I was in an Apple Store for a Genius Bar appointment when these two guys with hoodies and COVID masks walked in and started pulling phones off the displays and stuffing them into backpacks.
It took less than a minute and then they ran off. The security guard just stood to the side and recorded a video. Once they were gone, everyone just went back to what they were doing, like nothing had happened.
Afterward, I asked the Genius Bar guy if that happened often. He said the two guys hadn’t gotten much because they hadn’t refilled the display from a guy coming in and stealing all the phones literally the day before!
The phones were tracked and the cops eventually caught the two dudes as well as the other solo guy.
It’s really the fsct they are stealing GPS tracked devices that make it easy to not give a fuck. They’re gonna get caught without effort. No point in wasting your energy at that point.
If it were me, I’d come in with a copper box to put the phones in. 😌
I read somewhere it runs custom software so it’s not like it’s usable tech. Best if you can fence it quickly to someone greedy for low price it’ll serve them right for buying obviously stolen goods.
Well, it is a genius shop, or some shit…
I worked retail for years. This is every retailer’s company policy. Nothing in that store is worth dying for. The only event where you would go hands-on with someone in your store is when you get to the last option of the active shooter response. The best thing you can do is note what they theives take, and call the cops with a description after they have left the store
I was very nearly run over one time because there was a group stealing shit in my store, but I didn’t know it at the time. They thew a half empty Gatorade bottle at my storefront and when I went out to pick it up, they ran their car up on the curb at me. I ducked back inside the store, locked the doors, and called the police. Reviewed the security cameras and notices they had lifted a few small items from my endcap displays. I also called the store down the street from me that they went to next.
So yeah, if someone was stealing shit from my store, I’d hold the door open for them.
I worked in a major outdoors chain, and out policy was to prevent most theft with customer service.That is, you see someone stuffing shit in a box for a cheaper product you go over to them and start talking about the products and making sales pitches and either embarras them into “deciding not to buy it”, or they go through with it and you let it happen.
The only thing we’d physically intervene on was gun theft, and we had a designated armed employee on every shift (usually a retired cop) that handled that if they tried to leave before the local police arrived. It only came up once when I was there, and the local police did arrive in time, so they followed the thieves out of the lot and pulled them over.
The most dramatic event when I was there was actually kinda fun. We ran a background check on a guy and it got a delay, and the guy said he’d go eat in town and to call him if it came back in the next hour or so so he could save a trip. Turns out he was a fugitive, and the FBI called us to ask about the sale.
We quickly got a bunch of police dropped off in a bus so their cars wouldn’t be visible, and they hid in a few offices around the store, and I called the guy back and told him the background check came back with a proceed.
Then when he came in the door I met him at the front and walked him down a pre-arranged route to the gun counter while chatting him up while the police blocked the aisles around us, and then I got “paged” over the intercom to go to the manger’s office and pointed to the register where another salesman could check him out.When I was clear the police moved in on him.
It was kinda awesome.
How on earth does somebody try to commit gun theft during open hours at a major outdoor retail chain? My local Bass Pro has all the guns behind a counter and like 4-6 employees working that counter and the stock room behind it at all times.
that was a fun story to read thank you
Im trying to understand how the top part of your comment is supposed to work? So if someone is stealing a low range product you tell them about the better product in the hopes that they’ll suddenly decide to spend even more money on it than what theyre stealing? Whats to stop them from just stealing the better thing?
Edit* also to be clear if i worked there this would be my personal policy, like if youre gonna steal something you might as well steal the best version, i just dont get how this is supposed to work as corporate policy
We’d pretend to be oblivious to them stealing it while making it obvious they’re being actively observed.
I guess technically holding the door is minimizing the damage. It’s not like they’re going to try to stop the robbers, but this way, they’re preventing the glass door or windows from being damaged.
I secretly wish they had a trip wire, so you hold the door, they go running out and a wire pops up from the sill and they splat on the pavement. Just for some good lols
All of those products have been rendered useless before they even got out of the door…
This is so dumb…
Of course they won’t do anything because they can brick all those devices…
that’s about phones in general… they mention iphone once, and that’s about the 1 phone that led to them catching the criminals (which i’d say is a check in the box of “stealing iphones is useless”)
iphones in apple stores as display models are not standard iphones: they lock down and turn themselves into only a tracker the instant they leave the apple store
and it’s basically useless to steal an iphone in most cases anyway, because an iphone gets registered to an apple account, and if a phone is already registered you just can’t use it
even parting it out the huge majority of parts - especially anything even a little bit expensive - has essentially DRM on it that talks to iOS… when you add a genuine apple part to an iphone, iOS checks to see if it’s already been registered to another phone and just won’t proceed with stolen parts
the best you could do is use it or the parts as a prop in some secondary scam
I thought iPhones were “secure”. How can they be stolen and resold if you can’t get in to wipe it clean?
exactly… stealing any iphone is worse than useless - you can’t use it, and it will track you (both via gps reporting via internet and via the find my network)
So many uncles died that night…
Hahahha no one’s dying for tim cook. Get farked
If you hold the door for them aren’t you technically an accomplice?
Not if that is what you are told to do and it has been legally vetted.
Good. If they want security, hire security. No store clerk should be expected to intervene. Most they should be responsible for is keeping them self safe and and calling a manager/police once its safe for them to do.
Also, jailbreaking stolen tech to sale is more trouble than it’s worth. Doubt the smash and dash thefts aren’t the ones calling the shots but most modern tech is little better than strapping a GPS to yourself.
As somebody that picked up an old iPad from a thrift store where owner had not removed their account, factory refreshing it is a hard if not an impossible task.
Even the sketchy tools weren’t great, you could boot it to a state of new user use, but a power off and back on you are locked out again.
And they don’t give you enough of the previous users email to be able to track them down and say “Hey, either I found your stolen iPad, do you want it back, or can you remove your device from your apple ID”
To be fair I don’t think the actual organizations doing this type of crime for a living are using sketchy tools they found online.
I worked multiple customer facing roles when I was younger. This is the procedure for all of them, in fact it is usually a firable offense to try to stop someone with a weapon or threatened you. It is easy to defend stolen product to an insurance company. If you try to stop someone robbing a store and are injured or killed do to a policy the store had or a manager told you, the insurance isn’t going to pay anything. Someone stealing “$30,000” worth of merchandise (which insurance pays you back for) and then being on cameras and not being able to use a lot of it without getting caught is much more preferable than having to pay hundreds of thousands in medical bills or millions in gross negligence if someone dies.
This is actually the legal requirement in my country. Even security is just a deterrent and aren’t legally responsible for actually intercepting physically.
I kind of get why, but I’m so tired of our culture of everyone knowing this so shoplifters know they can get away with almost no consequences.
It puts the onus on the store so now a bunch of local grocery stores have these plexiglass walls and things which are definitely not safe in a fire.
And you know the cops are t showing up in a halfway timely manner for petty shoplifting and the serious ones will just run.
I feel you, but on the flip side I couldn’t give less of a shit about the lost profits giant corporations complain about from theft. Although they do inflate theft numbers to justify increases in price so we lose there too.
We need to break up like every major retailer and go back to locals.
I just hate being Ike chattel.
…which is why I’m glad I’m not expected to die for my employer.
Security ain’t doin shit. “Observe and Report” isnt just a catchy saying, it is literally all corp Security is supposed to do.
Everything they stole is literally a tracker. So stupid.
No, this is a thing because it’s lucrative. It’s also pretty quick and easy to disable a tracker if you have the right equipment.
Phones have IMEI numbers
There is also the fact that Apple runs a massive p2p wireless network
The devices in the apple store are not retail phones. They have special software that makes them dedicated trackers the second they leave the store’s perimeter.
Yes, but these can be disabled and the phones still used for parts.
They can only sell the battery and the speakers. The screen and the cameras are paired to the motherboard.
I thought the batteries were paired now too
Do you have a source for that? Is it just an app?
It’s not a retail device, and it’s loaded with a store version of iOS. It’s tracked specifically to that apple store. Here is a recent article. The phones are designed to work while they’re connected to the apple store wifi and that’s it. You’d get more useful spare parts if you robbed people outside a nightclub.
TIL. That’s pretty neat.
They rip them apart and use the non-serialized components as repair parts. If apple didn’t try to overcharge for and restrict repair parts this would be less of a thing.
Aren’t a lot of the parts married together though? Like, you can’t just replace a fingerprint sensor without throwing errors.
Nah they have a good amount of replaceable parts on the inside. I used to repair iPhones a lot and the worst part was just the tiny components
The key phrase here is “used to”. They’ve locked everything down in the past few years. Even the fucking battery is serialized and paired now.
For sure, someone else linked a more recent ifixit and yeah, right to repair is just getting nonexistent. I embrace the hopeful coming of more and more hardware for Linux
Activation lock is designed to prevent reuse of stolen parts like this. Don’t know how successful this is, what components it’s tied to, and it doesn’t work on older models.
I’ve changed out fingerprint scanners and mostly just peripherals like the speakers and jacks and things like that. The board itself is pretty much locked down with nothing you can replace other than maybe a few components like a capacitor or something and even now they’re becoming increasingly just disposable unfortunately
Well that tracks with the devices becoming more and more disposable
Maybe in USDystopia, but the EU is going after Pear for that.
Sooner they left, the less chance of underpaid employees getting hurt. Of course they held the door.
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that’s why I don’t give a shit on company time.
Most retails companies make it a point in training that you are not there to try to physically stop thieves. If you get injured, they don’t want to have to pay workers comp for it, or be held liable. All that shit is insured anyway
What would you have them do. This is typical policy of retail. They don’t get paid enough to get hurt.
It is also a questionable choice to steal Iphones. Those things are surveillance magnets
We shouldn’t have a society where getting hurt was only a matter of getting paid the right amount.
They were trained well, dont get in the way.
Those phones will be bricked when 100 yards away, nbd for a worldwide product that has no working black market for ita products.
Robbers just wasted their time by not researching their crime.
They’ll just use them to scan people online.
