Skip to main content

To catch package thieves, police are relying on Amazon data and decoy boxes

Fed up with thieves stealing packages left at your front door, Amazon provided police with “heat maps” showing the worst areas in a city for package theft. The data helped local cops in Albuquerque, New Mexico set up a sting operation to catch so-called “porch pirates.”

Internal emails between the Albuquerque Police Department and Amazon obtained by Motherboard show that Amazon provided the heat map data, which shows the worst zip codes for package theft over the last 60 days and 12 months.

Recommended Videos

Amazon also provided police with 30 Amazon boxes, a roll of Amazon tape, and lithium ion stickers, according to Motherboard. The sting involved police placing fake Amazon packages containing GPS trackers on stoops in specific neighborhoods, making sure the houses being used had Ring doorbell cameras to record video of a theft. Amazon itself owns Ring, which manufactures the camera.

“I hope the operation nets a lot of bad guys,” one Amazon employee wrote in a December 2018 email to his coworkers and an Albuquerque lieutenant.

It’s not clear if the sting operation caught any thieves or led to any arrests. While Amazon denied sending the heat map data to Albuquerque police, the company has provided other police departments around the country with equipment — including dummy boxes and tape — to help them catch thieves in the act, according to Motherboard.

“We appreciate the effort by local law enforcement to tackle package theft in their communities, and we remain committed to assisting them in their efforts however we can,” a spokesperson for Amazon told Motherboard.

The company has moved aggressively to stop package theft in recent years — which makes sense, since Amazon wants the process of ordering from it to be seamless and worry-free. It introduced Amazon Key, which lets delivery drivers drop off packages inside your home, in 2018. More recently, Amazon extended Key to your garage using smart garage door openers — allowing drivers to deliver packages to a relatively secure location without actually stepping foot in your house.

According to a 2017 survey by Xfinity Home, nearly one-third of Americans have had packages taken from their porch, and another 54% of Americans know someone who have had a package stolen from their stoop.

Mathew Katz
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Mathew is a news editor at Digital Trends, specializing in covering all kinds of tech news — from video games to policy. He…
Google just gave vision to AI, but it’s still not available for everyone
Gemini Live App on the Galaxy S25 Ultra broadcast to a TV showing the Gemini app with the camera feature open

Google has just officially announced the roll out of a powerful Gemini AI feature that means the intelligence can now see.

This started in March as Google began to show off Gemini Live, but it's now become more widely available.

Read more
This modular Pebble and Apple Watch underdog just smashed funding goals
UNA Watch

Both the Pebble Watch and Apple Watch are due some fierce competition as a new modular brand, UNA, is gaining some serous backing and excitement.

The UNA Watch is the creation of a Scottish company that wants to give everyone modular control of smartwatch upgrades and repairs.

Read more
Tesla, Warner Bros. dodge some claims in ‘Blade Runner 2049’ lawsuit, copyright battle continues
Tesla Cybercab at night

Tesla and Warner Bros. scored a partial legal victory as a federal judge dismissed several claims in a lawsuit filed by Alcon Entertainment, a production company behind the 2017 sci-fi movie Blade Runner 2049, Reuters reports.
The lawsuit accused the two companies of using imagery from the film to promote Tesla’s autonomous Cybercab vehicle at an event hosted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk at Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Studios in Hollywood in October of last year.
U.S. District Judge George Wu indicated he was inclined to dismiss Alcon’s allegations that Tesla and Warner Bros. violated trademark law, according to Reuters. Specifically, the judge said Musk only referenced the original Blade Runner movie at the event, and noted that Tesla and Alcon are not competitors.
"Tesla and Musk are looking to sell cars," Reuters quoted Wu as saying. "Plaintiff is plainly not in that line of business."
Wu also dismissed most of Alcon's claims against Warner Bros., the distributor of the Blade Runner franchise.
However, the judge allowed Alcon to continue its copyright infringement claims against Tesla for its alleged use of AI-generated images mimicking scenes from Blade Runner 2049 without permission.
Alcan says that just hours before the Cybercab event, it had turned down a request from Tesla and WBD to use “an icononic still image” from the movie.
In the lawsuit, Alcon explained its decision by saying that “any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account.”
Alcon further said it did not want Blade Runner 2049 “to be affiliated with Musk, Tesla, or any Musk company, for all of these reasons.”
But according to Alcon, Tesla went ahead with feeding images from Blade Runner 2049 into an AI image generator to yield a still image that appeared on screen for 10 seconds during the Cybercab event. With the image featured in the background, Musk directly referenced Blade Runner.
Alcon also said that Musk’s reference to Blade Runner 2049 was not a coincidence as the movie features a “strikingly designed, artificially intelligent, fully autonomous car.”

Read more