Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer-turned-YouTube star, has designed a booby trap to deter doorstep delivery thieves. That’s right, he spent six months combining GPS tracking, cameras, fart spray and glitter, all into one elaborate and amusing mechanism after discovering thieves had stolen an Amazon delivery from his doorstep. To be more specific, he connected four phones to a GPS-connected circuit board inside an Apple box, and once the package was removed from a home by a would-be thief, the geo-tracking would alert Rober while also triggering the phones to begin recording and uploading footage to the cloud. “If anyone was going to make a revenge…package and over-engineer the crap out of it, it was going to be me,” said Rober, who spent nine years with NASA. Read more for the video to see the chaos that ensued.
When the thief lifted the box’s lid, it would set off a can of “fart spray” as well as a centrifugal motor attached to a cup of glitter, prompting comical responses from the thieves. Up to 30 percent of Americans claim they’ve suffered from either missing or stolen delivery orders, according to a survey by Xfinity Home, Comcast’s home security service. Unfortunately,. authorities have been slow to respond to these incidents, and the FBI currently keeps no national statistics on the issue.
“If the thief wasn’t in such a hurry they’d see that the package is actually coming from my childhood hero and the inspiration for this project. So the moral of the story is, just don’t take other people’s stuff,” said Rober.
