The bait was apparently too tantalizing to pass up. In the early morning darkness, an Amazon package vanished off the stoop of an ornate Greenwich Village townhouse. Whoever took it was likely unaware that a tracking device was placed inside. It showed that, in a matter of hours, the package took a long, pretzel-shaped route through the Holland Tunnel to Newark, New Jersey, then back through Manhattan, following the contours of the 2 train into the North Bronx.
Roughly 14 miles away in South Richmond Hill, Queens, a security camera captured the moment a hooded figure in a blue surgical mask swiped another Amazon box from the porch of a modest two-story home in South Richmond Hill. This time, a tracker showed the item making a circuitous journey down the commercial corridors of nearby Jamaica, Queens before landing blocks from where it was stolen.
Package theft has become a ubiquitous fact of life that — according to criminologist Ben Stickle, who studies the phenomenon — appears to be getting more organized, and more bold.
“I see more videos where people are following delivery drivers. I see more videos of people who are approaching victims and stealing a package out of their hands,” he said.
Amazon itself refused to divulge its own figures on how many customers report stolen packages each year. But over the last half decade, New Yorkers have reported more than 74,000 stolen packages to the NYPD, according to city data. It also shows that the number of calls to the police is 45% higher during the holiday season than the rest of the year, though overall reports of package theft have declined this year.
However, that number only captures those who’ve bothered to file complaints. The actual number of pilfered deliveries is likely higher. The total value of stolen packages in New York City is close to $1 billion, estimates SafeWise, a company that works with Stickle and reviews home security systems. The NYPD said it could not provide information on how many people have been arrested and prosecuted for stealing packages.
The question is: Where do all of these stolen packages go?
In an unscientific attempt to get answers, Gothamist placed tracking devices inside three products ordered from Amazon — a pair of JBL earbuds, a container of high-end facial cleansing pads and a blue pair of New Balance sneakers. All vanished within a day of being placed outside homes in different parts of the city.
We tracked down where they went. Some appeared to have been shopped around to small stores. But all ultimately ended their journeys within the city limits over the period we tracked their whereabouts.
“It makes me angry.”
Earlier this month, Indira Maharaj was in her kitchen in Queens when she heard a noise outside and glanced at a video screen on the wall. Her security camera showed a delivery driver placing a pair of boxes on her front porch. They were two 17-pound bags of specialty dog food she’d ordered for $100 each.
“ Maybe three minutes after, this guy, heavy-built with a hoodie and a backpack, took the two bags of dog food that I had delivered, placed it on his shoulder and just walked away,” Maharaj said.
She suspects the man had no idea what was inside the boxes and is doubtful he’ll be able to use the dog food himself.
“He certainly cannot eat it,” she said. “He's probably selling it.”
Unlike shoplifting and other types of theft — where it’s clear what’s being taken and what its value is — package thieves often don’t know what they’re stealing, making the crime like a strange game of Secret Santa.
“It’s almost like playing the lottery where you don't know if you’re gonna win,” said Stickle, who is a criminal justice professor at Middle Tennessee State University.
- Product: JBL earbuds
- Cost: $54.38
- Location: South Richmond Hill
To test whether an item was sold on the black market, and how far it travels, Gothamist hid a tracking device inside the packaging of a pair of JBL earbuds ordered from Amazon. We placed the product back in the shipping box it came in and resealed it with tape that was printed with the Amazon Prime logo, which was also ordered from Amazon. Then, we left it on Maharaj’s porch.
Her security camera caught a masked thief in action at just after 1 a.m. The video shows him slowly opening the white metal gate at the front of her house. He wears one glove on his left hand, snatches the package from the top step and doesn’t bother to close the gate behind him.
By noon, the earbuds were detected meandering down Liberty Avenue and Sutphin Boulevard in Jamaica, both lined with shops.
A Gothamist journalist later visited half a dozen bodegas, pharmacies and other stores along the same route. None of the workers we spoke with said they’d seen anyone selling the earbuds, but most said people routinely come in trying to sell what employees often presume to be stolen goods.
“I don’t buy nothing. I’m too sacred about the police,” said one bodega worker who did not want to be identified in a story about theft.
Another package — the one stolen from the stoop in Greenwich Village — ended up in a similar type of location, though it traveled much further than the JBL earbuds.
This box contained pricey facial cleansing pads. We placed a tracking device inside plastic bags to protect it from moisture, opened the airtight seal around the top of the jar and hid the tracker inside before gluing the seal back onto the top.
- Product: Murad face & body pads
- Cost: $49
- Location: Greenwich Village
After making their grand tour through New Jersey and then into the Bronx, the cleansing pads showed up at a building on Allerton Avenue that houses a pharmacy, according to the tracking device. Like the shops in Queens, none of the pharmacy employees said they’d seen anyone coming in to sell the item. It later moved to a large six-story apartment building around the corner, but Gothamist could not get a clear enough signal when we visited to pinpoint exactly where the cleansing pads were.
We did, however, have better luck locating the whereabouts of those JBL earbuds.
A tracking device showed that a container of facial cleansing pads stolen from a stoop in Greenwich Village in Manhattan ended up in this apartment building on Wallace Ave. in the north Bronx.
Early in the afternoon on the day the earbuds were stolen, the tracking device repeatedly pinged from the intersection of 109th Avenue and the Van Wyck Expressway, just blocks away from Maharaj’s porch, where they were stolen.
We found that the tracking signal was strongest when a journalist entered a two-story, red brick building on the corner, suggesting it was somewhere inside.
Jose Marte, an employee at the bodega on the ground floor of the building, echoed what we’d heard from other workers in the neighborhood. He said people often bring in items that he believes are stolen, hoping to sell them.
“But I don’t buy. They don’t have receipt,” he said.
He and his colleagues insisted the earbuds weren’t there.
Indira Maharaj
Maharaj said she’d like to see the police do more to deter people from stealing packages.
“It makes me angry,” she said, adding that her neighbors are continuously reporting deliveries that go missing. “If a thief sees a police car, they probably would think twice.”
In response to calls for the police to take more action to curb package theft, the NYPD suggested that residents track their deliveries, require signatures and plan to be home when their packages are scheduled to arrive.
At the time we published this article, the tracking device we placed inside the box of JBL earbuds showed it was still at the same corner. And while we weren’t able to get them or our facial cleansing pads back, those blue New Balance shoes were another story.
The sneakers that snuck off
Hiding a tracking device inside a pair of shoes is a bit of a challenge. What you need is a drill, a hot glue gun and a willingness to ruin perfectly good footwear. We temporarily removed the insole in one sneaker, hollowed out an opening in the heel just big enough to fit the tracker, glued it in and then packed the shoes back inside the box as if it’d never been opened, but without the address label.
A tracking device secreted inside the heel of a sneaker.
This time, we left the package outside a 12-unit apartment building in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Residents in the neighborhood have reported more incidents of package theft to the NYPD than other parts of the city, according to police data.
We placed the shoes outside the building’s front door where they would be most likely to be stolen. But over the course of the night, some tenants began moving the package into the vestibule where it would presumably be safer, according to one resident who did not wish to be named in a story about theft in their building.
This is the package shuffle many New Yorkers have learned to play. We watch out for neighbors’ deliveries. We work from home on days when something is being delivered. We install doorbell cameras to monitor the stoop.
Ring, a subsidiary of Amazon and one of the largest home security camera companies, has its own social networking platform that’s practically dedicated to the genre of package theft videos and neighbors warning each other to be on the lookout. The company did not respond to a request for data on how frequently its users report stolen packages in New York City.
- Product: New Balance sneakers
- Cost: $64.99
- Location: Bed-Stuy
Joseph LeGrand, an independent delivery driver for Amazon in parts of Brooklyn and Queens, said the majority of the homes on his route have notes on their doors asking him to hand their packages to customers or place them out of sight.
“They put it in all caps, 'MY PACKAGES GET STOLEN,'” he said. “The [New York Public Housing Authority] buildings, a lot of them will have signs on their door that tell me, 'Don’t leave it in front of the door,' 'Contact the neighbor' or just 'Bring it back to the warehouse for re-delivery.'”
He said he’s had direct experience with people stealing packages soon after he’s left someone’s stoop.
“I have seen a lady on a bike in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn. She tends to ride around following the drivers and takes the packages after we delivered them,” LeGrand said. “In Howard Beach at the moment, someone wears the uniform and tries to pose as the drivers to get inside to take some packages.”
A pair of shoes fitted with a tracking device inside an Amazon box in Bed-Stuy.
A day after we dropped off the shoes, they vanished from outside the front door and vestibule. But the tracking device showed they remained in another part of the building for the next 48 hours, possibly taken by another tenant.
Then, at just after 7 a.m., they made their move, traveling seven blocks north to a four-floor walkup on Kent Avenue. When a Gothamist journalist visited one evening, the tracking device showed the shoes were in a first-floor apartment at the back of the building. When the journalist knocked, a small child answered. A male voice could be heard behind the door, unseen, instructing the boy in Spanish on what to say.
The shoes, the child said, had been found sitting at the front of the family’s building. He returned them to the journalist in a white plastic shopping bag. The Amazon box was gone. The location app linked to the tracking device pinged: “Your lost item was found.”
