So I phoned the police. They never turned up.

I opened up a credit card chargeback. But I was complaining about this to someone in the school playground and someone else overheard it. Turns out she was his next door neighbour. Said "I'll get it back for you". Sure enough that afternoon she turned up with it! Turns out the guy was a convicted paedophile and she knew that and said if he didn't give it back she'd tell everyone on the estate.

You need leverage or a good police force against criminals. The latter is rare so I suspect that taking matters in to your own hands is sometimes required.

I've also learned the hard way, there again I have had police make so many mistakes for crimes in the past and ignore hard evidence that I lost faith in them years ago sadly. But this is the UK.

Though in your case, at stage it was at, once you had asked the recipient for it back and they said no, the police should have intervened due to the law of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_by_finding and acted.

Equally, the onus to prove delivery is upon the courier and again, you had a case there with them, so shouldn't of had to go thru that.

I agree, taking the law into your own hands alas seems to be the best solution in so many matters in the UK from my experience, sad and wrong but heck, we all want a simple life.

Also note from experience, the police (from a UK perspective) are not as aware of the laws as you would expect and had them tell me a matter was a civil matter and not criminal and raised complaint and had that upheld (lots of those) as they were wrong and the common laypersons expectations of the police is far short from reality, so always stand your ground and don't let anything slide as I used to do as it only erodes you away and enables incompetence to prevail.

That all said there are some good police (those that care and do their job properly) but sadly not as common as one would expect.

So with due respect that reality doesn't exist.

One reason I buy stuff from Amazon mostly is they are big enough to eat the issues and I put enough business through one service to be a customer worth keeping. Everyone else, not so much. I won't go into how shit Apple are on this front.

It's a very tricky situation.

I started a dispute with my credit card company, but yesterday they emailed to tell me that they had "concluded their investigation" and that the item had indeed been delivered.

No further information. Just "it was delivered, you owe the retailer".

Apple Card uses Goldman Sachs for the bank and the customer service. While Apple may be an experienced provider of retail services, this sort of thing is relatively new to Goldman Sachs.

I contacted customer service and they believe that a report regarding the investigation will be sent to me. They might even have a delivery address. The order was placed four months ago...

Good luck getting through a situation like this with good outcome. It depends on all the players involved.

When it goes to collections, at least in the US, you can tell the collection agency that the charge is in dispute, and they have to leave you alone.

If the bank then puts a ding on your credit report, you can dispute it with the credit reporting agency.

At some point, someone decides this is too much of a waste of time and pays up.

If you go this route, read up on your rights and the exact process.

One early step is sending them a letter via registered mail saying the charge is invalid because you never received the item. That carries more weight than a phone call, and usually routes to a different department. It might solve the problem on your own.

Make sure the letter makes it clear you understand your rights and know what the CFPB is.

Best solution is to file a small claim at your local court. Near certainty it won’t be disputed due to cost-benefit of the retailer having to hire a lawyer to defend it.

I have to consider if fifty bucks is worth the expense of following a procedure of insisting on my rights under current industry regulations.

What do you expect the police to do in this situation? They can't just walk into people's homes over your word. OP at least had a noise which in the states I assume is probable cause or something. And even then they'd have to come back with a warrant but got the headphones because the suspect felt defeated.

Your situation is bizarre, the helpless feeling of knowing where your stolen item is and not be able to do anything about it. But it's not solvable by the police unless you have more evidence. For example you could have recorded your neighbor saying those things to you.

Here in Sweden petty theft is 99% an insurance issue. I even heard one case where their boat was stolen with an airtag on it and it was traced to a particular driveway.

The police here won't even pick up the case, it goes into a pile of other theft cases and the owner can use the ID to file an insurance claim.

It's very sad on the surface. But maybe they have their reasons.

He had ordered it, so had the order, he had the delivery picture, and so on.

And even if people can't just "walk into people's homes over your word" they could still knock on them, question the person, and investigate the theft complaint.

Basically evidence.

If the police can't take evidence and solve a crime then fuck 'em.

Paperwork exists for a reason.

What more evidence do you need?

Here I always opt for delivery at a pick up location and use my electronic ID to pick it up so I had never expected delivery drivers to take, and store, photos of people.

The delivery person gave me the box then ran back to me as I was walking away. "I have to take a photo to prove I delivered it." He puts it down on the ground and photographs it. Not sure what a picture of a box on a nondescript driveway would prove, but I guess he had to do it.

"Your parcel is on the way."

"Your parcel is being used as a football by the warehouse staff."

"Your parcel is in Antarctica."

"Your parcel has somehow been delivered to your roof."

I'm not sure that's the case - the UK police are rigorously judged on the amount of cases they solve. If it was a slam dunk they would have done it.

Like what reasons? It's somewhat understandable that police might not want to investigate theft of relatively cheap item because they have to prioritize. But a stolen boat? At the very least it warrants some further investigation. Them dismissing it outright just seems bizarre since they do have some evidence they at least should come and talk to the owner.

Isn’t a signal that is within a few feet of the door you want to enter good enough? It’s more authenticate than some random noise - you know it’s your device and not some random device emitting find my data.

Sounds like policing or judicial approach is outdated. If a police officer sees the stolen goods inside via a window, they can enter right? How are RF waves that they can see coming inside the property, and uniquely identify the property, any different?

The “defund the police” movement was onto something - but it has to be spelled out. - offload many of their jobs to metermaids and other ticket-issuers and keep armed POLICE for things like robberies, no-knock raids, breaking up fights and arresting violent criminals etc.

Most civil disputes can be - and are - handled by banks and insurance companies. This includes auto accidents and credit card chargebacks. Not even the justice system (public courts) need to get involved, they handle thousands of cases a day.

But don’t let everyone write tickets or it will go too far: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vJYaXy5mmA8

This is hugely different to what I understood from anyone in favour of defunding the police to mean.

Officer I was kidnapped, taken to this address and violently raped. "Sorry we just walk in to people's homes over your word" ? Half a dozen other scenarios come to mind.

So they can't just walk in over your word. I has to be your word plus either a warrant or exigent circumstance.

More detail: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/somethings-gone-w...

I’ve personally experienced their lack of competency when they refused to follow up on stalking/harassment of a friend. They said there was nothing they could do even after I’d tracked down what free texting service was being used and gave them the abuse email address for law enforcement to use. They just straight up refused to do anything. Finally I was able to get my friend’s number blacklisted from the free text message service’s side to stop the abuse (the scumbag would change phone numbers every time he was blocked so we couldn’t just block the number). We even knew who was behind it and they wouldn’t do anything. And before you think this was mild he was sending 100’s of texts a day and calling multiple times. He also keyed the victim’s car but again, cops wouldn’t do anything about it.

Compared to SFPD, who took about 8 hours to even show up to my burgled apartment so I could file an insurance report, it was a breath of fresh air.

Online or telephone stuff won't. It is much more complex and requires system knowledge.

It's that simple.

Because anecdotally, the cops that interacted with me and people around me where completely uninterested in doing any kind of work, no matter how easy it was.

I’d expect it depends on the context of your jurisdiction, and so really is not that simple.

(I never got that MacBook back).

The reason is that sitting in a car, playing solitaire or Pokemon go, collecting huge amounts of cash for doing nothing is even easier (and rewarding to most police officers) than solving an easy crime.

You clearly don't understand what you're talking about if you think it's simple.

In either case it doesn't sound like a sound way to operate a police department. It seems like a good way to incentivize vigilantism though.

So to translate, there may be a high up front cost but the return on invest will outweigh in the long run (for higher value products, admittedly). Even if that's not the case, you're not valuing the societal cost at all!

And if there are enough crimes going on to mean that they can't even send a single officer to assist with a theft or burglary then that's the sign of a serious problem with wherever this place is.

Public services cannot think about making a profit, otherwise it gets dark pretty quickly.

Whether they're helping track down a smartphone or a private jet, the victim isn't expected to reimburse them.

The benefit to society of having police spend time and money to enforce the laws in theory, is that we get to feel some sense of security in our ability to continue owning things without having to fight off raiders, or walk down a street without getting assaulted/robbed.

Past a certain point of late-stage capitalism, there might be some resultant net negative effects to society, like when the masses are starving and the police are enforcing the property rights of the top 0.1% who are hoarding 90% of wealth/food/medicine. But in that scenario the top 0.1% are unlikely to be getting involved directly to track down a single laptop

Edit: being able to use my iPad with Find My was an amazing experience, it’s almost worth having one just for that situation, where I didn’t have to bumble around with 2FA and logging in from my laptop, which isn’t Apple. I could also erase my stolen phone remotely, which gave me so much peace of mind.

Depends on the generation, the new ones with ultra wideband (UWB) are really awesome, you can locate the item to tens of centimeters. I think you already have to be in a certain range for UWB to kick in. So might not really help if you could not identify the apartment otherwise.

Then I saw the phone was at someone else’s house right by the one I showed up to the following evening. I used public records to track down the owner and he said it was a rental. He called his tenants and they said they didn’t have it. They were also telling the truth. Once I told them where it was stolen they said that another neighbor actually worked at the gym.

He did have my iPhone and returned it once his manager told him to. I worked at the gym part time as a fitness instructor.

This was back in the iPhone 4 days admittedly when Find My relied on GPS.

There is no other way to contact them that I can see?

Open and shut case, Watson.

My flatmates and I were all sound asleep in our rooms. I remember half-waking a few times and seeing a shadowy figure in my room, but being half-asleep remember thinking "ah just my flatmate probably doing something" and went back to sleep.

Awoke a short time later and realised what had happened with the charging cables for my laptop/phone pulled towards the doorway and a few things strewn here and there. Got up and went to the hallway and found the rest of the house in disarray and banged on my flatmates doors to panic/get them to call the police. This was at about 4am.

They hadn't hit up my flatmates rooms, only mine (closest to the front door/road) and the main areas of the house. While the police were on their way, I realised my desktop was still there (it was a full-tower) and turned it on to see if I could locate the phone: success! It showed my phone as being in a carpark near a Macca's a few areas over.

My flatmate was still on the phone to the police so we relayed that and they said they'd take a look, but a separate team was coming to see if we were okay. That second team arrived and we made 'em some tea and all sat around being reassured by 'em until the first team had reported in; they got the stuff back! (Well, most of it).

Turns out the guy had: stolen a car, burgled about a half dozen places before ours, then burgled our place and driven to get get Macca's to celebrate. Apparently he was the only car in the carpark and the police walked up seeing that the car was chock full of people's stuff.

My stuff was returned and so was the car and the police were apparently trying to get the other stuff back to their owners, too. I got a follow up call a couple months later "we can't tell you who he is, but for your information he'd already been pulled up on this before and this time he's going to prison". There's nothing quite like the feeling of justice, like "yeah FUCK you for entering my house and taking my stuff".

The scariest thing of the entire scenario was me realising that my phone/laptop were charging on my bed, next to me. Which meant he'd leant over me while I slept to take my stuff.

After moving to the UK, unfortunately after a few years with getting away with walking around London at night, I got mugged. These guys clearly did this stuff all the time because my phone had clearly been turned off, so was not able to be located.

But it really shows the importance of technology helping mitigate/prevent these sorts of things; we should really be holding companies to higher standards and have universal ways to make theft of anything like phones/laptops essentially impossible.

Another thing was the reaction of NZ police; fast, efficient, caring and really eager to just help out someone who had been wronged. Whereas the response I got in London/Met police was basically "ya we can't do anything and there's no CCTV of it" (the most surveilled city in all of Europe, apparently.

When I met the guy that night a week later he opened the door and it was pretty obvious he was the guy. Same sandals.

Beyond a reasonable doubt? Eh, probably not.

I think my point still holds, guy lives in range of Find My, Find My notices it a week later - ah ha this guy definitely stole it? Seems a logical disconnect.