(WWJ) -- Monday and Tuesday are Amazon Prime Day, with online shoppers jumping on hot deals from the e-commerce giant.
That means hundreds of millions of packages will be shipped all across the country, creating worries of “porch pirates” -- people stealing packages right from yards and front porches.
Speaking live on WWJ Monday, analyst and senior editor at security.org Aliza Vigderman says 40% of U.S. households have had packages stolen. Last month, data showed about 20% of those thefts occurred in the past three months.
Roughly 1.7 million packages are lost or stolen every day in the U.S., according to Vigderman.
She says the most common way porch pirate plunder packages is simple -- they see a package on a porch, walk up and take it away without even knowing what’s inside.
“We see that all the time with the Ring video doorbell footage, just people going up to a random house, taking a package and just leaving without knowing what’s inside,” Vigderman told WWJ. “I think e-commerce is so common that it’s easy to just walk around and see unsupervised packages.”
The best ways to protect against porch piracy, according to Vigderman, are taking advantage of programs like Amazon Locker, security video systems and providing delivery instructions.
For example, customers can tell the company to put packages out of sight in backyards or garages. Amazon Locker also lets customers have a package delivered to an Amazon hub, where they can go to pick it up from a safe locker.
Other solutions include having the packaged delivered to someone else's house who you know will be home, or using Amazon Key -- a program that lets you remotely unlock your home, garage or vehicle, to allow the delivery person to place the package inside.
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