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New York Thieves Wearing Apple Store T-Shirts Steal $16,000 In iPhones (pix11.com)
An anonymous reader quotes this article from a TV station in New York about a "brazen daylight heist" made possible by wearing the right t-shirt:
Two thieves put on Apple store employee T-shirts and headed past the Genius Bar to the repair room, grabbed what they could and walked out with more than $16,000 worth of stolen iPhones... Police said just one hour before, the same thieves may have stolen three iPhones 6's worth $1,900 from the Apple Store on 14th Street and Ninth Avenue in the West Village... Earlier this year, three thieves pulled off two similar, but much more lucrative heists, at the Upper West Side Apple Store at Broadway and 67th Street, a training center for Apple employees. Once again, they dressed as Apple employees and stole a total of $49,000 worth of iPhones.
$16,000 retail maybe, but probably $1600 to manufacture, so that is the true loss.
Agreed. Just because iPhones were involved doesn't make this news for nerds.
Stop fucking spamming your same trolling shit on every story. Don't you have anything better to do?
They were probably undercover FBI agents trying to reduce the availability of iPhones to consumers.
If you walk in like you belong, look like you belong, act like you belong, and have balls of brass, you too can go places and do things you shouldn't.
What can you actually do with a stolen iphone at this point?
There are presumably markets where IMEI blacklists won't cause you any trouble(or you can use the thing as a glorified ipod touch); but Apple presumably has knowledge of serial numbers/device IDs/etc. and there aren't a lot of alternatives for things like iOS updates Indeed, if they felt like it, Apple would be in an excellent position to brick the devices if they ever made the mistake of accepting an update from Apple.
Do they just part them out? Are their actually still jailbreaks and such for the newer models good enough that you can operate one outside of Apple's sight? Do you just resell them to optimistic idiots looking for suspiciously good deals on idevices and make this their problem?
I can see that 'compact, expensive, widely desired' are all good qualities in a theft target; but 'bristling with radios and globally unique IDs burned into the hardware and firmware; and nearly impossible to use without the vendor's continued cooperation' seem like egregiously bad qualities.
"walked out with more than $16,000 worth of stolen iPhones"
So... wait. The thieves stole stolen iphones?
It's in Chelsea or maybe the Meatpacking District (if you read some of the signs in the area), but it definitely isn't West Village.
Obviously for iPhone.
I just pretend it's here for the social engineering angle.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is news because even at those prices they're too expensive?
The thieves are idiots because Apple probably has the serial numbers of those stolen iPhones and thus will nuke them from orbit?
Please pray for them or do otherwise nothing, just as long as you finally stop spamming about it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't hate gay people (simply out of a lack of self hate), I just hate spam.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sorry, but until you sell something, your loss is just what you invested. Else I claim that the hardware I slapped together costs 10 grand (despite costing 5 bucks to make) and my insurance claim is for 10 grand.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't know since the media has not said yet (mid-Sunday) that the attack was religiously motivated. Until it is revealed otherwise, there is no reason to think it is. But, if you wanna go that route: Christian Terrorism.
But you don't find people alarmed at all of Cristendom because Timothy McVeigh was a Roman Catholic. Some terrorist attacks are religiously motivated, some are not. And when it comes to religious motivation, the crowning achievement in religious terrorism by far was the European Crusades that sought to conquer the holy lands by spilling blood. Just because it wasn't a covert operation, doesn't mean it isn't terrorism, and it was religiously motivated.
Now they need the state, crying for help because evil nasty criminals stole stuff from them. But when its about paying taxes, or helping the FBI decrypt a shooter's iPhone, they say fuck the state.
I don't have anything against companies building products that can't be decrypted. But this iPhone was a product that *could* be decrypted by apple, but they refused simply to protect their image as manufacturer of phones that can't be decrypted.
The feds should decline investigating until apple pays its fucking taxes and agrees to aid law enforcement with the decryption of iPhones.
"The thieves are idiots because Apple probably has the serial numbers of those stolen iPhones and thus will nuke them from orbit?"
And given a serial, each one will report its GPS position to the holy city of Cupertino on request.
Because Slashdot is posting filler instead of talking about the mass shooting. They hate gay people. Hate them!!!
and a couple of Mac Books?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
That's almost $10 worth of parts!
Nope. Projcted sales = all. This is apple. They command the finest herd
Those Apple 'geniuses' didn't query someone taking a bag of handsets out the door?
The local chemist has a fingerprint scanner on it's store room. The local electronics store just sacked their security guard, making the security stickers on the boxes their main theft deterrent. They'd be more secure than an Apple store.
The thieves aren't idiots, they'll sell them to idiots for cheap.
Sorry, but until you sell something, your loss is just what you invested.
Speaking as a certified accountant, I can tell you that that isn't true at all. It might be what you get reimbursed for by an insurance company but it isn't the full value of the loss incurred. Apple is self insured so they won't get reimbursed by anyone. Until the device can be replaced and sold, the value of the loss is the cost of the device, the cost to replace the device, the cost to transport and sell the device, the cost of investigating and dealing with the loss, the cost of the lost revenue for whatever period the device was unavailable to be sold, and I can keep going. Basically you have the cost of the device plus the opportunity cost of the lost revenue for whatever time the revenue is lost. If a sale is lost permanently (customer comes in to buy iPhone, can't get one and buys Android instead) then the lost value of the iPhone is the full retail value. If they can replace the phone the value is the cost of the device plus the opportunity costs involved.
Else I claim that the hardware I slapped together costs 10 grand (despite costing 5 bucks to make) and my insurance claim is for 10 grand.
The selling price of the iPhones is well known and the cost to build them is easy to prove. A company the size of Apple is self insured so there is no insurance claim to be made. The value of the phones at minimum is higher than their cost to make and could in principle be the full retail value of them if certain factors prove true. The real value of the loss is somewhere in between in the long run most likely but it definitely is more than just the cost to make it.
To be fair, the entire ISIS thing is religiously motivated, the first I standing for "Islamic". They claimed responsibility for the attack.
This hasn't been news for nerds for quite a while. That disappeared a while ago. It's really tech news, which basically only has to mention a tech company or liberal news because the internet doesn't have enough of that. Basically, you can get the same news everywhere except here you get some amusing AC trolls.
If Australia can do it we can too. Every phone, sim card or not has a personal identification number. It's 100% possible to implement a database of phones and prevent carriers from registering stolen and lost phones. If we did this we could actually motivate people to do the right thing and return phones to their owners.
The carriers and manufacturers don't want to do it because stolen phones increase sales of replacements.
I work in retail, and we have vendors who work in plain, dirty clothes (maintenence vendors especially) all the time. They NEVER wear their nametags and sometimes don't even check in. I have told AP on more than one occasion what a stupid idea it is to let them go unchecked, most of the areas they work in are right next to our stockroom. I'm just waiting for someone to walk back there and walk out with a handful of stuff, never even questioned.
1. Apple pays all taxes required by law, and they play by the same rules as any other company.
2. Apple didn't break any laws by refusing to crack the encryption on one of their phones, if they had then the FBI would have pursued it rather than giving up--and Apple is innocent until proven guilty.
3. The FBI doesn't have the right to unilaterally refuse to investigate crimes just because they don't like the victim--that would be pretty fucked up.
4. By all accounts this was a local crime and will be investigated by the NYPD, not the "feds"
5. EVERY product can be decrypted, it just takes time & money.
Just owning all the Abble products isn't enough to make one completely ghey; you have to actually use them as intended. Even if you DID jack off while wearing the iWatch, it wouldn't give them your pulse correctly since Abble has such a closed ecosystem, its not like GNU is gonna help them. HOWEVER Abble users switching to teh lunis is *PROOF* that homosexuality is a *choice* and IT CAN BE CURED The one time I went to the Abble store at the mall, the resident ghey Socialst came up to me in his Speedos and offered me a tiny cup of Froot Loops; he explained that sadly, they had to cut back on the portion size because they were running out of money. I politely turned them down because I wasn't sure what they were glazed with. And his iWatch had the wrong time.
He did so it is an ISIS related attack. I'm just saying not all Islamic terrorists do it for religion, just like all Christian terrorists do it for religion. In this case he did.
are geniuses.
Don't nerds talk about social engineering?
Unless supplies are tight and loss of sales is irrecuperable, it's the cost rather than lost sales that matter, so with about 65% gross margin, the loss is around 5k value. However:
1. The thiefs may successfully sell their stash. This may lead to some people not buying from a store as they bought it from the fence. This pushes the actual loss a bit higher (but most likely not to full retail).
2. Such a heist is mildly interesting and entertaining, not to mention newsworthy or even 'viral'. A 0.001% increase of US sales over a single day probably more than offsets the losses.
This was pretty genius!
I guess that's why they let them past the "Genius Bar" and into the back area.
You'd think there would have been a badge reader, though...
Sure, you can do that, as long as you pay for $10k of coverage.
But seriously, you should brush up on your accounting skills, specifically "inventory."
http://www.accountingtools.com/accounting-inventory-methods
Isn't praying for them doing nothing anyway?
This why people should be paid $15 per hour minimum wage ... so they don't have to resort to crime to pay their bills in the big city.
I presume that Apple knows which phones are missing, and they will simply brick them?
See now that's technology we can get behind, um...so to speak. New use for existing technology.
I am very much a user of Apple gear, but I am rather allergic to the Apple retail experience. This phrase in context totally cracked me up.
I could have told Apple that tee-shirts were bad authentication credentials.
In all seriousness, these people should be getting some props and a well earned pat on the back for a job well done.
I mean it, they're an inspiration to us all. I love how the simple schemes can be the most elegant and genius ones.
Strange. Given the cost of buying an iPhone, I've known for years that the people wearing the Apple T-Shirts were thieves.
#can't-take-a-joke
Apple pays all taxes required by law**
** - Exotic accounting excepted.
There's your Barry Bonds asterisk.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
For people who are not into Apple's Newspeak, what is a "Genius Bar"? Is it the sales counter?
If even a real Apple store employee can walk out of there with a bunch of hardware then there is a real problem with their security.. The fact that even 2 unknown persons just wearing a t-shirt can walk off with that kind of hardware is even more bizzar.
Nah, they'll break them up for repair parts! Now you see why Apple is working to keep people from being able to repair their own phones!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The real story here is that $16,000 of boxed iPhones will fit under a t-shirt.
No sig today...
They claimed responsibility for the attack.
Well of course they did.... claiming responsibility is what they do best.
No sig today...
We have had one for the past three years, and other countries even tap in to it. Do you live under a rock?
http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/fcc-and-wireless-carriers-prepare-to-blacklist-stolen-phones/
So which figure are they going to use on their taxes? Because you know the joe q public taxpayer will be picking up at least a portion of this tab
Taxes are done on a cash basis so they'll probably take the material cost of the unit plus whatever expenses they incur in the process of dealing with the theft which might actually add up to more than the retail price of the phones themselves when all is said and done. Dealing with cops, security and paying lawyers is shockingly expensive.
This will not have any meaningful impact on the amount of tax that Apple pays. Yes it will (very) slightly reduce Apple's profits and in theory that would result in lower tax remittances. There is no cost to taxpayers though the government coffers might be lighter by a few pennies at the end of the day.
"Think Different." Apparently that worked wonders at Apple Store for a couple of enterprising thieves.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Given that the current iPhone has been around for almost a year, stocks are aplenty and those who go to an Apple store to buy an iPhone are more likely to go to another one or come back the next day than to buy an Android phone, I'd be very surprised if this event actually lead to a significant number of irrevocably lost sales, if any
Probably true but one has to account for all the possible outcomes.
Also, I think it's not quite accurate to call apple "self-insured" - sure they may not have contracted with an insurance company for such events (I don't know), and sure they have a lot of cash that insulates them from measurable consequences, but these do not a self-insurance make.
Yes Apple is self insured. It's a common term of art for when company's back benefits and hedge against losses with certain pools of assets rather than by contracting with an insurance company. In the case of Apple it probably costs less for them to simply eat the loss than to pay an insurance company. Insurance is really to transfer risk, typically risks the company can't handle themselves. The loss of a few iPhones is a rounding error to Apple so they can afford to self insure against the occasional bit of theft.
Really?
Yes really.
The rule for reporting inventory is that it must be valued at acquisition cost or market value, whichever is the lower amount. In general, inventories should be valued at acquisition costs. [...] Valuing at the price you could sell at retail is not allowed because retail prices are inflated to cover selling costs. Selling costs are not allowed in the market value calculation.
What you have quoted there is merely a detailing of what can be reported on the inventory account on the balance sheet. Accounting 101 stuff. There's a lot more to it than that. The value of inventory is only a fraction of the costs that would incurred in a theft. When the theft occurs you incur a variety of expenses including legal fees, security expenses, cost of replacing the lost inventory, administrative burden, insurance costs (not applicable here), and a bunch of other stuff you probably don't think of straight away. Depending on the size of the theft the expenses incurred in dealing with it could easily outstrip the value of the lost merchandise depending on how aggressively Apple pursues the problem.
Well damn, expensive android....
These links do little to further the claim that these represent self-insurance. I thought it's something more specific - as your wikipedia link seems to suggest too. With your quite broad definition of self-insurance, everyone is self-insuring left and right.
That is actually true. When you decline to buy the extended warranty you are engaging in a small scale version of self insurance. Apple is just able to absorb far larger risks. Don't get too worked up about the the term. I agree that it's a little bit silly but as long as you understand what it represents you'll know what people mean when they say it. There are lots of terms like that in finance and accounting. Often several that mean the same thing (Sales = Revenue = Gross Receipts for example) for no useful reason. It's annoying to people like me that come from an engineering/physics background where terms tend to be more standardized.
So I think it's quite meaningless to use this term unless there's wing to wing handling for specifically this risk category
Apple and most big retailers do exactly that with varying degrees of formality. Apple does have pools in their accounting for shrinkage and it is normal practice for a retailer to set aside a certain amount of funds and resources to account for expected losses and to make adjusting entries to account for actual loses. This does impact the P&L, it does impact budgeting, it does impact internal controls and it certainly is accounted for.
I think it's conceivable that with their very high gross margin they don't worry about store stealth to the extent a grocery chain would have to, and I believe most of their risk management priorities rarer and more impactful risks, mostly relating to their supply chain, and perhaps forex losses.
That is probably correct. I don't think shrinkage tops the list of things that keep Apple management up at night. It's something they have to deal with but it's not an existential threat to them like it might be to a low margin grocery store.
That's not "social engineerineg" that's Security by letterhead.
Or T-Shirt, in this case,
bickerdyke
http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/3...
That could be painful...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
This looked painful and impossible for you Coren22: Coren22 backup your alleged self-proclaimed professional status in security + programming. Your evasions are good for laughs https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9229319&cid=52314773 @ your expense, hahahaha!
James 2:14-26
tl;dr Just praying for someone (and slacktivism in general) is synonymous with doing absolutely nothing. Thus not only are you doing nothing, you're sinning.