Glitterbomb 3.0 vs. Porch Pirates

this guy stole my package from a porch and he's about to open it in his house hello but what he doesn't know is that this is the third generation of a new and improved custom-built bait package that's recording them on four different phones and just released a pound of the world's finest glitter along with some other nasty surprises but to understand how we got here we first have to go back in time a bit because that's when this couple stole a package from my porch and even with the video footage the police wouldn't do anything so i vowed to use my engineering skills to go full home alone on these punks not just to avenge my package but as a tribute to the 2 million packages that are stolen across america every year and because packages are taken most in december for the third year now it's sort of become a christmas time tradition for me to do my very small part to encourage future would-be porch pirates to choose a different profession in just the most fabulous way possible so before we see how this year's version fares in the wild i'm going to first walk you through all the upgrades my buddy shawn and i have been incorporating into this box over the past year for starters we updated the outer casing this time going for more of a cyber truck aesthetic you can sort of see the evolution from year to year right here as part of this we created an intentional handle here in the hopes that the package thief will grab it not realizing we took a page directly from the kevin mcallister home security plan by putting extra sticky glue on the underside this is the exact same stuff used in those rodent traps and as you can see here it's incredibly strong you'll also notice these two protruding rods those are the most critical improvement from last year but more on that in a second under the hood we made quite a few changes as well the fundamentals are still the same where you have a battery-powered arduino-based microcontroller on a custom printed circuit board that gives instructions to these four phones which allows us to record the thief no matter which side they open it from but this time we upgraded the brains of the box itself to have its own sim card too so we can fully control all the functions of the phone at any time including remotely triggering sounds to be played on command and you'll see why that matters in just a bit and this year you'll see not one not two but four canisters of fart spray i had the personal goal this year that anyone who opened this box would at least at some point comment on just how bad it smells stayed with that i'm using the same absolutely wretched formula that almost killed macaulay culkin last year i still smell it along with just a touch or two of essence of actual skunk i'm going light on this stuff because it lingers much longer than the fart spray and anything more than a couple drops just wouldn't be cool and so these cams are turned by motors which sprays the fart spray and we keep spraying it every 30 seconds because first of all it's ridiculous and hilarious but second and more importantly so they get rid of the package out of their house before they realize there's four phones inside this design feature makes it so we pretty much recover our boxes 100 of the time from the closest trash can or dumpster since we already know the location of the box at all times due to the gps tracking on the phones but if the box does get destroyed by a package stealing glitter hater all the phones will have already uploaded their footage to the cloud for me to see exactly what happened and then of course we've got the main attraction which is the spinning cup powered by a motor underneath here which this year holds 15 more of the finest biodegradable glitter that money can buy and so then after opening the box and just like sitting in a daze trying to process what the heck just happened well that's when we start the countdown nine and of course we know nothing happens when it gets to the end but having just been covered in glitter and fart spray they're going to be terrified of what this would possibly escalate to next by the time the countdown ends and then after the countdown we have the police scanner but this year we added leds so it will light up the room in red and blue lights for added ambiance this also allows us to illuminate the package these face with white light in case they open it in a darker setting and then finally we've got this lid which still has these two holes with one-way film so we can record what's going on even before it's opened as you can see kevin's older brother buzz has also been working hard this year he's releasing not just the fictitious buzz buds but the entire buzz collection and it's just adorable when you hear some of these package thieves repeat that in excitement and this is literally the box we use but somehow they never bothered to read the side with lots of little words that would totally give the whole thing away and so now with the lid in place you can see the function of those two rods from earlier because when the lid slides off they shoot out which prevents the natural reaction of someone who just quickly put the lid right back on again this happened quite a bit last year and it just makes it way less fun for nearly everyone involved and if you look at the cad you can see how these are designed such that once the plunger is extended out by this spring this little floating chunk of steel drops down into this groove which stops the plunger from being pushed back in this is just a beautiful passive solution and the only way to reset them to get the lid back on is to either wave a magnet here which sucks that steel chunk up thereby allowing the plunger to go back in or to turn the whole thing upside down which means the chunk falls out of the groove due to gravity and for the final major design improvement last year it was a hassle for our porch volunteers to have to bring the boxes in and charge them every night and then remember to put them out the next day it was also a problem if the box got stolen in the late afternoon because the phone in the box batteries could be pretty low at that point so this year we made a custom door mat that discreetly plugs in and then inductively charges the box at all times so it's always ready to go so the idea is after the bad guy properly disguises himself and then comes sneaking by and steals it off the porch all the batteries are at 100 charge and the box knows that it's no longer on the mat so it texts us that it's been stolen and starts recording and uploading footage and sending us gps updates so when they eventually get home and take off the lid the circuit board brain knows it's go time and autonomously sets everything in motion hello now is it petty to dedicate an entire year of your life to completely over engineering a box just to shoot a little glitter at someone yes but at the same time could that creation still be just ridiculous and beautiful also yes [Music] so that's glitter bomb 3.0 and if you think this is cool and you want to support more efforts like this you can get this super dope hoodie of the wireframe cab model at markrover.com after 10 years of youtubing i finally got some merch along with a cool new logo and i can assure you that the money that was clearly saved by using the second rate t-shirt model just went straight into making everything in the store super soft and comfortable and to give free returns and so now all that was left to do was to send these boxes to porches all across america and thanks to my friends at simply safe who hooked us up with a bunch of cameras we could monitor everything remotely and then just wait and we didn't have to wait long [Music] our very first box was taken at night and apparently they didn't seem to appreciate the name calling or the quality engineering because in the morning this is what we found so it was one box down but we still had six backups left 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 and while he didn't explicitly mention the smell five four three the countdown was certainly pulling its own weight [Music] this five four three two one activation complete recovery sequence initiated after a nice fart spray block with their hands this lady tries to wrestle the lid on in her sink for a solid 10 minutes and eventually exploits our one acutely seal and turns it upside down and she got it i mean i'm not even mad that's just impressive hello [Music] you guys give up oh yeah thirsty for more and at this point i'm like how is nobody mentioning the smell so you can imagine how happy i was to see this six five four three two recovery sequence initiated this one was another w for team fart spray [Music] oh 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 activation and this one was the perfect harry and marv wet bandit reaction because not only did his room get dusted with glitter but he got doused with the fart spray and then freaked out with the countdown and then grabbed it by the mouse glue handle on the way to the dumpster these guys had suspicions so they took it outside to open it [Music] i'm sorry i'm sorry because i don't want anyone to feel totally depressed about humanity after seeing only the bad apples that make it into my video just like last year we set up a way to showcase the good apples too so in some cases we left it by an apartment mailbox and left tons of contact information all over the label and 90 of the people did the right thing and just walked by and didn't take something that didn't belong to them then an additional seven percent took it but they were really trying to do the right thing by locating where it was supposed to go and then calling the number that was listed all over the label and they left them out by the group mailbox really yeah i'm just like i do not want to leave these there in those cases we would go retrieve the box from them and typically give them a couple hundred bucks for being so cool it's only that teensy remaining three percent that get to star in my video and they almost never fit my preconceived ocean of what a package thief is like in this case we had placed it by this mailbox and then randomly a bunch of police showed up to arrest this guy who lived there then this teenage kid comes out and grabs the box literally walking past several police officers in the process [Laughter] [Music] [Music] here we're going to actually flush this down the toilet so no one could find it yeah that feels good what clothespin stealing stop don't brag about it nothing did you know the kid he would have taken this any one of them could i have the buds we'll talk this is my christmas present merry christmas tree 15 14 13 12 11 10 9. well it was a joke it was a glitter bomb so we won't get in trouble i'm hopeful the fart spray changes thoughts on stealing and as we're in the process of putting all these boxes out i kept getting spammed with all those pre-recorded scam calls so i thought how amazing would it be if i could send a glitter bomb to one of those guys so i called on my buddy jim browning who has a youtube channel dedicated to reversing the remote connection on scammers computers in this case getting access to their cctv footage then disrupting the scam by warning the victim and or their bank and so by teaming up we were able to physically intercept two packages that were moments away from being delivered to scammers and then swap them out for glitter bombs have a good holiday and these packages contained more than ten thousand dollars in cash they were able to return to their first very confused but then very grateful owners and it's such a crazy convoluted story that involves multiple continents private investigators the nypd it's a glitter bomb it has a camera built into it there's a camera built into this but the problem is it's like we rolled over this log and all sorts of interesting stuff came crawling out so we're still chasing down leads and basically glitter bombing our way through the whole chain of command and don't worry we're being cautious and we're appropriate we're working with the authorities at any rate i was planning on putting all that in this video but the whole situation has taken such a hard right and is still ongoing that i won't be ready to tell the full story for another couple months and by the way if you're thinking how dumb could someone be i would never send 15 000 in cash through the mail just hold your judgment until you hear the full story the scammers tactics have evolved way beyond just an email from a nigerian prince so make sure you're subscribed to my channel and jim's channel if you want to hear how this whole thing pans out another new thing we tried this year was because i live near san francisco and cars get broken into all the time up there i was curious what would happen if we put one in a car seat and the window was busted literally within an hour we actually had a camera placed in the car and one across the street but apparently murphy's law was in full force that day because the one in the car suddenly got corrupted and stopped recording and then i'm sure the world's nicest but unfortunately also the slowest uber patron got picked up at precisely the worst possible moment the whole thing took like five seconds total for them to smash the window grab the box and just be gone [Music] my buddies in the field followed them for a bit in case they were just gonna toss it out the window until we heard this the pd is coming that's why we left clown that's why i was moving quick because the pd was coming i got a gun in the car about time to be driving around at that point we decided to stay put and just watch the gps as they drove all around the city streets for about two hours and look besides my theft i'm not gonna make any other accusations about them i mean maybe they're just a group of buddies who love to cruise around together for a couple hours and admire all sorts of different cars but there's another explanation entirely that also fits the gps evidence they're just trying to find a bathroom it's a restaurant it's a restaurant [Music] [Applause] either way the batteries were almost dead on the box so we decided to go with the hail mary option hey guys it's me the headphones box of uploading a custom sound to the phone to see how they would react so we don't want any trouble so you can go ahead and open me and you can have everything inside we'll call it even now i could take that audio message and text it to the box and then i could listen near real time as the clips were uploaded to the server probably not gonna go try and get that box back and so while i'm left contemplating exactly what just happened i'll leave you with my favorite reaction from this year hello 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 activation complete [Music] if you look in our freezer you'll see my ice cream well kind of you'll have to first open this bag of frozen vegetables i camouflage it in but inside that bag you'll find this cup and lid i designed now you might be thinking big whoop mark but let me explain why the whoop is in fact very big because i can put my ice cream in here and the lid just barely slides on at room temperature but then when you let it chill in the freezer for a bit and take it out the lid is clamped onto the base with 500 pounds of force thereby protecting it from anyone else in my house who won't realize the trick is just to run room temperature water over the lid for about 30 seconds and the reason this works is because the base is made from steel and the lid is made from aluminum and aluminum shrinks more when it gets cold and grows more when it warms up this idea just occurred to me one day so i made it and that's the thing i love about being an engineer if you have an idea about a thing and that thing doesn't exist you can just will it into existence so here's my big announcement i've been secretly working for nearly a year on a month-long creative engineering course that will teach you how to use engineering and science to bring your own creative ideas to life in this class i cover my full engineering design process from how i come up with the ideas to prototyping to finalizing the build and giving it character i talk through everything that i'm thinking everything that i'm doing and i do it three times over the course of a month you'll watch me design and create three totally original builds but more importantly i will guide you through finishing three creative builds of your own and this is an online class so you could take it from anywhere and work it around your schedule but it's fully immersive and intensive so whether you're a complete beginner or an experienced engineer this course has been designed to meet you where you're at and then level up your skills and the engineering process i will teach you is the exact same one i used at nasa and at apple and for all of my videos just go to monthly.com or use the link in the video description to check it out and then enroll in this month-long learning experience with me

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Views: 5,410,005

Rating: 4.9794321 out of 5

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Id: h4T_LlK1VE4

Length: 22min 11sec (1331 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ActualWhiterabbit]

There is a depressing amount of kids in the background

[u/FlyingChinesePanda]

Any reason why some faces are blurred and others not while stealing the same thing?

[u/BigShoots]

TIL 98% of all porch pirates are morbidly obese.

Seriously, what's up with that?

[u/brwonmagikk]

I know Mark said its only 3% of people that steal the package. But it stil breaks my heart to see how many families and adults (not just kids) were perfectly okay robbing someone and ruining their christmas for a temporary gain.

Couldnt be more angry to see people with kids and entire families that are all okay with this kind of behaviour. Its one thing to be a lone theif but an entire family of accomplices being on board with theft is gut wrenching.

Fuck that one mom who had the gall to admonish her son for "enjoyin" stealing, while also claiming the stolen item as her own personal present.

[u/camwow13]

"Hey baby this is your Christmas present!"

"It feels good... Stealing"

~ha let's follow the car prowlers!!~

"I carry a gun at all times here in my car"

~immediately stops following car~

I lost it at that point hahahaha. So many great quotes in this year's edition.

[u/JuliusJT]

This is my favorite end-of-the-year tradition

[u/Werft]

"It feels good."

"What feels good?"

"Stealing."

That kid is definitely gonna grow up to be a productive member of society...

[u/dreamweapon]

Next year instead of fart spray he should use a mixture of spray paint, capsaicin, and fox urine. Instead of glitter he should just use bees.

[u/wheelman12345]

Anytime someone mentioned working with Jim Browning in a video something epic is going to come of it. Too bad it didn’t make it into this video. I’m sure it opened up a big can of worms.