A lot of people have seen the online home videos and thought, “Glad that didn’t happen to me.” A mail delivery company leaves a package on a doorstep or front porch. Within minutes or sometimes seconds, a thief walks up to the box, snatches it and walks off. “Porch piracy” — or the ft of items people order and have delivered to their homes — occurs in small towns, big cities and everywhere in between. A study from SafeWise, an online research company focused on home safety, estimates that thieves have grabbed 250,000 packages a day nationwide for the past year. That’s 104 million packages stolen, according to the eighth annual SafeWise Package Theft Report. The trend intensifies as the winter holidays approach. “This seems to be a steady crime, in the sense it’s opportunity-driven,” Ben Stickle, professor of criminal justice at Middle Tennessee State University, said in a phone interview this week. A former police officer, Stickle now researches package theft and has become a national expert on the topic. The crime may seem petty, but such thievery directly costs American consumers about $15 billion in the value of goods that were pilfered this past year, according to the new report. “We are more and more accustomed to ordering things that have been delivered to our home; the front porch is the center of e-commerce,” Stickle said. “We’re ordering phones, computers and other electronic devices, jewelry, medication — which have pretty high price tags.” Even if you’ve never personally had a package stolen, all buyers are being charged for the losses, Stickle said. “You’re probably paying higher prices for your packages — this is cost to industry — so everyone is a victim to package theft.” In fact, many retailers charge a “package protection” fee to cover such incidents because of the large amounts of money they are losing to theft. For the first time this year, the cost to the industry is calculated in the report, which determined losses for retailers topped $22 billion from last fall to this fall, according to data collected by ZFLO Technologies, a loss prevention and research company. The analysis looked at expenses for investigating the situation, replacing and re-shipping lost products and material expenses, Stickle said. When combined, the financial damage to consumers and retailers totaled about $37 million in the past year. “Stealing packages has been around for a long time, but we’ve seen dramatic increases since 2020, during the COVID pandemic, when we saw exponential delivery of packages,” Stickle said. The Better Business Bureau of Southern Colorado hears occasional complaints, said Jonathan Liebert, president and CEO. “It’s a fairly random thing,” he said, adding that sometimes theft rings come through and target a neighborhood, stealing packages from homes and doing smash-and-grabs at businesses. Users of digital apps such as NextDoor report that some robbers seem to be following delivery trucks and grabbing packages a short time after they’ve arrived on a doorstep. The form of stealing has been around since at least 2007, when the term “porch pirate” was first used, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Recommended preventive measures — such as installing an exterior locker to hold packages or asking that packages be left at the back of the house or at a neighbor’s — are best to ward off criminals, Stickle said. “The more packages are left in the open, the more people are likely to take them,” he said. Other tips include scheduling delivery for when someone is at home and retrieving parcels quickly, asking for tracking and placing a decoration or plant on the porch to hide deliveries. The SafeWise study shows 93% of stolen packages were visible from the street. Most thefts take under 10 seconds, and three out of four package snatchers don’t check to see if anyone is home. By the way, Amazon packages are the most stolen, according to the new report, which Stickle said could be because Amazon is the largest private parcel carrier. The Better Business Bureau reminds people that online scammers reference package delivery as a target to obtain personal information with phishing tactics. “You have to be really careful if you get emails or texts that say your package has been delayed and to ‘click here,’” Liebert said. “It doesn’t tell you what you’ve ordered, but during the holidays, they’re counting on you to have ordered something. And when you click the link, they’ve gotten your information.” ...read more read less