How a Coder Helped a Crime Ring Steal Thousands of iPhones From Porches
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, March 21st. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. A Silicon Valley CEO who prefers to be collegial with competitors and thinks inside the box when it comes to her company's driverless vehicle. Then into a crime ring that scammed FedEx websites for real-time data, giving thieves a high-tech way to steal gadgets delivered to our doors.

But first, Ayesha Evans is the CEO of Amazon-backed Zoox, an autonomous vehicle company that's preparing later this year to launch a service in Las Vegas and San Francisco that people can use to get around town. In a crowded field of fierce challengers like Elon Musk, Evans prefers to approach competition and innovation a little differently.

She joined WSJ columnists Tim Higgins and Christopher Mims on Bold Names. That's our podcast where the bold-named leaders featured in the pages of The Wall Street Journal chat about their businesses and business decisions.

I'll lob an easy question at you first. You took a ride in these toaster-looking autonomous vehicles. What was it like? Boring in some ways, and that's what they want. You don't want an amusement park in the middle of San Francisco. It's like riding in a vehicle except for the fact that nobody's driving it, or at least a human isn't driving it. The biggest difference is that it isn't

a car-like setting. It's like a lounge. It's almost being like in one of those office phone booths where there's two rows, one on each side. Well, that's what you get in there. And they've got music playing and special lights. The windows are tinted. Well, autonomous vehicles built by other companies have been on California roads for quite a while. What makes

Zooks different from those other company cars. So we have Waymo in San Francisco and in other cities. They are the front runner in the robot taxi race. Zooks is the next entrant, if you will. We had a competitor from General Motors named Cruise, but they got out of that game. They haven't launched a

official robo-taxi service just yet, but they plan to start taking public customers who are paying in Las Vegas later this year. All autonomous car companies that I have talked to over the years all talk about how safety is paramount. A lot of the times, though, it comes down to the details. The technology oftentimes is mostly there. It's that very rare case when it doesn't work, that's where the challenge is. It

What I have seen in the past is companies that are racing to achieve some sort of milestone or be able to brag sometimes get themselves in trouble. We saw that several years ago where there were other companies involved in injuries and death.

and really set the industry back. We hear Zoox talking about now, they're not trying to boil the ocean. They are trying to deploy these vehicles in very small segments so they can learn from it and improve from there. Aisha Evans is the company's chief executive, and she told you that she takes a bit of a different approach, not just to leadership, but innovation and safety. This is a big industry. I try and have some respect and humility. And so I'm

I have called them fellow travelers because I was not confused that I was going to be alone or we were going to be alone doing this. That to me would be delusional, at least the way I think. So it's fellow travelers. We're also indirectly in the safety business. What either of us does affects the other, whether we like it or not.

So Tim, it seems that she doesn't really buy into this move fast and break things way that things are typically done in Silicon Valley. Is that an accurate depiction? Absolutely. It comes from the Zoox that she is running is in a different place than it was when it was created.

When you are a startup, you are trying to grab attention. You are trying to grab investment dollars. You are trying to convince people that you can change the world. When she took over, it was a different time, though. She would lead it to be sold to Amazon. They would have money. And she had the luxury of saying, let's think about how we actually deploy this technology. One of the ways that she kind of refers to it as, it's not as simple as just deploying one of those Roombas in your living room and letting it go to town.

So after Amazon bought Zoox in 2020 for about a billion dollars, Amazon just sort of let the company operate on its own. How is that partnership evolving? The conventional wisdom was that Zoox might pivot towards being a robot taxi for packages, that it might get into the delivery business. She's not talking like that. In fact...

She kept true to the original vision of being a robot taxi, that unique toaster-like design. She didn't scrap that. She doubled down on it and figured out a way to bring it out to the consumer. And that's part of the differentiation that Zoox has in the marketplace. When you get back to the race between Waymo and Zoox and Tesla, they all have a little bit of a different sauce.

That was Wall Street Journal columnist Tim Higgins. You can find the full conversation with the CEO of Zoox on the WSJ podcast Bold Names. We've got a link in our show notes. Coming up, a sophisticated crime ring harnessed the power of technology and old-fashioned bribery to steal thousands of devices from U.S. customers, then sell them in international markets. How you can protect yourself from tech theft after the break.

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Front porches in multiple states across the U.S. were the starting point for a sophisticated international crime ring that recently resulted in 13 arrests by federal authorities. Package theft isn't new, but WSJ's Esther Fung found out that those who steal have developed high-tech ways to get what they want.

So Esther, this is not just a story about a few iPhones stolen off of people's porches. This is really a sophisticated, coordinated effort to swipe thousands of devices from people across the U.S. and then sell them abroad. How did it work? This crime ring that was recently busted, they had someone write computer scripts to scrape FedEx's website for tracking numbers.

And they also bribed AT&T store employees for customer data, package data, and

And what this crime ring did was to put these two data points together to identify packages that contain valuables like iPhones or Apple AirTags or AirPods, Samsung devices. The idea was that they wanted to be more targeted in which packages to

to steal, these tracking numbers were also actually sold on Telegram. Telegram is like a social media chat application, a bit like WhatsApp. So the idea is that someone could just purchase these tracking numbers, the address and the time or the day when a package might be dropped off. And you could go to that location and

steal the box and then bring that iPhone to a location and sell that iPhone inside. The prosecutor said that this crime ring stole thousands of shipments and that millions of losses were recorded by AT&T and FedEx. Some victims have told me that even though they managed to bring the package back into their homes when they were dropped off,

The thieves still came by, looked around. One of them even pretended to be a FedEx driver and said, we need the box and we need to rescan it. And they grabbed the box and ran. And they wouldn't be able to do this without someone masterminding the entire operation. There were also locations in Brooklyn and in the Bronx where the stolen electronics were bought and then sold.

possibly resold abroad. So it worked through old-fashioned bribery as well as sophisticated technology. So in order to make this successful, there was a person at the center of this who had to create a special code to get around limits on data sharing for FedEx systems. And then he sold that information on Telegram along with instructions about how to use it.

Is that sort of thing becoming more common for thieves to use? As more and more logistics companies are...

trying to digitize their work to make it easier to track packages. Some of this data sometimes is being placed online so that their customers can get easier access to information about where the packages are located, whether or not weather events might impact their date of arrival. So with

added convenience of knowing all this information, there are also loopholes and this is also information that bad actors can use for their advantage.

So while these companies are trying to make it easier for you and me to buy our own devices, it's also giving thieves an opportunity too. You spoke to representatives at both FedEx and AT&T. What have they said that they can do to sort of wrap up these loopholes to make these systems more secure? They didn't want to give away too much information. With security stuff, they're always trying to be careful about what they say so that

Bad actors wouldn't take advantage of the information they shared. They said that they regularly make changes to their processes. In a way, they're also trying to make it so that it works.

It wouldn't be as predictable. And the idea is also if you are a customer and you have a stolen package, report it immediately so that the companies can react more promptly. AT&T has said that it's already seen a significant reduction in these kinds of incidents and that they're working with FedEx and law enforcement to try to prevent this.

But just talk a little bit more about what consumers can really do to protect themselves from becoming a victim. My immediate response is if you can pick up a valuable package from the store directly, I would say go ahead and do that. It would be also better if that package requires a signature.

Although that can sometimes be a bit tricky to handle and arrange. When you know that the package is arriving on a certain day, have someone at home. And you could also even leave a note on your door telling the delivery driver, ring my doorbell and alert me to pick it up.

Because sometimes a lot of these parcel delivery drivers, they would just leave the package at the doorstep, take a picture and then leave. You might get an email alert on your phone, but you might not get it immediately. Or you might ignore it because you are distracted. But a doorbell, it might be more immediate.

That was The Wall Street Journal's Esther Fung. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Jess Jupiter. I'm your host, Victoria Craig. Additional support this week from Julie Chang, Jessica Fenton, and Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Matthew Walls. Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muslim. Scott Salloway and Chris Zinsley are the deputy editors.

And Falana Patterson is The Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.