> Require a signature for all of your valuable deliveries, including and especially iPhones.
I'm not sure if this is universal, or region-specific, but out of all the times that I've received something that's been signature-required, it's incredibly rare (single-digit percent) that the driver will actually get my signature. Usually when I see the "SIGNED BY XYZ" note on the delivery notification, it's some random name.
90+% of the time they don't even check my ID when it's a wine delivery, like they're supposed to.
Drivers are overworked and have too many deliveries on their plate. They're not going to bother to get signatures.
Reminds me of places that tell you something by speaking to you, and then they want you to sign a digital pad. What does that prove? All you have is a digital signature that will presumably be placed next to some digital text.
> Drivers are overworked and have too many deliveries on their plate. They're not going to bother to get signatures.
Yeah, I don’t hold this against them at all. My USPS delivery driver asked me the other day if he could just leave packages requiring a signature on my porch going forward and I told him that was fine.
I have cameras, I work from home, we don’t have porch pirates in this area (or at least in it’s never happened in the last 5 years I’ve been here).
On the other hand, I don’t trust FedEx/UPS at all. I had a Steam Deck stolen in-transit (an empty box was delivered to my porch) and then I had another Steam Deck stolen from a pickup box (I assume stolen by a driver, not from the box directly). The first one I was able to prove and get a free replacement. The second one was something I couldn’t prove and I ate the loss (~$600 IIRC, I keep trying to forget it). I’ll never trust a dropbox again with anything expensive. Arguably I should have been smarter but up till that point I’d returned 10+ $1000+ iPhones the same way without issue.
When you buy something online in the USA, the responsibility of the shipper ends once they hand it to the shipping company. At that moment it is your (the customer's) responsibility.
Which is weird, as you, the customer, don't have any leverage in enforcing any behavior of the shipping company (like make sure package is signed for). You can't even select them.
Apple for example charges you $9 for expedited shipping, which is essentially Uber delivery. But when the delivery person takes off with your $1,200 phone they don't have to replace it. It is on you: https://law.stackexchange.com/a/73842
When this whole thing is flipped around, where the sender is responsible until the buyer actually has it in their hands the whole system all of the sudden becomes incentivized to minimize losses.
(sidenote: it is a disgrace that Stackoverflow doesn't allow you to turn off auto-sharing of your ID when you share a link).
> Consequently, you only ever really see this kind of blase delivery from Amazon
Sweet innocent child, so lucky never to have suffered (edit: the low cost UK courier) Hermes. Their definition of delivered to you regularly includes left in a bush 3 streets over at a random address
Your first paragraph is totally correct and I wish more people stopped wasting so much energy chasing couriers when it's not their job. However, there is a certain reality when people expect free or <£3 delivery costs
I lost my CashApp account because I ordered something with my debit card and it was delivered somewhere else who eventually handed it back and redelivered to the merchant who kept it.
I asked CashApp to step in and refund me and they said "Look chum, the FedEx ticket says DELIVERED".. and I'm like "Yes, but not to me" and they said "Yeah we get that, but our policy states if its DELIVERED it's over with. How about we just terminate your CashApp account for complaining?"
CashApp did nothing wrong in the original story, you have a complaint against the seller, and the seller has a complaint against their agent, who failed to deliver correctly.
With a debit card, chargebacks are not a legal right, but often platforms will do them for you. Not sure exactly why CashApp weren't happy with you for asking, but maybe they felt like you hadn't tried hard enough with the seller, or that you were trying it on.
That said, my understanding from general opinions about CashApp is that them terminating your account is probably a net benefit for you in the long term, rather than something to rue.
Legal liability might not apply in the US. But card network rules still apply, and as far as I know even in the US those still very much require the merchant to ensure the goods are delivered as a condition of keeping their money.
Disputes/chargebacks is the very last remnant of "consumer protection" in the US that actually works - which is why nobody with money is actually incentivized to spread good words about it, and as a result it's not common knowledge even on HN.
Weird? That's WILD that it's not even the courier's responsibility. Like the law just pretends the courier is the customer's agent or something (isn't it the seller with the contract with the courier?)
Really it goes back on to the seller. Because if I don't get my item, I'm going to dispute the charge on my credit card. Eventually, someone pays, but not me.
Requiring a signature, as the article suggests, doesn’t help. The delivery people just ignore it. My iPhone was left outside despite requiring a signature. I changed my schedule to be home when it was delivered. They didn’t even knock on the door before they left it.
I bought a ~$500 item from amazon the other day. They sent me a code to give to the driver to recieve the package. They told me not to give it over the phone/intercom, and to only give it in person. He tapped it into his phone before giving me the package. I suppose he needed to do so to mark the package as delivered. That seemed a reliable enough system.
Similarly living in an apartment complex with a package locker doesn’t necessarily help. At both of the places I lived with one of those, deliveries were routinely dumped on the floor in front of the lockers, and so you’d have to watch delivery status like a hawk, hope you noticed that it was delivered quickly enough, and then awkwardly dig through a bunch of other peoples’ deliveries to retrieve yours. Had a couple of packages disappear that way.
Man, the worst is "overnight shipping" on Amazon. It's a huge nerf over normal shipping, but they push it like it's some sort of perk.
Unless you live in a detached home, "overnight shipping" just means someone's going to call you at 5:30am asking how to enter your apartment and then try again in two days when you don't pick up. One time I did this dance for a week because they kept coming at 4am, and I feel bad for them too, but c'mon "4am-8am" delivery, and they don't have Amazon Locker access?
In some countries, delivery items require a 2FA code. I still don’t think it solves the problem as delivery drivers are stressed and this would lead to dropping stuff at alternatives like a post office or something. There’s no full solution until delivery drivers are paid a fair minimum amount.
I had a brand new laptop disappear this way. The delivery log shows a failed delivery attempt, followed by a “signed delivery” in my name 5 minutes later. Meanwhile I wasn’t even in the same state.
Never did find out what happened to it, fortunately the seller was willing to send a replacement to make it right.
Part of the reason they don't do that is because they're already paying the lowest the market will bear (and being able to steal items might very well be priced in by said market).
> The group created software to scrape FedEx tracking numbers and bribed AT&T store employees to get order details and delivery addresses, according to a criminal complaint filed in New Jersey. The group then sent thieves to pick off the packages and bring them back to destinations like the Brooklyn shop
> employee also received bonuses of $2,000-2,500 for recruiting other AT&T employees into the scheme.
It is a good scam, but you have to assume you have a limited window before getting caught. Too many accomplices - eventually someone will be caught and rat out the rest of the crew.
What other high value items are shipped regularly? I thought Costco started selling gold recently, which seems way more lucrative and harder to trace than phones.
The gold costco sells is serialized. It is traceable and if you report it stolen, if it's found in a pawn shop or the pocket of a thief, you will get it back.
It would be trivial to keep track the IMEI of the phones and to render them worthless by blacklisting them on the mobile networks.
Why is this not done?
It would be even more trivial for Apple to block the phones the same way they do when an Apple Store is broken into. You can’t use an iPhone without an activation via login.
They used to get broken down for parts, as the screens etc were still worth hundreds on their own. But since the parts are now encoded, that can't be done as easily.
This is happening in Germany too, but in another form. The delivery is handed personally, you sign or confirm it. The package is sealed, but when you open it, there’s something else in there, usually of the same weight as to not trigger alarm bells along the way. The phone or tablet disappears along the way somehow.
Then you go into a kafkaesque process with Amazon, who say “sure buddy, we sent you something else”, and then you have to file a police report and probably have to claw the money back which leads to the forfeiture of your account.
A good solution I’ve seen from Otto, another big eshop here in Germany is that they seal the package with tape that can’t be removed without damaging either the tape or the box and you are instructed not to accept the package if it’s been tampered with.
In my country delivery guys always phone you and knock on your door to give you your package. If you are not at home, they will get the package back and try to deliver it the next day. I’ve never heard of an option to ask them to just leave the package outside.
Looks like tracking number scraping is so much of an issue now isn't it? (Although, in this case, this incident is also include bribing an employee too.) Quite the same story with the GPU delivery scam covered by LTT recently. [0]
In my country, at least, some provider is now requiring related party's phone number to be included in order to access the tracking data. [1]
Are deliveries of new iPhones not insured? If they are, I'd think it's the insurance company's problem. I suppose they will claim they have a photo of the package on your doorstep but if a porch pirate gets to it first do they not cover that?
Insurance companies don't really turn your problems into their problems.
It's easier to think of them turning _risks_ of occasional large losses into a steady constant flow of losses.
Whatever level of verification you pick, an insurance company can give you a quote. If you want to implement a very lax policy (without even a photo of the package on the doorstep), the insurance company will charge you an arm and a leg for coverage.
If you pick a more robust system, the insurance will become cheaper.
OK, but if the delivery is covered, with a "photo on the doorstep" level of proof, and the recipient claims they did not receive it, do they (insurance) pay for the loss or is it going to be an argument?
That depends on the policy. But you are right that my analysis only really applies for repeat players.
So if you have two insurance providers with the same written down policies, but one provider A usually pays out, and the other B fights it tooth and nail, then provider A has an easier time selling their services for a higher price. Reputation matters.
Thus in the end (assuming some competition) the actual policies as implemented matter more than what's written down.
I bought a knife on Amazon. Every step of the process says “you must be over 18 and show ID to the delivery driver”. The ordering page, follow up email, tracking page, even the parcel had in huge letters “over 18 ID required”.
I found the parcel outside my front door like all the other parcels.
Ultimately if the drivers are strongly incentivised to be fast, and not strongly incentivised to follow process, they won’t follow process.
Whatever the solution is here, it must not, under any circumstance, involve an analysis of why people are so willing to steal from one another. All that matters is me getting my iPhone.
Are you saying there is some hidden reason why people are doing this? The straightforward reason is that this is a valuable fungible good that you can easily fence. This kind of thing has always been a target for the criminal element. Watches before this. Chains.
We don’t need another social science thesis over this. Just like the blonde millionaire in San Diego who organized a crime ring in California, there are people who know how to run other criminal organizations.
In the UK I've only had this for Deliveroo or Justeat. Oh and one other time when I ordered a kitchen knife and it said they'd need id etc. Driver didn't ask for id.
> Require a signature for all of your valuable deliveries, including and especially iPhones.
I'm not sure if this is universal, or region-specific, but out of all the times that I've received something that's been signature-required, it's incredibly rare (single-digit percent) that the driver will actually get my signature. Usually when I see the "SIGNED BY XYZ" note on the delivery notification, it's some random name.
90+% of the time they don't even check my ID when it's a wine delivery, like they're supposed to.
Drivers are overworked and have too many deliveries on their plate. They're not going to bother to get signatures.
And even when you are asked to sign, it usually goes like this:
"Sign here"
"What is it? Who is the recipient?"
"Just sign"
Like, you don't know what you've signed for until after signing for it.
Still, handing the package to a person that was inside the house is much better odds than leaving it outside.
Reminds me of places that tell you something by speaking to you, and then they want you to sign a digital pad. What does that prove? All you have is a digital signature that will presumably be placed next to some digital text.
> Drivers are overworked and have too many deliveries on their plate. They're not going to bother to get signatures.
Yeah, I don’t hold this against them at all. My USPS delivery driver asked me the other day if he could just leave packages requiring a signature on my porch going forward and I told him that was fine.
I have cameras, I work from home, we don’t have porch pirates in this area (or at least in it’s never happened in the last 5 years I’ve been here).
On the other hand, I don’t trust FedEx/UPS at all. I had a Steam Deck stolen in-transit (an empty box was delivered to my porch) and then I had another Steam Deck stolen from a pickup box (I assume stolen by a driver, not from the box directly). The first one I was able to prove and get a free replacement. The second one was something I couldn’t prove and I ate the loss (~$600 IIRC, I keep trying to forget it). I’ll never trust a dropbox again with anything expensive. Arguably I should have been smarter but up till that point I’d returned 10+ $1000+ iPhones the same way without issue.
When you buy something online in the USA, the responsibility of the shipper ends once they hand it to the shipping company. At that moment it is your (the customer's) responsibility.
Which is weird, as you, the customer, don't have any leverage in enforcing any behavior of the shipping company (like make sure package is signed for). You can't even select them.
Apple for example charges you $9 for expedited shipping, which is essentially Uber delivery. But when the delivery person takes off with your $1,200 phone they don't have to replace it. It is on you: https://law.stackexchange.com/a/73842
When this whole thing is flipped around, where the sender is responsible until the buyer actually has it in their hands the whole system all of the sudden becomes incentivized to minimize losses.
(sidenote: it is a disgrace that Stackoverflow doesn't allow you to turn off auto-sharing of your ID when you share a link).
And this is the situation in the UK - until it is in the hands of the buyer, the seller is wholly responsible for the item and delivering it to you.
Consequently, you only ever really see this kind of blase delivery from Amazon, who I guess are rich enough to absorb the cost.
> Consequently, you only ever really see this kind of blase delivery from Amazon
Sweet innocent child, so lucky never to have suffered (edit: the low cost UK courier) Hermes. Their definition of delivered to you regularly includes left in a bush 3 streets over at a random address
Your first paragraph is totally correct and I wish more people stopped wasting so much energy chasing couriers when it's not their job. However, there is a certain reality when people expect free or <£3 delivery costs
I lost my CashApp account because I ordered something with my debit card and it was delivered somewhere else who eventually handed it back and redelivered to the merchant who kept it.
I asked CashApp to step in and refund me and they said "Look chum, the FedEx ticket says DELIVERED".. and I'm like "Yes, but not to me" and they said "Yeah we get that, but our policy states if its DELIVERED it's over with. How about we just terminate your CashApp account for complaining?"
CashApp did nothing wrong in the original story, you have a complaint against the seller, and the seller has a complaint against their agent, who failed to deliver correctly.
With a debit card, chargebacks are not a legal right, but often platforms will do them for you. Not sure exactly why CashApp weren't happy with you for asking, but maybe they felt like you hadn't tried hard enough with the seller, or that you were trying it on.
That said, my understanding from general opinions about CashApp is that them terminating your account is probably a net benefit for you in the long term, rather than something to rue.
For a while I thought you meant Hermes the luxury brand tossed your stuff in the bushes. Apparently there is a delivery company under the same name.
Hermès dear, totally different!
Most people pronounce the courier like Her-mies which reminds you of herpes which is apt.
Well, these days it's pronounced "Evri" - the old name got too toxic :)
Doh! Of course
"Evri delivery is a nightmare"
Legal liability might not apply in the US. But card network rules still apply, and as far as I know even in the US those still very much require the merchant to ensure the goods are delivered as a condition of keeping their money.
Disputes/chargebacks is the very last remnant of "consumer protection" in the US that actually works - which is why nobody with money is actually incentivized to spread good words about it, and as a result it's not common knowledge even on HN.
Weird? That's WILD that it's not even the courier's responsibility. Like the law just pretends the courier is the customer's agent or something (isn't it the seller with the contract with the courier?)
Really it goes back on to the seller. Because if I don't get my item, I'm going to dispute the charge on my credit card. Eventually, someone pays, but not me.
Even worse, you often have zero say in what courier a merchant uses!
Requiring a signature, as the article suggests, doesn’t help. The delivery people just ignore it. My iPhone was left outside despite requiring a signature. I changed my schedule to be home when it was delivered. They didn’t even knock on the door before they left it.
I bought a ~$500 item from amazon the other day. They sent me a code to give to the driver to recieve the package. They told me not to give it over the phone/intercom, and to only give it in person. He tapped it into his phone before giving me the package. I suppose he needed to do so to mark the package as delivered. That seemed a reliable enough system.
Seems like a good system, but it will only work if Amazon is the one doing the final delivery…
In cases like this where it is third party (in this case FedEx), there’s no way to manage that.
How long are they required to wait? They're going to start marking it as undeliverable without knocking just to get done with the route faster.
Technical solutions always fail to solve social trust problems.
That definitely happens here in Aus, but I'd still prefer that over a brand new phone left on the verandah.
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Similarly living in an apartment complex with a package locker doesn’t necessarily help. At both of the places I lived with one of those, deliveries were routinely dumped on the floor in front of the lockers, and so you’d have to watch delivery status like a hawk, hope you noticed that it was delivered quickly enough, and then awkwardly dig through a bunch of other peoples’ deliveries to retrieve yours. Had a couple of packages disappear that way.
Man, the worst is "overnight shipping" on Amazon. It's a huge nerf over normal shipping, but they push it like it's some sort of perk.
Unless you live in a detached home, "overnight shipping" just means someone's going to call you at 5:30am asking how to enter your apartment and then try again in two days when you don't pick up. One time I did this dance for a week because they kept coming at 4am, and I feel bad for them too, but c'mon "4am-8am" delivery, and they don't have Amazon Locker access?
I wish I could disable it permanently.
In some countries, delivery items require a 2FA code. I still don’t think it solves the problem as delivery drivers are stressed and this would lead to dropping stuff at alternatives like a post office or something. There’s no full solution until delivery drivers are paid a fair minimum amount.
I had a brand new laptop disappear this way. The delivery log shows a failed delivery attempt, followed by a “signed delivery” in my name 5 minutes later. Meanwhile I wasn’t even in the same state.
Never did find out what happened to it, fortunately the seller was willing to send a replacement to make it right.
I feel grateful I live in a large condo with concierge service that always receives my packages. I've never had a package stolen since moving in.
> The delivery people just ignore it.
When the compensation for stolen items starts being taken out of their pay, they will stop ignoring it.
Part of the reason they don't do that is because they're already paying the lowest the market will bear (and being able to steal items might very well be priced in by said market).
> The group created software to scrape FedEx tracking numbers and bribed AT&T store employees to get order details and delivery addresses, according to a criminal complaint filed in New Jersey. The group then sent thieves to pick off the packages and bring them back to destinations like the Brooklyn shop
> employee also received bonuses of $2,000-2,500 for recruiting other AT&T employees into the scheme.
It is a good scam, but you have to assume you have a limited window before getting caught. Too many accomplices - eventually someone will be caught and rat out the rest of the crew.
What other high value items are shipped regularly? I thought Costco started selling gold recently, which seems way more lucrative and harder to trace than phones.
That's a good point. I think most people go into Costco to get the gold though. I'd need some good shipping insurance on a $3000+ purchase
The gold costco sells is serialized. It is traceable and if you report it stolen, if it's found in a pawn shop or the pocket of a thief, you will get it back.
Couldn’t you kiss it with a propane torch to melt away the identifiers? Shred it? Some mechanism of making it non traceable.
> Overall, it was a complex, multi-faceted crime ring.
Looks like a not-so complex, multi-faceted LLM was used to help write this article :)
this will soon be most news articles outside of a couple of places, like AP or Reuters
It would be trivial to keep track the IMEI of the phones and to render them worthless by blacklisting them on the mobile networks. Why is this not done?
Same applies to any stolen phones btw.
It would be even more trivial for Apple to block the phones the same way they do when an Apple Store is broken into. You can’t use an iPhone without an activation via login.
Carriers have this ability. They'll do it under certain circumstances. This isn't really one of them.
It's extra work for the carrier and can result in innocent people being denied service so they lean towards not banning IMEIs.
Also it can be spoofed so it isn't a surefire way to ban these devices.
They used to get broken down for parts, as the screens etc were still worth hundreds on their own. But since the parts are now encoded, that can't be done as easily.
This is happening in Germany too, but in another form. The delivery is handed personally, you sign or confirm it. The package is sealed, but when you open it, there’s something else in there, usually of the same weight as to not trigger alarm bells along the way. The phone or tablet disappears along the way somehow.
Then you go into a kafkaesque process with Amazon, who say “sure buddy, we sent you something else”, and then you have to file a police report and probably have to claw the money back which leads to the forfeiture of your account.
A good solution I’ve seen from Otto, another big eshop here in Germany is that they seal the package with tape that can’t be removed without damaging either the tape or the box and you are instructed not to accept the package if it’s been tampered with.
In Asia it's common to record yourself opening the package. Ultimately social trust can't be fixed with technology.
In my country delivery guys always phone you and knock on your door to give you your package. If you are not at home, they will get the package back and try to deliver it the next day. I’ve never heard of an option to ask them to just leave the package outside.
Looks like tracking number scraping is so much of an issue now isn't it? (Although, in this case, this incident is also include bribing an employee too.) Quite the same story with the GPU delivery scam covered by LTT recently. [0]
In my country, at least, some provider is now requiring related party's phone number to be included in order to access the tracking data. [1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NpOw1Onf2I
[1] https://th.kex-express.com/th/track/
Are deliveries of new iPhones not insured? If they are, I'd think it's the insurance company's problem. I suppose they will claim they have a photo of the package on your doorstep but if a porch pirate gets to it first do they not cover that?
Insurance companies don't really turn your problems into their problems.
It's easier to think of them turning _risks_ of occasional large losses into a steady constant flow of losses.
Whatever level of verification you pick, an insurance company can give you a quote. If you want to implement a very lax policy (without even a photo of the package on the doorstep), the insurance company will charge you an arm and a leg for coverage.
If you pick a more robust system, the insurance will become cheaper.
OK, but if the delivery is covered, with a "photo on the doorstep" level of proof, and the recipient claims they did not receive it, do they (insurance) pay for the loss or is it going to be an argument?
That depends on the policy. But you are right that my analysis only really applies for repeat players.
So if you have two insurance providers with the same written down policies, but one provider A usually pays out, and the other B fights it tooth and nail, then provider A has an easier time selling their services for a higher price. Reputation matters.
Thus in the end (assuming some competition) the actual policies as implemented matter more than what's written down.
Wait, is it really common to deliver high value packages to completely insecure locations like this in the US?
They never do that here in Australia. Either sign for it, or you get a card saying where you can go and pick it up, with ID.
I bought a knife on Amazon. Every step of the process says “you must be over 18 and show ID to the delivery driver”. The ordering page, follow up email, tracking page, even the parcel had in huge letters “over 18 ID required”.
I found the parcel outside my front door like all the other parcels.
Ultimately if the drivers are strongly incentivised to be fast, and not strongly incentivised to follow process, they won’t follow process.
Is that an Amazon thing? There’s no loges requirement to not sell knives to children, right?
Whatever the solution is here, it must not, under any circumstance, involve an analysis of why people are so willing to steal from one another. All that matters is me getting my iPhone.
Are you saying there is some hidden reason why people are doing this? The straightforward reason is that this is a valuable fungible good that you can easily fence. This kind of thing has always been a target for the criminal element. Watches before this. Chains.
We don’t need another social science thesis over this. Just like the blonde millionaire in San Diego who organized a crime ring in California, there are people who know how to run other criminal organizations.
Yet somehow - just like school shootings - this appears to be a much worse problem in the US compared to many other countries.
Its only a problem in certain parts of the US. There are some towns where people don't lock their car doors.
Other people are saying that it's the norm in some other countries for couriers to require a OTP at delivery, something that is very rare in the US.
Doesn't that imply that those places have package thievery problems far worse than in the US?
Why do you think that?
In my country, the delivery driver asks for OTP for items that exceed a certain threshold.
Is this not the case for America ?
In the UK I've only had this for Deliveroo or Justeat. Oh and one other time when I ordered a kitchen knife and it said they'd need id etc. Driver didn't ask for id.
I have only ever seen this for goods bought at Amazon and delivered by Amazon logistics.
Nope. I guess amazon did the math and prevalence of theft is not high enough to warrant the extra step in the process
The solution is that the sender give you a one time code that is required upon delivery.
All my Amazon deliveries above ~100€ (depend on product categories too) are with a OTP and the package is never handed off to me without the code
For a second there I thought Porsches were getting their phones stolen ...
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