NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- With the holiday season beginning, Americans will be busy scooping up deals—and porch pirates will be busy scooping up pricey packages.
In its annual package theft report, CNET found 1 in 7 adults said they were victims of porch piracy this year.
CNET senior writer Joe Supan said the mean value of packages being delivered this season is $300 per an adult, “a significant amount of money that’s going to be sitting on porches.”
“Anything that’s kind of smaller and high value is the most attractive,” Supan said. “It’s going to be hard for a thief to run off with a bigger appliance.”
A former FedEx worker in NYC told 1010 WINS that porch piracy is a huge problem and that thieves are after “everything.”
“I guess they do it for the thrill of it—they don’t know what’s in the boxes, but they’ll take it,” he said.
Indeed, more than 90,000 packages are reported stolen or lost in transit in the city each day.
Supan said apartment buildings with shared mailrooms and suburban areas where a lot of porches may be unattended for hours are attractive to porch pirates.
Among the tips from CNET: carefully track packages, use a doorbell cam, invest in a delivery box, arrange in-garage drop-offs or send deliveries to pick-up locations.