Yesterday, I was corresponding via email with someone who was a victim of the porch pirates, although her story is a little different. Based on camera footage that she has of the theft, an hour after first being delivered to her home, another FedEx driver came to pick up the three iPhones that just arrived. He scanned the packages, put them in his car, drove them to Federal Express, and tried to ship them to Florida using the same tracking numbers used for the original packages shipped to her home. This signaled a red flag inside FedEx and the company intercepted the packages.
After stopping the three phones from getting shipped to the bad guys in Florida, Federal Express called the victim to tell her that she might have been involved in a scam. Here is the part that indicates the involvement of an AT&T insider. About an hour after the three iPhones were shipped to her address and then picked up again for a trip down south to Florida, the victim found out that someone had changed her address in AT&T‘s shipping and tracking system to the address in Florida where the thieves had planned to ship the stolen iPhones.
Ask yourself this. How did AT&T know to change the victim’s shipping and tracking address to the unknown location in Florida where the thieves attempted to ship the three stolen units? Why was this address change made only after the phones were first delivered to the correct address in Iowa? It all points to involvement by someone at AT&T.
It should be noted that the phones were purchased from a third-party AT&T authorized retailer and many of these locations and their employees do have access to information that might have led to this incident as well as many of the others we’ve written about over the last few weeks. When we say that an AT&T insider might have been involved in these robberies, we include those working for AT&T third-party stores.
The victim in this robbery was lucky that FedEx was able to put two and two together and realized that the same tracking number used to deliver three iPhones to an address in Iowa was being used to ship those same three iPhones to Florida. She was also told by the third-party rep that a signature is now required for a package to be left. However, that might not be the case everywhere. AT&T told us today that it now requires signatures for new phone deliveries in several markets where the carrier has experienced this issue but is expanding this policy more broadly.