Package theft is a menace year-round, but every holiday season highlights the problem. December is the month during which fleets of porch pirates hoist their sail and set out for the bonnie shores of your front door.
The consumer resource website Safewise cited a study that found 2025 package theft in the U.S. resulted in $15 billion worth of losses, with more than 104 million packages stolen nationwide – good for an average of about 250,000 stolen packages daily.
Why do people commit what in some places is felony theft for a box that might not even have anything valuable inside?
“Package theft is low risk and potentially high reward,” said Ben Stickle, who researches the topic in the criminal justice program at Middle Tennessee State University. “It takes zero skill to walk up to a house, grab a package and walk away. So I don't think that this crime is going to go anywhere anytime soon.”
The research, according to Stickle, suggests that security cameras aren’t the deterrent many think they are.
“Everyone wants to talk about cameras and their impact on this crime, and I'm not so sure there's a big impact there,” Stickle said, referring to case studies. “It seems like once a thief would walk up to a home, they'd see a camera often, look straight at it, look down at the box, look back at the camera, and then take the box and walk away.”
Despite the legal penalties for getting caught, which in some cases can bring felony charges, the unlikelihood of conviction leads thieves to view porch piracy as worth the risk.
“And then if there is a camera, that has to be a good quality photo that it gets of them, and then they have to have it saved on something, and then it has to get in the hands of the police, and police have to do an investigation,” Stickle said. “You start adding in all these steps, and if-thens, you realize, like this is just unlikely to happen when you think about the volume of it. And so I think they can look at a camera and go, ‘Well, there's lots of cameras in society, and I'm not normally caught,’ and they're right.”
In New Mexico, package theft charges range from misdemeanors to felonies, depending on the value of items stolen and the offender’s previous convictions, if any. Stealing from the U.S. Postal Service is a federal crime, while stealing packages from private delivery companies is a violation of state law. Some states have made all package theft a felony, but Stickle said the new laws haven’t yielded dramatically different numbers.
The best preventive measure seems to be keeping packages from being visible from the street. That’s not necessarily possible at every house or apartment. But if thieves can’t see it, Stickle says, they likely won’t steal it.
“So this is a crime where visibility equals vulnerability, right?” Stickle said. “So if you can remove a package from being visible from wherever you're at, whether it's close to the roadway or back at your house, that's going to reduce your likelihood of being a victim significantly.”
Stickle cited a study that found 93% of stolen packages were visible from the street.
Another option is getting the package sent to a parcel locker. Shipping services like Amazon and UPS offer pick-up sites at brick-and-mortar locations in many cities. But parcel lockers have finite storage capacity, and some can get so full during peak times that they cannot accept new deliveries.
Online shopping is here to stay, it seems, and Stickle says that the day could soon come when homes could have physical package-delivery structures, like many used to have to receive milk deliveries.
“Is it possible in the future to have almost like a small closet on your front porch, where you can open the one door and put a package inside, and I'm allowed to open the inside?” Stickle said. “Just like, if you will, back many years ago we had a milk chute or a coal chute, right? We design houses for the way that we live. I think the future is thinking about receiving packages this way, and re-thinking the front porch.”
One final word - it’s not a good idea to set a booby trap. If the thief is injured by the trap, one could face criminal charges. And it might not even be a porch pirate who finds it. Depending on your neighborhood and other circumstances, it could be an animal or innocent person.
The numbers Stickle has crunched suggest the best way to avoid being raided by the box buccaneers is to limit package visibility as much as you can. And if the waters in your neighborhood are lawless, use a parcel locker to ship your treasure to a safe port.
