The other day a video posted on YouTube went viral. It showed how engineer Mark Rober, sick of people stealing his packages off his front porch, decided to “fight back” by creating a fake booby trapped package that would explode glitter and spray fart gas when the box was opened. The idea was that it would be left on the porch unattended in hopes that it would encourage thieves to take it.
It also contained four smartphones that would begin recording once the package had been picked up, which also gave us a look at the reactions of said “thieves”. Now we put “thieves” in quotes because in a post by Rober, he has since revealed that parts of the video might not have been 100% real, and that some of the “thieves” weren’t actually thieves, but friends of a friend of a friend who might have been enlisted just for their reactions, and who did not actually steal it.
According to Rober, he claims that he was not aware of this. In his tweet, he says that he had initially put out a feeler to see if anyone would mind leaving the package on their porch (presumably to try and tempt thieves in a different area), in which a friend of a friend agreed, leading to the situation mentioned above.
Rober has since edited the video to cut out those portions of the video and apologized for putting up a video that might have been misleading to some. To Rober’s credit, while some of the reactions might not have been from actual thieves, the fact is that the device actually works and is the real deal, which we should definitely give him props for. If you haven’t seen it yet, the edited version of the video can be viewed above.
I posted this as a comment response to my recent viral tweet/video but I’m posting it as a new tweet as well: pic.twitter.com/g2VHsQWh1z
— Mark Rober (@MarkRober) December 20, 2018