I reported it to AT&T and they were more concerned with getting me to order a new one.
Watching the chain of events I’m pretty sure the driver was involved. My house is accessible from two streets, one side is our actual address but we get deliveries on the other side. The thief first came to our street address, looked around confusedly, left, then came to the other side (which required him to get in his car and drive around). I don’t know how he could have possibly figured that out without the driver telling him.
I’d call the cops on this one? Either a crazy lucky porch pirate or this was an inside job.
A cool feature of having a second-floor apartment is I’ve never had anything stolen, you can’t see if there’s a package at my door unless you actually walk up the stairs, which is probably something few thieves are bold enough to try.
Looks pretty good that I won’t be held responsible for this, and if it’s a loss for AT&T then great, fuck them. I think my purpose for pursuing it is to have it happen to fewer people in the future, and I think the best way to do that is for FedEx to look into the driver. If you saw the layout of my house and the way the thief went to the wrong place first, then got in his car and drove to the back of the property to get the package, it’s pretty indisputable he had some ground-level intel.
Update: contacting FedEx with anything more complicated than “my package is missing” seems pretty impossible. I guess I’ll hold onto my “evidence” to use in case somebody tries to make me responsible for this. I do not see a way to contact FedEx and tell them any of this.
My best friend’s sister used to get a lot of free stuff that way, back when letters were written on paper and delivered by people. She was a professional writer so ymmv.
I stopped having stuff delivered to the apt after the first package got yeeted. Getting stuff at a drop box or store was better than having it walk away from the porch. So far the new place hasn’t had anything go missing… so far…
I wonder if they don’t just have a couple of cars, one following around a delivery truck and one trailing a few minutes behind that dropping off the snatchers? Phones are pretty easy to spot due to size and these next few weeks is the busy time for them to be delivered.
Yeah I think I posted here a few months ago detailing my attempt to talk to a human at FedEx. They’ve all been replaced by AI chatbots. And they’ve been programmed to respond to a very limited set of concerns.
Just FWIW the guy who stole our iPhone definitely wasn’t following the delivery vehicle because his first attempt brought him to our street address, which isn’t where the driver delivered the package. He not only had the tracking info, but when that info led him to the wrong place he clearly made contact with someone who knew exactly where the package was and went there. Either the driver told him (most likely), or FedEx has some internal note on my address that says “when delivering to this house bring it to the back on XXXXX street” and the thief had contact with someone else inside FedEx who could share that info.
Based on my experiences with Amazon (and reading lots of message forums from people having the same issue) the only way to get FedEx’s attention is to have a lawyer send a letter. Unfortunately there’s no proof here so they’d probably just ignore it.
Possibly could the person trailing the car have confused the person grabbing the package?
Also I’m wondering if someone has inside info on packages from AT&T (that are likely to be phones)? Once you have a tracking number, I believe anyone can monitor it and know to the minute when it gets delivered. I could see some person sitting at a computer monitoring a bunch of tracking numbers while centrally dispatching a gang of porch pirates.
Our thief 100% had the tracking info - as he’s walking up the front (wrong) way you can see him looking at his phone trying to figure out where the package is. Once he realizes he’s definitely in the wrong place he skedaddles and a couple of minutes later he arrives at the back of my house. I really don’t see how he could have possibly made that adjustment without calling the driver who tells him “oh no, you have to go around back, the box is inside the gate by the pool”. The regular tracking info would never take you there, because our packages don’t get delivered to our actual street address (at least they don’t with FedEx, UPS, and USPS - Amazon delivery still leaves them in front).
What does it say if you look up your tracking number (w/o being logged in to anything)? Does it by any chance say “delivered to back gate” or something?
Experienced porch pirates would know that some houses have alternate delivery locations. They can know from the tracking number that the package has just been delivered somewhere. Maybe they just figure it out eventually.
Just purely speculating here, but it seems like a driver actively on the phone with a porch pirate would be pretty brazen and risking a nice well-paying job. It just seems more likely to me to be some low-level person at AT&T or FedEx, possibly in cahoots with some kind of central porch pirate dispatcher who can look on google maps and figure out possible alternate delivery locations (or maybe a person on the inside at FedEx knows them).
Without doing any investigation, it seems to me, that either ATT or FedEx or their insurers would have a big incentive to nip theft in the bud quickly. Like if the phones from a particular driver get stolen much more often than other drivers with similar routes then they’d have a suspect. On the other hand, the thieves may be smart and spread their crimes among many drivers.
I agree that a driver actively coordinating in real time with the thief would be unusually brazen. And, FedEx drivers do all seem to know to go to the back of the property, so I would not be completely shocked if there’s a note someplace that I can’t see.
But from watching the videos there is zero chance imo that the thief just figured it out on his own.
Here’s the delivery photo. If I was really conspiracy minded I would say this photo was intended to show where to look.
All of this is moot, I’ve got nobody to tell. I’m not calling the cops.
