessentially ad hominem, but we aren’t talking about mathematical proofs here. There is no indisputable proof. It’s just hearts and minds.
I’m not offended nor immature. I’m not tone policing. Speak and believe whatever you want. I was just commenting that I find that tone unpersuasive.
Just like I find the hypocrisy of calling me immature in the same comment that you lambast me for an ad hominem attack unpersuasive.
Anyhow, good luck storming the castle.
If the bosses want jaywalking tickets, they swarm like bees. Arresting someone for robbery fucks up the metric for the local commander.
It’s like any big dumb company. The officers are like salesmen, and they are trained to do whatever bullshit the boss wants.
But seriously, why he combative? People used to be able to ask questions without being told to take it up with the NYPD. The entire world wants to fight and frankly, it’s embarrassing.
edit: found it, the Santa line made it easy to search for lol: https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/08/27/the-best-of-atherton-...
Some highlights
A resident reported a large light in the sky. It was the moon.
A man was reported to be lying on the ground, possibly writing.Small town life exists even in major metro areas if you're wealthy.
https://policescorecard.org/md/police-department/howard-coun...
"He probably was not the one who stole them."
"Isn't it still a crime to sell stolen goods?"
"Shrug."
Individual property crime doesn't mean shit. A criminal can sell your Macbook if they like, but if they steal from Apple itself? Oh man there will be hell to pay.
The idea that police are inherently corrupt because they developed from paid security forces ignores that the very process of development is what enshrined the rule of law over power.
Even today courts have ruled that police are under no obligation to protect civilians from direct, inevitable harm. They are not there to protect you, they are there to protect "the peace" which can be fucking anything.
Be as that may (and as shitty as that is), this thread is about police forces utterly failing to protect property (or even attempt to).
See: Chelsea Boudin and the SFPD. See DeBlasio and the NYPD.
Yeah, LAPD's "protect and serve" was dreamed up by the City's marketing arm in the 1950s.
And those rulings have come because PDs have stood up and said "We have no obligation to prevent crime or protect people" and the courts have said, "Yup, you're right."
I've never heard this. Reference, please?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheriff_of_Nottingham_(positio...
The Code of Hammurabi:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi
Wouldn't that be useless without a mechanism of enforcement?
Also, you've conflated 'enforcement of the law' with 'the law protects property more than people'. Why?
For most of history the people with the power to create and enforce laws were also the people with the most property. This isn't some big mystery.
Where do you get the idea that there will be "hell to pay" if you steal from Apple itself? People regularly run out of Apple stores with tens of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise and never get caught.
But they decided that would be worse for business to prevent all theft then to simply have a few people steal stuff.
It being easy for people to grab thousands of dollars worth of stuff and run out of the store is a choice they made intentionally.
The absolute optimum is zero.
>It being easy for people to grab thousands of dollars worth of stuff and run out of the store is a choice they made intentionally.
Risking rape or death when I leave my house is a choice I make intentionally. That doesn't mean that murder is optimal or should be tolerated.
There are straight forward ways crime could be reduced if the public chooses.
There are a number of less extreme suggestions that you actually probably hold (more policing, stronger sentencing, etc.) that people actually do support and are not obviously dead in the water but they have the same tradeoffs on a smaller scale. Do we accept, as a society, less crime that also makes it more likely that you will be mistakenly identified as a criminal? Should we funnel more money towards crime prevention instead of, say, healthcare? Going "we cannot tolerate any crime" sounds great but the optimal amount of crime will always be nonzero.
Define optimum. It would be trivially easy for Apple to make theft at their stores absolutely zero.
How is that optimum though? The same measures that make theft zero would also drive away pretty much all legitimate business. Is that optimum for you?
Consider my standard example of this: electric power. We insist nuclear plants be insanely safe, making them uneconomic, making us use far more dangerous sources of power instead.
>The first example of a statutory police force in the world was probably the High Constables of Edinburgh, formed in 1611 to police the streets of Edinburgh, then part of the Kingdom of Scotland. The constables, of whom half were merchants and half were craftsmen, were charged with enforcing 16 regulations relating to curfews, weapons, and theft.
That sounds a lot like businesses working with government to secure their property.
This replaced, rather then grew out of, a mishmash of informal local watchmen and constables.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)
Fast forward to today and it’s very common for private security to be composed of ex-cops and former military, creating a very fluid dynamic of all policing as a paramilitary organization in support of capitalism.
In alot of places, police tend to take care of friends and referred people first. The top down control involved in that discourages the rank and file from doing more than required.
Steal a guys watch or TV, fine. He will go without. Steal his tools and his kids don't get Christmas. Even the most gruesome mob hitmen would turn their noses up at stealing a working man's tools.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/08/us/denver-police-raid-wrong-h...
I suspect there has to be more evidence than just the AirTag, but it is possible that the police used that tip to kick off an investigation that ultimately led to the warrant and search. Or they already started building a case. Based off the estimated 15,000 stolen tools, this theft ring was in the millions of dollars and was quite possibly already on their radar.
I suspect just one more data point would be pretty easy to manage, peek in a window, or even have the dude drive around the facility and see if the location was consistently reporting.
https://www.amazon.com/Jiobit-Real-Time-Waterproof-Encrypted...
I assume what got them to show up was that they didn’t want the bad press if the dude got shot.
I think in texas you can defend your self/loved ones/property with a gun.
In california, you can take a gun to the target range (in your trunk, unloaded). Not sure what else you can use a gun for except maybe get in trouble.
There are cities that have gotten proactive and fought against high car theft rates by handing out free Bluetooth trackers to the public and having people hide them in their car.
Big time vs. small beans
The scale seems very different to reach any such conclusion as grand-parent.
As well they should. The last thing Apple wants is some parent tracking down their kid’s stolen bicycle using an AirTag and wind up getting killed by the thief. They want people using these things the way my dad uses them: to find his car keys (or whatever else he might lose)!
Apple is well aware people use it as an anti-theft device, just as Unilever is well aware that people use Q-Tips in their ears.
Because if people would rely on that then I'm pretty certain some would go and sue Apple if they fail to retrieve their property - e.g. because a thief noticed the "you're being tracked" notification on their iPhone or Android.
OTOH I'd really really REALLY love it if all the modern cordless power tools and their batteries would come with smart tags integrated that work with Apple's, Google's and Samsung's Find My networks.
And I'd love it if I could somehow tell my iPhone, my Android and my wife's Android which tags belong to the respective other... right now when we're travelling for longer than 2h, she gets notifications from my AirPods and keychain tracker, and I get a notification on each of my devices for her stuff. Makes the anti-stalker thing pretty useless if you routinely have to ignore it.
The only reason why they can sometimes work against theft is because thieves do not realize they are being tracked. That's because Apple's anti-stalking measures are sometimes insufficient.
Hope is get to read about the thieves getting pinched soon. Who knows, that huge caper in a Canadian airport just finally yielded arrests, so my optimism has been somewhat restored in _some_ aspects of the justice system.
Would recommend airtagging: even if you aren't as lucky as I was, at least you'll have the reassurance of knowing you did what you could.
Two years ago, WhistlinDiesel youtuber used trail camera's and his air tags to bust his neighbors stealing from him. It took a few calls, but he got it done. He was smart and used the cops as mediators and didn't just go over and start yelling at the dude to get his stuff back.
That's pretty much the definition of implicit. You know, the exact opposite of explicit.
Before Home Depot started putting tools in cages, I used to see a lot of craigslist/marketplace/etc postings for brand new and unopened tools, posted at amazing prices.
I've been robbed, and wanted to inflict violence in the heat of the moment, but cooler heads... prison would be fine, and you know, civilized.
The 13th amendment codifies slavery into our prison system and few things are as barbaric in my mind. It's basically a few small rungs down from sacrificing prisoners to Quetzalcoatl and the rain gods, which is graphic but no more dehumanizing. States with prolific death penalties just skip the religious angle.
There was an article on HN recently with a photo of a prison work detail in Louisiana that looked like it was straight out of Django Unchained: https://www.apr.org/news/2024-01-29/prisoners-in-alabama-and...
A lot of prisoners get treated badly, but the inherent idea of being forced to do labor doesn't strike me as ridiculous. Just about everybody has to work. Comparing it to sacrifice is stupid.
The sacrifice would then be laid on a stone slab, a chacmool, by four priests, and their abdomen would be sliced open by a fifth priest with a ceremonial knife made of flint. The most common form of human sacrifice was heart-extraction. . . . The cut was made in the abdomen and went through the diaphragm. The priest would rip out the heart and it would then be placed in a bowl held by a statue of the honored god, and the body would then be thrown down the temple's stairs. . . .
The body parts would then be disposed of, the viscera fed to the animals in the zoo, and the bleeding head was placed on display in the tzompantli or the skull rack. When the consumption of individuals was involved, the warrior who captured the enemy was given the meaty limbs while the most important flesh, the stomach and chest, were offerings to the gods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cultu...
Most places, jails are just depressing adult daycare.
Restraining someone against their will is a violent act, it's just an acceptable form of violence (that of course I agree with) used by the "Good" to deal with the "bad" (relative terms ofc)
Can’t steal if you don’t have a hand!
Not tolerating crime does not mean shooting people up or inflicting wounds on them, why should it be that extreme ? , either inflict wounds on people or let them go free with misdemeanor charges ?
It just kills the conversation and scope to actually fix this rise in crime mess, that is spreading everywhere.
Different branch of these threads:
> So they steal from you, and then you get the privilege of your tax dollars paying for their room and board. I dunno, I can see why some people might not be chuffed to bits by that solution.
If we’re going to make sure we get appropriate vengeance, and we’re not going to pay to incarcerate them… what do we have left? Physical punishment? Slavery? Unless bankruptcy of a person (without any assets to begin with) alone is a sufficient punishment for these crimes, I’m all out of ideas on where this could go.
You may not be who he was referring to, but the people he was referring to certainly seem to be present.
Will you be the one to deliver the violence, or would you rather someone else did that on your behalf?
Anyone who has implemented violence IRL is also scarred, for life.
Edit: I found a great article about that for the UK here: https://www.cyclinguk.org/cycle-magazine/justice-cycle-theft
> Ministry of Justice records show that in the five-year period between June 2017 and June 2022, just 159 people (out of roughly 350,000 bike theft cases) were found guilty of bike thefts and only two of these were given immediate custodial sentences.
The police could do way more, but it's easier to victim blame ("register your bike, use two locks, etc.")
Its really unfortunate but it's true, peer through the thin veneer of society and it's just violence.
"It's all violence?" "Always has been"
Violence is a universal language that the predators can understand innately.
Sold in bulk to someone overseas is my theory, way too much effort and risk selling this stuff piecemeal online or locally. You can see something similar happening with stolen cars in the US. [1]
[1] https://abc7ny.com/stolen-cars-tri-state-port-of-newark-west...
>Some were stolen as long ago as 2014
Weird situation near me, some local folks where stealing construction stuff were found not far from me and ... they found everything stolen over the course of a few years. If a generator and some tools were taken, there they were, all of them together. It appeared they straight up had no plan / active effort to sell everything.
So, how is the money coming in to pay the thieves? How is the money coming in to continue to pay for the storage units to store the tools? It doesn't make sense.
It's not hard, but the owner can get done for it of course.
Amazon marketplace is one of the best fences of all time.
Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela, and a few other Central/South American countries can plug these tools right into the wall.
Power tools probably not though.
Maybe there's a case to be made for Venuzeuela and Colombia because of the Darien Gap, but that's pushing it.
But you are absolutely right in that a lot of stolen items do end up in that part of the world.
Great stuff.
https://sfist.com/2021/12/21/tenderloin-camera-shop-was-fron...
It was selling stolen clothing. Odd that it wasn't stolen cameras.
I think I actually visited that store once or twice (before the bust) and it seemed like a nice little shop, though I didn't see how it could stay in business. I guess now I know.
Maybe there is some organization to it, one wear house, multiple people selling.
Where do you think fuckboy666 gets his stock of deodorant and drills from?
Solved a long running ‘lost hunting dog’ mystery.
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1995/aug/29/dogs-tracked-d...
Would've been heartbreaking if it didn't reek of death.
They also stole my AirPods Max which has Find My technology built in.
It happened over the weekend and when I found out about the burglary about 2 days later I checked the Find My app. I saw my AirPods Max was in a small town about 3 hours away from my office.
I informed the police and they said there’s nothing they could do about it due to privacy concerns. Ugh.
I considered going there myself, but it being in a foreign country, not knowing the language, having no transportation, and not knowing what or who I’d find when I arrive, I ultimately decided to not risk it and never ended up going.
A few days later the signal went offline. Months after that it showed up on the map again. It was in Moldova at a shopping mall known for selling electronic parts.
I don’t know what happened to my Apple Pro Display XDR, but if you ever see one for sale in Portugal please send me a message :D
BTW, interesting side story: They didn’t just steal my display and headphones, but also many computers from other offices. Multiple floors except one. I guess they didn’t have time for that one. A week later they came back to rob that other floor as well.
https://github.com/positive-security/find-you
"A modified version of OpenHaystack to showcase the possibility of building a stealth AirTag clone that bypasses all of Apple's tracking protection features."
Other projects from them, like https://github.com/positive-security/send-my , also seem interesting.
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.”
I wonder who owns and/or rents that warehouse…
“The first mass-produced cotton swab was developed in 1923 by Polish-American Jew Leo Gerstenzang after he watched his wife attach wads of cotton to toothpicks to clean their infant's ears.”
Snark: fascism grew in the 1920's, similar in the 2020's.
usually, this is in regard to complaints about the anti-stalking features making airtags less useful for finding stolen things. use airtags for whatever you want, but apple has made it clear that's not their priority when making product decisions.
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As a retired tradesman (IBEW), discovering your tools have been stolen is "up there" in gut-wrenching professional experiences. My good luck meant most items stolen from me were probably just "walk aways" [leant out, never returned]. Last time my work truck was burglarized, they only stole personal effects (leaving behind thousands in rechargeables).
When two seconds of thought would make anyone realize that the conspiracy story is insane: professionals working at a company literally paying for criminal acts targeting their own customers, in support of a sales increase they could never get credit for, and which would bankrupt the company overnight if it ever came to light.
But critical thinking seems nearly extinct, and the thrill of having figured it all out seems irresistible.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Japan-s-Bigmotor-scandal-is-...
Not to say that it's even remotely likely, but all you need is for someone with a vested interest to find a cost effective way to boost sales. Depending on how desperate people and the broader economy are, and how little people care about risk, it's not exactly that farfetched that people will go to insane measures. People will try and pull off ridiculous schemes/crines for relatively small amounts of cash or even social media points and shoulder huge amounts of risk, and then turn around and buy nonsense with it, that's just America.
The person stealing doesn't need to know who hired them, nobody else at the company needs to know did the hiring, shareholders are happy.
I think you're vastly underestimating how difficult it is to anonymously recruit and pay thousands of thieves from all over the country to target one particular brand and ensure they actually do the job.
Maybe one could offer some sort of buy-back program to maybe induce this behavior, but that would be quite expensive.
But imagine you’re Black and Decker, and you want to hire thousands of thieves around the country to target tens of thousands of your customers (People who bought DeWalt, Stanley, etc).
How? Is there a budget line item for market development? And you convert maybe $20m into cash, and have reps in major metro areas? Do you fire low performers who don’t steal enough?
The whole thing collapses when you think about the logistics. No different from the “1000 people were paid off to falsely claim they saw an airplane hit the Pentagon, but nobody has come forward with receipts” nonsense.
Normal business is impossible to get right. These kinds of conspiracies are just fantasy.
Sure.
> And you convert maybe $20m into cash, and have reps in major metro areas?
You’ve seen examples in the thread. Flea markets, online marketplaces, injections into clean retail supply chains. (Amazon)
> Do you fire low performers who don’t steal enough?
Yes.
The existence of small time crooks doesn’t prove that organized crime is a myth. Getting stolen at scale commodities to market is not so different than managing global supply chains of cocaine and heroin. The street level people are independent contractors who make near minimum wage. The best example of business that skirt the line between legit and criminal enterprise are Chinatown busses… they provide cheap, unsafe travel and fuel the human trafficking pipeline of sexually exploited women as well as economically exploited restaurant and other employees.
Would it not be in the same ballpark of reasoning though as updating your older products to intentionally slow them down and influence more sales, or updating your trains to conveniently not work when they're at a competitors depot?
Sure it'd be a more blatant demonstration of sociopathy and criminal intent to commit widespread theft of tools, but really we'd only need one missing detail, and that's a connection back to the companies, the theft is already happening.
In this case it doesn't seem it's nationwide or one particular manufacturer, but if you're in a position to even consider such a thing, I'd think you either don't care or don't anticipate being caught, and perhaps don't care about precision or results, which really reduces the problem. Like if you're a popular retailer of many brands, but seeing sales slump. Now you can just find someone who already coordinates thieves to steal any equipment in some region, and if all you care about is that warehouse is filling up and your sales are increasing, your first problem is solved.
Executives were upset about the newsletter’s coverage, so their employees set out to ruin the lives of the couple who ran the website, sending a funeral wreath, bloody pig face Halloween mask and other alarming items to their home, authorities said. The employees also sent pornographic magazines with the husband’s name on it to their neighbor’s house and planned to break into the couple’s garage to install a GPS device on their car, officials said.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jun/15/ebay-empl...
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/29/tech/ebay-exec-jail-harassmen...
Ex-eBay execs heading to prison for harassing couple behind newsletter
And they'll even use RF locating techniques to draw an arrow on the screen that points at the AirTag (so that it can be found and destroyed).
Taking the speakers out of AirTags doesn't really improve the situation much; at best, it seems kind of naive.
That would seem like a poor choice. If the same thieves are taking everything they might be "smart" enough to NOT bring a personal tracking device with them.
why would they announce this without someone in custody?
Just a guess, though.
Of course it was a civilian victim tired of the cops being unable to do anything. I say unable vs unwilling even though I'd also suggest unwilling, but I digress. It's the kind of theft ring that would just not motivate anyone to look at anything. I wouldn't be surprised to see that this has been going on for a really long time. It's kind of genius
I don't think you know how expensive commercial power tools and accessories are.. They cited 15k items with a range of 3-5 million. At 3 million that's $200 an item. Hardly peanuts.
The article also says the tools likely came from a variety of sources
15,000 $200 thefts, all sitting in one spot in a storage locker, they just might be interested (and, it seems they were interested).
Instead, a couple of cops followed up with a gift wrapped solved case of "locate my stolen items at this exact location", and stumbled into a big take down just because they decided today they'll do some real police work.
Had this one civilian not been pissed off enough to plant trackers, this caper would have continued for years.
https://www.deere.com/en/loaders/skid-steers/334-p-skid-stee...
Even at $200, that doesn't even qualify as anything more than a misdemeanor. The police are just not going to care if the victim even bother reporting it. I've had my battery powered lawn equipment stolen within the time it took me to push my mower to the front of the house and then walk back to the garage to grab the now stolen items. Of course I didn't report it to the police. Why would I waste my time as well as theirs? I even specifically qualified some equipment like construction equipment would potentially raise an eyebrow implying their value is more than my weekend warrior power tools.
Talking about totally being so far off base, and missing the point that you even attempt to use math to get to. However, even your math totally misses the point. If you think $200 gets the police excited, you are grossly putting too much faith in the system. It doesn't matter at all that somebody else thinks $200 is hardly peanuts. It doesn't move the needle at all in motivating someone doing some investigating. That is the point I was making. It's the perfect crime to run for a long time as even if it is reported, nobody is going to do anything about it.
The cops literally raided the place when it was reported
I'm thinking probably an underling getting paid a small amount delivered stuff and whoever was supposed to handle it messed up the same way people mess up deployments or other things.
Probably the reason they're not in any of the hauls is because they have a reputation for not being very good, and are harder to sell/fence...
Personally, I stick with DeWalt because I like quality even though I fall under the “diyer” category. This impact driver has survived 5-6 moves, at least a handful of projects across a few years, and it’s still working as if I just picked it up from the store. Haven’t had to do any maintenance or repairs.
One of the cheaper harbor freight or off brand power tools I picked up many years ago lasted at most 1-2 yrs with only a few projects. Which is the reason I started investing in higher quality (prefer dewalt, but will buy Milwaukee).
That’s because time is money.
But there's a fair amount of inter-model variety within those four/five brands. My 12v Dewalt impact punches above its weight/price and I have two Bosch 18v drills, similar in form factor but one is frankly inferior quality.
Hilti makes some very large tools that if needed Festool does not have alternative. I have also seen a comparably priced Hilti drill/driver give up where a Makita kept going.
I really like Ryobi's 18V and 40V 'ecosystem'. Every time I am browsing Home Depot or their website, I come across new items that are compatible with these two ecosystems.
Just recently I saw everything from 18V Ryobi Glue Gun to a Portable Power washer that can suck water from a bucket (eliminating the need for a hose) to even a portable soldering iron! Hell they even got a boombox ha ha!
For the 40V I saw cool things such as a portable power generator, lawn mowers, wet dry vac and even a portable refrigerator.
Its really cool that there are like a bazillion things that your existing batteries can plug into.
Makita also has a large range but I usually have to order the less popular stuff but when I get it, it’s usually worth it.
Festool domino system I hear is probably the best, but that is rather specialized.