came home to find my amazon box well hidden on the porch, but tape was cut open and my new htpc mobo gone. they left the intel CPU and a small power adapter for charging my slacker radio player. funny part is the CPU was worth way more than the mobo...
talked to a neighbor and she said she had a package never show up a few months back as well. - obviously it was stolen as well.

Kudos to Amazon for shipping a new replacement part second day air. the phone rang 20 seconds after clicking the "call me" button on their contact us page, and the whole call took under 5 mins.

how do you other city dwellers deal with getting packages delivered safely when no one is home?

You don't. It's a PITA, but that's how thing's go.

Around here, over the past 5 years or so, UPS has been arranging their delivery schedules so that residential packages are delivered later in the afternoon and into the early evening. This give the customer somewhat of a fighting chance to be home to get their packages.

We avoid UPS . In Canada at least we have Canada Post to drops off packages at the nearest post office, rather than taking chances with UPS leaving them in the bush.

That seems like no kind of well planned delivery system. They can't just abandon a package outside. Where's the non-repudiation in this as well? You could say that it was stolen when actually it wasn't and get a replacement for free. This is why packages of any value should always need a signature to protect you, protect the carrier and protect the sender. Why didn't they leave in with a neighbour? That's what always seems to happen here.

I used to get the ok from work to have it delivered there if i knew it was going to be daytime deliver, maybe ask your manager or who ever..

Another option may be to use the lockers Amazon has:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/ ... =200689010

I haven't used that service as anything that I'm being paranoid about I get delivered to work. I work at an office with a proper shipping department so that may make it easier than some other places.

Also if you live somewhere with a staffed office, that might also be an option. When I was renting I'd leave a note on my door saying to leave the package at the Rental Office. That happened enough that the guy stopped going to our door and went straight to the office.

Same in Germany. It is actually illegal here to drop mail anywhere but the mailbox or hand it over personally to a homeowner. Packages have to be signed over.

UPS sucks. They come three times at wildly inconvenient times and then you have to pick your package up from one of their obscure logistic centers in the middle of nowhere. DHL/German Postal Service have their post offices and every other parcel service seems to have been able to strike a deal with local/regional retailers and have parcel stations in various shops, but UPS lives by "We didn't meet at daybreak, stranger, now find our secret hiding place in the forbidden forest".

It's still better than "When you weren't there we left your box of childhood mementos, bullions and marihuana on the street - but fear not, we placed a glowing red sticker on it saying 'Valuable, please don't steal!'".

I leave notes on the front door for the delivery person to leave the box at the back door. Thieves will grab a box if they see it, but seldom are motivated enough to read a notice hanging in clear view.

Sometimes I'm not sure cops understand how this petty shit lowers the quality of life.

As others have said, leaving packages rarely happen her in the UK without a signature. It either fits throyugh the letterbox and does not need a signature, or it does need a signature and is left with the home owner, or a neighbour and then a card is left with you saying the house number where the package was left, otherwise it goes back to the depot - that's when it becomes annoying when you have to go and collect the parcel, although most of the time yu can just ask them to re-deliver it.


Andy

unfortunately all the neighbors are at work too... and insisting shippers require my signature means id never receive anything shipped to me unless it came on the weekend, or after 6pm.
btw the shipper wasnt UPS, it was ONTRAC, not that it would have made any difference.

I put two of these up on the porch, http://www.signmart.com/assets/images/c ... ch/291.jpg guess thats about all I can do.

You could get a parcel deliver box but there stupidly expensive imho.
Something like this costs £150
http://www.asgardsss.co.uk/detail.php?pro_code=Home3

This. You (or your neighbour, if he agrees to) MUST sign a receipt. If nobody's at home, then they'll return for the next couple of days (in different hours, if possible) 'till the package either goes to the deopt or goes back to the sender. They still have a phone number so that they can arrange a proper delivery time with the customer (let it be early in the morning or 6pm).
Other delivery methods are crap. Why should I have my package delivered on the porch (and then stolen) while I'm not at home? I've had my iPod nano stolen in this way (thank goodness the package was insured).

Postal service - here in Slovakia post in most cases don't even delivers the packages, they just leave you a note that your package is at post office. You have to go to the post, show your ID and the note, you get the package.
Couriers (UPS, DHL, DPD, TNT etc) - they require someone to take the package and sign that the package was delivered without any damage, if no one can be found at delivery address then they take the package away. In most cases i just order the stuff to my work address unless i know i will be at home at the specific date (orders inside the country are usually delivered next day, so i know where i will be tomorrow).

Once in a while, the UPS man will hide the package under the front door mat. So it looks like the mat is sitting on a cardboard box...

No one stole your motherboard off your porch. Think about it. If the package was well-hidden by the delivery person, the thief would have had to uncover it. In any case, after opening it and taking your motherboard, he would have had to carefully conceal it to make it "well hidden". He wouldn't have done any of that. He would've just taken the whole package. It's not like it would've been any harder to carry. I guess the delivery person could have stolen it, but it could have been any handler in the shipping chain. It could also have been a simple mistake by the seller.



We don't. That said, I raised my eyebrows when I saw that UPS left an $800 LED TV from Amazon standing up by my door a couple of weeks ago at 8 PM.

First 3 Youtube search results on UPS Special Delivery:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgAq_KnDIPc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtRMO7Rdeos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuerxbGfbFk

it was "well hidden" as in not visible from the street. it was behind a large, brick supporting column, and behind a closed gate. the tape was cut with a sharp box cutter (the thief missed the tape on his first cut). if it had been the shipper, i would think they would have taken the CPU as well and taped the box back up.
obviously someone saw the amazon box be left by the shipper behind the support column, and came up to see if anything in it was good. stupidly they thought the flashy mobo box was a tablet or some other piece of expensive item, cause they left the $200 intel CPU and took the $50 mobo.

other neighbors have had packages taken over the last year, its obviously theft. the local news did a story on how rampant package theft is this yea, and showed some security footage of a package being lifted from a porch...all i could think of when i saw it was, "great, now everyone knows how easy it is to steal boxes during the holidays!"

even for those of you that have no problems with packages disappearing, we are all paying slightly higher prices online than needed, just to offset the losses from stolen packages.

You must have been visited by the simultaneously stupidest and most considerate thief in the world. I mean, the guy had to pass a gate, come onto your property, discover a box that could not be seen from the street, and take the time to slice it open and investigate what was inside. Then he had to pick the shiniest thing but leave you the good stuff. I think he would have just taken the whole box and been in and out in 5 seconds. I would suspect a little brother or neighbor or other acquaintance before I would attribute this to a common thief off the street, which would be last on my list of suspects.

the police said the current MO is to follow the driver on his established route, and after he makes a drop and drives off, check the package to see if it has anything of value in it. walking out of a gate with a small mobo box, or with something that can fit in their pocket is way less suspicious/risky than a whole amazon box, that might only have a $10 book or two in it. if i were a thief, thats how id do it too...

I often leave things on the porch for their friends and family to stop over and grab, and never have a problem with them disappearing, but I also dont usually leave it in an over sized amazon box.

If what you said was true, it was an experienced thief, one who (A) might very well know that a CPU is more valuable than a motherboard, (B) would prefer it because a CPU box is much smaller than a mobo box, and (C) would want to take the most valuable item. Instead, he took the time and risk to breach your gate, slice open your box, rummage through it, and finally tidy up and conceal the package all over again after taking the bulkiest, least valuable item it contained. All that argues that he's actually stupid though considerate, like I said last time, not experienced. You choose to believe he did all that and took the bulkiest, most conspicuous item, when his goal was to take all that risk in order to avoid walking away with anything bulky, when the entire box would not have been that much larger, and it would have been lickety split to grab and run. Number one rule is not to get caught, and everything you believe he did maximizes his risk of getting caught.

I think what you believe is completely ridiculous, and it was either a simple mistake by the shipper, someone in the shipping chain, or a little brother or other acquaintance, and that's in decreasing order of likelihood. Out.

If you have ever watch America's dumbest criminals you would know criminals from any country are anything but intelligent.
In fact if your dumb enough to risk your freedom or a criminal record for what is normally little gain you qualify for the Mr stupid awards

whats ridiculous, is to think anything else happened. a crack-head followed the van, and took the most exciting "looking" thing out of the box. ( and probably dumped it in the nearest trash can after figuring out it was essentially worthless.)
interestingly I just today I spoke to a driver for the same company, but on a different route, and he said he confronted a "middle aged, nice looking woman walking a dog" that crept up on someones porch after he left and was walking off with an item from the box that was open.... He called the cops, but she wasn't sticking around and he had a truck full of boxes to drop off still... said its happening more and more, and the cut open box is the newest twist. - "they used to take the whole box." he said, "now they just take what looks valuable."

Happened to me (well, my brother) earlier this week. Silverstone case reported delivered by UPS ~ 12:20pm, brother came home at ~2:30pm, checked the front door, to find it gone.

Some other stuff delivered in the past few week had been fine, including other holiday gifts and more expensive items. I guess this was just an unlucky incident since the window was so short. Also, serves the thief right to risk stealing a big heavy item only for it to be an empty computer case, I guess. :/

I told my family to set up an account with UPS in the future so that they would have more control over how packages were delivered.

http://www.hardocp.com/news/2012/12/21/ ... kage_steal

Delivery-Thief.


Andy

Update: Just had someone ring the doorbell and leave the case at the door. The box looks sealed and unopened. I didn't see who dropped it off.

Looking at the address label, the unit # was printed first (two units with the same street address), and I'm wondering if it was delivered to the corresponding (incorrect) street address, which is an office building, where it bounced around for a few days, before someone figured it out and was able to drop it off Saturday morning.

I had already filed a claim with UPS, but it's still in the first stage, of "Lost Package Reported", so my guess is an employee didn't have time to bring it over till Saturday morning.

I had something similar happen to me, oddly enough with a case that was sent to me from China for an SPCR review about 8 years ago.

I wasn't even expecting it to arrive, so I never missed it when it didn't, but one day a lady pulled into my driveway and unloaded a big box from her trunk. It was addressed to me, with the correct address, but had ended up about 3/4 of a mile away at a house with the same number, but on an entirely different street. IIRC, it took her about a week to finally get around to delivering it to me.

Weird thing is that there was a cell phone number on the shipping label, but I don't think we ever got a call. You would think the first thing to try when you receive a package and don't know where it goes would be to try the phone number of the addressee...