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DrPizza

DrPizza

Administrator Elite Member Goat Whisperer
Mar 5, 2001
49,601
167
111
www.slatebrookfarm.com
I disagree. No amount of homework is going to help a thief reliably know when a family is going to be gone on vacation. Yeah - sitting in a car across the street... like that's not going to be noticed by someone. And knowing that a family is gone for a week may make their home a more attractive target.
 
Nik

Nik

Lifer
Jun 5, 2006
16,101
3
56
DrPizza said:
I disagree. No amount of homework is going to help a thief reliably know when a family is going to be gone on vacation. Yeah - sitting in a car across the street... like that's not going to be noticed by someone. And knowing that a family is gone for a week may make their home a more attractive target.
Click to expand...

Right, because it takes a week to rob a house and houses only get robbed while families are on vacation.
 
A

Auggie

Golden Member
Jul 18, 2003
1,379
0
0
Nik, it's like Farang said. You sit near a densely populated area of town, eventually you'll get an away-from-home notice for someone who happens to live near your target location.

Using a Google.Maps API would be an incredibly easy way to automate the process, you would just sit there refreshing the webpage until you found an address close to where you're currently checking from.

Have you ever had your house broken into? I have. They're in and out in under 5 minutes with 5k worth of items. They need only a couple good hits a month to make it worth their time.

Need I point out that technocratic folks like these whom would be highlighted by this process would be a very profitable target demographic? Or that most people that would be targeted by this method would be concentrated into certain areas of town?

Whether or not this actually becomes a real crime trend remains to be seen, but I see absolutely no reason to assume that it's an idiotic thing to consider.
 
R

RbSX

Diamond Member
Jan 18, 2002
8,351
1
76
Nik said:
Okay. Let's say they've got a laptop, a wireless connection, and are driving around a neighborhood.

How do you find out whether the guy who lives at the house on the left who's getting into his car even has a twitter account? How do you find his username?

Really? Are you not thinking this through?

If you can basically pick a house at random and start compiling information about them trying to decide when to strike, you're NOT just a common smash-and-grab thief who'll kick the door in the moment the owner turns the corner on their way out of the neighborhood.

If you ARE that type, you don't really need to read their twitter page, do you? Of course you don't, you're already kicking in their front door.

If you're the type that sits in the car across the street with your laptop doing your homework on the guy, and you're resourceful enough to find out who lives there (not hard), how are you going to find their twitter username? If you're smart enough (or lucky enough) to come across that, what are the odds that reading their twitter page is going to make any sort of difference in when you're going to strike and how? You're probably smart enough to have that figured out anyway.
Click to expand...

Okay dude let me describe how my house was broken into:

For several weeks the fellow cased my house, learning when we were and weren't home.

We went on vacation for 2 weeks, hired someone to live at our house while we were gone. This person stayed at our house 18 hours a day, and was only gone during the day.

The person decided to break in on christmas even when the house sitter went to visit her family, they brought climbing gear to rappel up the side of the house, cut the glass in our door so he could climb through without triggering the alarm.

The guy brought nothing, used our pillow cases to steal the stuff out of the house.

That guy was prepared, it wouldn't be beyond a fellow like him to use twitter to figure out when people weren't home. I don't think you give these people enough credit.

Within an hour we were out $40,000 dollars worth of stuff. A haul like that a guy could live off of for a while, so it's not beyond them to research people for a month, it's worth their time.
 
Nik

Nik

Lifer
Jun 5, 2006
16,101
3
56
RbSX said:
Okay dude let me describe how my house was broken into:

For several weeks the fellow cased my house, learning when we were and weren't home.

We went on vacation for 2 weeks, hired someone to live at our house while we were gone. This person stayed at our house 18 hours a day, and was only gone during the day.

The person decided to break in on christmas even when the house sitter went to visit her family, they brought climbing gear to rappel up the side of the house, cut the glass in our door so he could climb through without triggering the alarm.

The guy brought nothing, used our pillow cases to steal the stuff out of the house.

That guy was prepared, it wouldn't be beyond a fellow like him to use twitter to figure out when people weren't home. I don't think you give these people enough credit.

Within an hour we were out $40,000 dollars worth of stuff. A haul like that a guy could live off of for a while, so it's not beyond them to research people for a month, it's worth their time.
Click to expand...

He obviously didn't need twitter, now did he. Thanks for making my point for me.
 
R

RbSX

Diamond Member
Jan 18, 2002
8,351
1
76
Nik said:
He obviously didn't need twitter, now did he. Thanks for making my point for me.
Click to expand...

No, but like changing times new tools come about that makes things easier.

This is one of them.

At the time twitter didn't exist.
 
A

Auggie

Golden Member
Jul 18, 2003
1,379
0
0
Or completely ignoring the real-time aspect of this, at the VERY LEAST you're advertising to the public 1.) your home address and 2.) the fact that you carry around the latest mobile technology, and therefore are likely a lucrative future target.

Sitting outside a house for a week? Yeah, that's retarded, and that's why no criminals scout out targets like that. They drive down streets a few times one over a number of days and note which cars are present or absent over the course of a couple of weeks. Makes it really obvious which houses are empty during the day, which have a stay-at-home mom. Think a Mustang doesn't make you a target by being in your driveway? My college roommate who is now a police officer in Houston said they've found videos from drive-through scouting runs so they can look at targets at home instead of having to note anything in particular while driving.
 
DrPizza

DrPizza

Administrator Elite Member Goat Whisperer
Mar 5, 2001
49,601
167
111
www.slatebrookfarm.com
Nik said:
Right, because it takes a week to rob a house and houses only get robbed while families are on vacation.
Click to expand...

I never said that. I said that knowing that a family is gone for a week makes a house more appealing to a robber. Gone for a week = less likely someone comes home early. Less likely the big mean dog is still at home. Etc.

And more importantly - you would know that there would be more time between your crime & discovery of the crime. You're apparently forgetting - what's a robber going to do with most of the valuables? And think about it this way - there are 10 houses on a block. You know that 8 of them are vacant most days from 8am til 5pm. But, you happen to know that one particular house is going to be vacant for the next two weeks. Which house do you go to? One of the daily vacant ones during daylight hours, knowing that on any particular day there's always that chance that someone comes home early from work? Or that house that's going to be vacant for a couple of weeks - that you can approach under cover of darkness & have 2 weeks to fence the stolen items.
 
vshah

vshah

Lifer
Sep 20, 2003
19,003
24
81
this reminds me of the time clarkson said "no one can do shit with just my account number!"

and then some guy donated to a charity from him.
 
F

Farang

Lifer
Jul 7, 2003
10,913
3
0
Maybe people will understand in this way: twitter and these other sites allow thieves to case your house from the comfort of their own home. So yes, they do have alternatives (afterall robbing houses as been around long before Twitter), but this may be an attractive option for would-be thieves.

The argument that they could just case the house like they've always done is moot. I can ride a horse and buggy to work, too, but I find a car to be more convenient.
 
Nik

Nik

Lifer
Jun 5, 2006
16,101
3
56
DrPizza said:
I never said that. I said that knowing that a family is gone for a week makes a house more appealing to a robber. Gone for a week = less likely someone comes home early. Less likely the big mean dog is still at home. Etc.

And more importantly - you would know that there would be more time between your crime & discovery of the crime. You're apparently forgetting - what's a robber going to do with most of the valuables? And think about it this way - there are 10 houses on a block. You know that 8 of them are vacant most days from 8am til 5pm. But, you happen to know that one particular house is going to be vacant for the next two weeks. Which house do you go to? One of the daily vacant ones during daylight hours, knowing that on any particular day there's always that chance that someone comes home early from work? Or that house that's going to be vacant for a couple of weeks - that you can approach under cover of darkness & have 2 weeks to fence the stolen items.
Click to expand...

I'm not an idiot; I'm well aware of all of this. It's not rocket science. Thieving is very, very easy.

The only place you'll find thieves wasting their time with twitter to track their targets is in the freakin movies.
 
DrPizza

DrPizza

Administrator Elite Member Goat Whisperer
Mar 5, 2001
49,601
167
111
www.slatebrookfarm.com
For what it's worth though - I have posted one thing in particular about my house and whereabouts that should give any criminal pause. Roughly midnight one night, I heard BOOM BOOM outside. Phone rang a minute later, our neighbor shot a fox that had gotten one of our rabbits that had been running around loose.

My neighbor noticed and had his Mossberg loaded & fired before the fox could get 50 feet from where it grabbed a rabbit. If you think you're sneakier and less conspicuous than a fox in the dark, and that you can run away faster than a fox, go for it. My neighbor is retired & always home.
 
J

JS80

Lifer
Oct 24, 2005
26,271
7
81
Nik said:
Care to contribute to the thread instead of just thread crap and insult other members?
Click to expand...

I'm not insulting you nor thread crapping. But the 2 pages have great responses to your grasping defense.
 
effowe

effowe

Diamond Member
Nov 1, 2004
6,012
18
81
What if the thief already knows you and knows where you live? What if you had a falling out with someone? What if you had a house party and some people showed up who you didn't know that well?

There are many ways people can get information about where you live, your roommate situation, what sort of valuables are in the house. If someone decided to use this information against you, this website gives them access to your schedule and what you do without them doing a thing. These people are putting their personal info out there for the world to see. It just takes one person to use this info.
 
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