LPRC - Episode 18 – Buying EAS Detachers Online as a Shoplifter ft. LPRC Sr. Research Scientist Mike Giblin

Episode Date: January 20, 2019

The post Episode 18 – Buying EAS Detachers Online as a Shoplifter ft. LPRC Sr. Research Scientist Mike Giblin appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi everyone, welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. Co-host Dr. Reid Hayes of the Loss Prevention Research Council and Tom Meehan of ControlTech discuss a wide range of topics with industry experts, thought leaders, solution providers, and many more. On today's episode, returning featured guest, Mike Giblin, LPRC Senior Research Scientist, gives insight on the surprisingly accessible world of internet shoplifting communities and marketplaces and what it's like to buy EAS detaches online as a shoplifter. We would like to thank Bosch

for making this episode possible. Use Bosch Camera's onboard intelligent video analytics to quickly locate important recorded incidents or events. Bosch's forensic search saves you time and money by searching through hours or days of video within minutes to find and collect video evidence. Learn more

about intelligent video analytics from Bosch in zones one through four of LPRC's zones of influence by visiting Bosch online at boschsecurity.com. All right, welcome everybody to another episode of the LPRC's Crime Science Podcast, reporting live from Gainesville, Florida. And what I'd like to do today is keep us rolling a little bit inside the mind of the offender. And anybody that's listened to this podcast for a while knows that what we do at the LPRC and what our team at the University of Florida does is, by and large, try and reduce crime events or attempts by deterring, disrupting, and documenting, but it's all very heavily psychological premise saturated. And so psychology is where we think we begin.

There's sociology involved, of course, but it's really an individual taking in information over time and then immediately in a situation and making a call, making a decision. And that's based on, in part, what they're seeing and feeling right there, rightly or wrongly. So psychology is what it's all about. And you know, in talking with Dr. Shikotano from the University of Florida, talking with Stephanie Lynn, a research scientist at the LPRC, and so on. That's what we've explored.

What do people pick up? How do they perceive things? How do they communicate with each other? How do they recruit, scout, acquire, travel, and all these things that have to happen? And today we're going to talk with our senior research scientist, Mike Giblin. He's the leader of our research team. And in that realm of research, he's going to talk a little about what he's finding, looking for on the internet and other places, in addition to us talking to people on the ground that are involved in crime. And of course, I'm joined, as always, by my co-host, Tom Meehan, a VP of several important parts of Control Tech and a longtime LPAP practitioner at the Home Depot, of course, at Bloomingdale's and so forth.

Tom, I'm going to go over to you to make a quick intro, and then we'll talk with our senior research scientist, Mike Giblin. Well, thank you, Reed. Thank you, Mike, for joining. It's great to be on the podcast. We have an exciting episode. It's great to be on the podcast. We have an exciting episode. It's always fun to talk about the LPRC and some of the great research projects that are going on. So today, Mike is going to talk a little bit about a rather large project that was broken up into two. Mike, why don't you just start and give just a brief overview of how this all started and how you ended up taking one very large project and breaking it down into two.

Sure. Yeah, thanks, Reid. Thanks, Tom. So the Product Protection Working Group has been around in the LPRC for a very long time. I've been facilitating it for about five years now. And in that group, we do a lot of work looking at EAS technologies. One of the common themes that's come up over the years has been this idea that this technology is becoming a little bit easier to find. You can, you know, find detachers online, you can maybe find tutorials on how to defeat these technologies online, YouTube videos, Reddit forums, so on and so forth. So it seems like it was really reaching kind of a point where our members wanted us to explore that a little bit.

So as Reid kind of alluded to, a lot of the research that we do is kind of in the laboratory setting or in a setting where we bring someone in and talk to them. And it's not observational in nature. So there's things like the Hawthorne effect. There's things like, you know, observer bias, those types of things that occur in that domain. And one of the big advantages to more observational research or going out and just trying to take a look at how things are working is that you don't disturb the kind of environment that you're trying to study. You get kind of a clear picture of what it would look like if you weren't present in it.

And so we wanted to take a look at the online world of trying to learn how to shoplift as well as of trying to obtain shoplifting tools, particularly EAS detachers, magnet detachers, those types of things. So it kind of ended up getting split into two because we needed to explore the world of online shoplifting in general a little bit in order to get our bearings and to find where we could get these detachers and kind of where to start. One of the really exciting pieces of this was, from my perspective, kind of being able to take off the research scientist hat a little bit. And I actually kind of had to go in and approach this with the mindset of what would a typical person that's interested in shoplifting do? What would they kind of have at their disposal as far as

tools. So, you know, they wouldn't have a business email address that they could ask people to send technologies to. They wouldn't necessarily have the knowledge of the industry that someone like myself that's been in for a couple of years would. So it was a really fun endeavor in pretending to be a shoplifter and kind of getting into that character and playing that role, you know, trying to go in and use the same type of web browsers they would and approach it very similarly to how they would. So I know that at the LPR Impact Conference, you went over this study in detail and you also wrote a fantastic article, what it's like to buy AAS Detachers online as a shoplifter. And I was fortunate enough to hear you speak about it live

at Impact, read the article, and then talk to you about it a couple of times. What are some of the key things that you learned in the process of essentially turning yourself into a shoplifter and trying to find these detachers? What are some of the key things that you learned? Yeah, so I think going into this, I had kind of this vision conjured in my mind of having to do a little bit more legwork to get myself started than what ended up actually occurring. So I thought I would have to download Tor or some sort of dark web browser. I thought that I would have to create a couple of fake, maybe a new credit card account or go get gift cards, that kind of thing. I think the thing that struck me most right out of the bat, sorry, right out of the gate is just how easy it was and how kind of how apparent this is. And it's not

something that's, you know, deep in the dark web. It's in the top five Google searches when you search for something as simple as how do I shoplift or where do I get an EAS detacher. So you can just, you know, it's available for anyone to take a look at. So it's kind of disheartening from the perspective of someone that's in the retail LP world that these things are so visible and so easy. You know, you can just go in Google. It'll be one of the top 10 hits. And you can find yourself in forums that, you know, give very specific step-by-step guidelines on how to shoplift. You'll find places that will tell you exactly what detachers you need and give you advice on how to steal those detachers from retail stores or how to purchase them online, if that's the way that you decide to go.

So I think that was one of the things that really struck me right off the bat. Another piece that was very interesting was the kind of psychological kind of wrapping that these forums were couched within. So I found two basic types of web domains that contain this type of shoplifting and detacher information. The first is kind of anti-capitalistic and anarchist in nature. So there were web pages where you could find information on shoplifting that had a lot of rhetoric about, you know, comrades, let's come together and, you know, fight the good fight against capitalism and against, you know, these evil big corporations. It was actually couched within this survivalism kind of thing and pitched it as almost similar to a tutorial on how to make fire or something like that. It's like, once this thing

all falls apart, you're really going to need to know how to shoplift. So it was almost a survival guide of sorts of how to shoplift. So that's kind of the first archetype that I saw. The second was uplift. So that's kind of the first archetype that I saw. The second was more of an informative kind of online forum. So just like you would go to any blog or any sort of online Reddit forum, for instance, to learn how to knit or to learn how to install a new computer program. The kind of pros that these EAS Detacher tutorials were written in was just as informative and just as kind of a matter of fact as any of those others that you would see. So it was written in was just as informative and just as kind of a matter of fact as, uh, as any of those others that you would see. Um, so it was written, uh, in a way that was meant to serve a community. So you're writing something that you think is going to be helpful. Uh, the reward

system seems to be this kind of open feedback loop of, uh, upvotes in the case of things like forums, you know, likes people acknowledging your work saying, wow, that was a great tutorial. You know, uh, you clearly know a lot about this. You've done a great job. So it seemed to almost be this, this social kind of communal piece to it. And it wasn't written in a very apologetic way, as I mentioned, it was very much, you know, matter of fact, this is how you conduct this type of behavior. And, and I know that this is a more opinion based question. But I think, you know, we talked so heavily today about organized retail crime. And I know that this is a more opinion-based question but i think you know we talked so heavily today about organized retail crime and i know that's something that i have a passion for and when i was in asset protection i had global responsibility for and you know commonly it's

like the number one thing i think that comes up when i see people today is organized retail crime did you have a sense on those forums was Was it more habitual shoplifters, disgruntled folks just writing about it? Was there anything that keyed you into what type of people were putting the information out there? If I were to take a guess, I don't think that the level of depth that I encountered in most of these tutorials of how to shoplift, where to go, what time of day you should approach certain sections of certain stores. I don't think that that level of depth would have been possible without some sort of insider knowledge. So I do think that these were

former employees that at least contributed in part to these forums and to this base of knowledge of how to do these types of things. I have a perception that ORC folks are maybe a little bit more careful than your habitual shoplifter. If I were an ORC offender, I wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable going onto a, you know, online website. And, you know, I'd be thinking about things like my IP address. I'd be thinking about things like me being tracked and this being used against me in court later. But I didn't really find any evidence one way or the other on whether these folks that were part of these online ecosystems were ORC or not. But I do think there was an internal component for sure. So that's very interesting.

You know, I often look to the Los Ferrens Research Council and have for many, many years. for Rent and Research Council and have for many, many years is you specifically, Mike and Reid and the whole group really have a depth of knowledge that even a retailer doesn't amass because you have the luxury of working directly with hundreds of people who get, so you arguably absorb hundreds of people's experience and then get to research it. With that being said, the information that you're reading, how accurate was it? I mean, really, was it really good info? Was it something that you think someone could take and actually tangibly use to help them steal? Or was it more of the associate that got disgruntled and said, hey, you can do this? Just based on all of your interactions with all the working groups and all the people

because I would say this is you are an expert in asset protection practices you are an expert in all those things so you probably have a good understanding of when you're reading this forum post was it common sense that someone wrote down was you know, or was it tangible things that you're going, wow, if someone took this, they'd be able to steal better? That's a really interesting question, Tom. So when we interview offenders in person, often the kind of takeaway that I'm left with is more kind of the former of what you're talking about. So the person may think that they're being particularly clever and that they are particularly apt. But in fact, I'm not terribly impressed with what they're saying. You know, they're essentially just telling me all you have to do is walk into the store and run and

no one will stop you. There's no, you know, super special techniques or anything that are going on. Oftentimes, there are folks that are particularly talented, maybe in the 20 to 30% range of the folks that we talk to in person that I do get a sense are very good at what they do in the realm of shoplifting. But it seems like the cream tends to rise to the top in these online forums. So most of the things that I was encountering, I was very impressed by the depth of knowledge and by them using the actual terms that we would use in the industry. So they weren't just saying the weird black detacher looking thing. and by them using the actual terms that we would use in the industry. So they weren't just saying the weird black detacher-looking thing. They were saying the alpha S3 key is what you're looking for,

and it's attached in this way, and this is the type of tool you need to remove it. So there were a lot of specifics baked in. There was, again, industry jargon, which I found surprising. And I would say that the overall level of intellect and of internal knowledge was very high online. It's very interesting. I think I kind of agree with you the same way. I can remember interviewing people that shoplifted that were always so boisterous about, I can do anything, I can do this. And I'd literally appropriately and professionally say, well, you got caught. like you're sitting here talking to me yeah exactly so uh that was that was always the funny thing where i think

some of the more cautious people that are detail-oriented are the ones that that take a little bit more approach so but i i would love to get into the specifics of the study i you know i i think it would be really interesting what what actual process was like to, let's just say I'm a bad guy and actually wanted to buy a magnetic detacher, an S3 key. What is that like? What is the process like? How long does it take? I know that you went through the fundamentals of it was easy to find them, but when you actually went to the step of saying, I'm going to buy this, what actually happens? Yeah. So I did have a couple kind of ground rules for myself. As I mentioned, I wanted to approach this as similarly to how I think a typical, you know, would be shoplifter would

approach this. So a couple things I did, I used, you know, personal email address, I didn't want to get special treatment, because I had an email domain that looked as though it might be professional. Another thing I did was I did purchase gift cards and use those in order to buy these. I figured that that would maybe be a level of care that more so than not offenders would take. They wouldn't want to enter their own personal credit card information. I went on the web and looked for essentially the different types of detachers that were part of this study. So we had five different technologies from four solution providers. We looked at the Alpha S3 key as well as their new encoded key.

We looked at AllTag's QTag, which is a very high-strength magnet that also uses a magnet array that's supposed to be kind of impossible to duplicate unless you have the actual magnet itself. You can't just use a very strong single magnet. The CIS magnet and IR system. So it has an infrared light trigger that pairs with the magnet. And if you don't have that infrared light, then it won't open. And then the Sifron LM and IR turtle technologies. So I went looking for these. I also looked for

basic technologies like a fairly low strength detacher, around 6,000 gauss, as well as a high strength magnetic detacher. And those were kind of the domains of technologies that I was looking around for. I started out looking just on the general Google web search. I ended up kind of going down the path of Amazon.com, Alibaba.com, Craigslist, eBay, and Walmart.com. Those were the main places that I found myself more often than not. So the process itself for most of these places did not involve creating an account, which I found a little bit surprising. But I think Amazon.com was the only place that I needed an account in order to do what I needed to. The other places I could kind of just do a temporary, you know, order as a guest kind of thing. The gift cards worked in 100% of the cases. So there was never a point where somebody

stopped me and said, as I entered that information, this is a gift card, we need you to pay with a credit card or something along those lines. So I thought that that was noteworthy. The shipment dates varied quite a bit. So I had some things that offered, you know, two day shipping and free returns and a satisfaction guarantee. I had others that, you know, it was it would arrive eventually, it would arrive someday, it was coming from China, and it would get there when it gets there. So there was a lot of variation in that kind of metric of when things were going to arrive. I think one of the most striking things that occurred once I actually made these purchases was the rate at which I didn't get what was advertised. So I had several technologies that were kind of a bait and switch.

They sent me just an empty kind of package that had just a little card that said your actual package is on the way, but it never actually came. So it seems like they're potentially kind of trying to take advantage of the fact that whoever's ordering these things is probably too timid to complain to customer service. And so it seems like maybe there's some folks that are taking advantage of that. I had a couple of technologies that were delivered and seemed as advertised, but they had claims at being able to open a hyperlock. And once they got them here to the lab, they turned out to not be the magnet strength that was necessary to actually do that. So they were a little bit lower strength than they had been advertised to be. So those were, I think, the most striking things

right off the bat. And so when you talk about ship times and things of that nature, did you have any interaction with any of the sellers? I think I recall you talking about some deep interaction with the sellers. What was that like? Was it helpful? Were they giving you accurate information? Were they just being good customer service people? I remember you talking about an impact. I remember, but really, I remember that striking that, but what was it really? I know we only talked briefly about it. What was it really like the interaction? Yeah.

So, um, I think the, the most interesting, uh, website was alibaba.com. So on Alibaba, uh, the system's a little bit different than it is on other websites like Amazon. You're not actually placing an order for something. You're kind of placing a bid. You're saying, I want this number of units of this type of technology. Then suppliers will essentially try to satisfy that bid. They'll respond to your email address and they'll say, I can fulfill that bid at this

price. I can fulfill that bid at that price. That's kind of what happened. I was only ordering a single unit. The price point for these things in this case was I think around $150 to $200 for a single unit, which was enough incentive for some individuals to reach out to me personally and kind of try to operate as sort of a concierge service. So that was kind of the article that I wrote and shared in LPM that's been kind of circulating is the personal shoplifting concierge. So it was a really interesting experience. I had one individual reach out to me and essentially say, hey, you know, I can fulfill this order for you, but not only can I get you this high gauss detacher, but I can get

you anything you want. So what else can I help you with? What other types of, I think she worded it, what other types of tags do you use so that I can get you what you need? So at that point, you know, as potentially a shoplifter, as I'm kind of trying to portray, I essentially said, I would like to unlock these different types of tags. I didn't directly say I own these tags or that I run a store or anything like that. I just said, these are the things I would like to attach. I didn't say defeat, but I think, you know, everybody in the conversation seemed to understand potentially what was happening here. So there was some back and forth. There were about five email interactions back and forth of me saying, you know, I basically put together a menu of all the different technologies that I was interested in that were part of this test.

I said, I want all these. There was some back and forth. Well, can you give me more specifics on this? There were a couple of cases where I believe this individual was located in China. And the website that I had sent her did not appear for her. So it appeared to be blocked in the country of China, which I thought was interesting. I don't know if it was necessarily deliberate on the part of the solution provider involved, but there was this downstream effect of if your website's not available in China, you may be less susceptible to this type of thing

occurring where somebody's interacting with a supplier that's located there trying to obtain your detachers for kind of illicit use. From there, we did some back and forth, and she ended up only being able to supply me what I had originally kind of placed a bid for, which is a high Gauss magnetic detacher. And it did arrive, but again, wasn't able to open the Hyperlocks from ControlTech that we had here at the lab. And so that was actually a question that I wanted to turn to you, Tom. I think you may have a little bit more kind of domain expertise when it comes to what the Gauss ratings are and what Hyperlock, you know, exactly means. So would you say, you know, I think I ordered something that said it was 15,000 Gauss and it did not open your Hyperlock.

Would the expectation be that a 15,000 Gauss would open that Hyperlock or is that a kind of higher magnetic strength that's necessary? Yeah, so it's a little bit of, there's a little semantics in the name. So when you think of a standard lock, you know, you'll hear the term of 16,000 gallons. There is a range, so a 6,000 for a standard. There is a range associated with the locking mechanism if it's a spring-based locking mechanism. So if it's a clutch, it is what it is. But when you apply a spring to it, the spring, let's say, I'll just use, it doesn't matter the locking mechanism. Let's say the Gauss for a standard is 6,000. That spring is going to have a range of maybe four to six. I'm just using that as an example. When you get into hyper or super,

it's the same thing. So if you use a spring-loaded size, anybody who tells you an exact science either doesn't understand it or has never really done testing because springs wear and springs, you know, they have metal fatigue. So if you designed a spring to start at 16,000, every time you open it, it could change that. But Hyperlock, what we generally do is go to the highest quality spring or metal we can. So we start at the very highest point where in some cases you might have something that's 14,000 gallons, which is still harder than a super standard, but isn't truly the highest method. It isn't an exact science. We can't control if a retailer turns their inventory 12 times a year, 15 times a year, or three times a year, that has a direct effect on the spring mechanism. It should never go lower than the point of a hyper unless it was used hundreds of thousands of times or damaged.

But there are cases where a magnet that you order online, and I don't want to say from an unreputable source, but if you're buying something Alibaba and you don't know who you're buying it from, a magnet might be hyper in the sense that it's above 12,000 gauss but it isn't the max range so that's one of the things with hyper that is interesting and we're finding in the US quite honestly it is that hyper because the magnet is harder to get and more expensive for folks that the retailers were seeing are having good results it's highly adopted in Europe, highly adopted outside the U.S. It would actually, I'm fortunate, you know, working in retail and

kind of seeing how people steal and doing those things for over 20 years and working so closely with the LBRC and then switching sides. I do a tremendous amount of international travel, I'll say. So what are people doing in other countries differently than us? How does it work? And, you know, Reid would disown me if I didn't take a scientific method. So I don't just sit down and guess. I actually test and do lab and we use independent testing. statement that it is truly fact-based and that we can back that up and understand. And when I started here, we learned very quickly that in Europe, it was almost impossible to find a standard lock, that it was all super or hyper. And when I started talking to people about super, they literally both from a retail and an integrator said, well, why would you ever buy that? Why would you start with the easiest to defeat?

Why wouldn't you start with the hardest? And so that's what we're seeing. And to your point, and I had a question specifically to Hyper, did you actually get any good Hyperlock detachers in that really opened every Hyperlock tag you had at your exposure? Because generally a high quality Hyperlock magnet is expensive, like costs more than $150 for everybody. You know, even if you buy it in volume, where a standard lock magnet, you could probably get sub $10 if you knew where to get it, even sub $5. So did you personally get any hyperlock magnets that actually worked on the whole array of tags? We did not. So we're going to do multiple iterations of this. Obviously, this is a very kind of dynamic situation. You'll find certain technologies available one day on eBay that will

sell and not be available the next day. So we want to do a couple of kind of snapshots in time. But for this particular portion of the test, we got a high-gauss magnet detacher that opened some of the hyperlocks in the array that we have here at the lab, but did not open others. And so we didn't get anything that was capable of opening every single one. Okay. And then I have just a question. So your person from Alibaba that you were interacting with in those five messages said she could get you anything. Did you ask her for an array of detachers, and was she actually able to get you anything? So she was approaching it from the perspective of what types of tags I was looking to detach.

opinion, the item that she was able to source to me was a hyper and was capable of opening, you know, any high magnet strength tag that didn't have another technology such as IR built into it. That turned out to not be correct. As I mentioned, once we received it, it was able to open some, but not all hyperlocks. And her response actually to trying to source these other technologies was pleasantly responsible. So her response to, I believe, the Alpha S3 key with the encoder, as well as the CIS magnet and the Sifron tag, was something along the lines of, these are copyrighted detachers. I cannot get them for you. You have to go straight to the manufacturer. So that was pleasant to see.

That's great. And then just out of curiosity, because you had a really good chart in the LP magazine that I remember looking at on the article, but don't recall from it. What was your success rate overall in going through all these pieces where you, not including where people debate and switch, but when you actually asked for a product that was delivered, it worked overall. So I'll kind of go over things based on the technology type. So one kind of really striking piece was that low magnetic strength and high magnetic strength detachers were very similar when it came to ease

of acquisition. The only real difference was price point. So the exact same websites that I had success getting the 6,000 gauss, I had equal success getting the 15 or 16,000 gauss, which I was a little bit surprised by there. I was only able to get one alpha S3 key, and this was the classic alpha that doesn't have the encoder kind of chip built into it. And there's an interesting story there that I'll tell here in a second. But the other technologies I didn't have any success with, and one of the pieces that I talk about when I presented this research is that a lot of these technologies are fairly new. They aren't terribly kind of ubiquitous. They're not in a ton of stores.

And so it's going to be a supply and demand kind of thing. So we definitely want to do a retest of this once some of these technologies are in stores and the demand pumps up and, you know, kind of the whole ecosystem starts to form a little bit around it. But back to that Alpha S3 key, I was only able to find it in one place. It was an eBay order that essentially was a single S3 key and 25 spider wraps. So I placed the order. I think it was around $70 that it cost. It arrived fairly quickly, within about a week. And these things had clearly been used quite a bit. So the S3 key was very dirty, grungy looking. When you flipped it over and looked on the back, there was an adhesive, a strong adhesive that, you know, you would think had adhered it to maybe a counter at a store. And you could see where

someone had taken a Phillips head screwdriver and worked that thing loose. You could see kind of the damage marks. And so I thought that was really interesting. I made note of it. And when I presented this at the impact conference, we actually had the checkpoint team there and they came and spoke to me afterwards. We've passed each detacher around the room. Everyone had a chance to touch and feel everything. They flipped the thing over and they typed in the serial number. They sent it back to their home office. And by the time I was done talking, 30 minutes later, they were able to tell me exactly who they had sold that detacher to, what store it was in. So it turned out to be

from a closed Toys R Us store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They were able to tell me when they sold it to them. And we were really able to kind of go down the rabbit hole and say, okay, so what happened, obviously, was this store closed, and there was some sort of liquidation that took place. And this thing ended up potentially in the wrong hands. You know, it was ended up being okay, because I went to the LPRC team, but it could have gone anywhere at that point. So that sparked a really interesting conversation about ownership of these detachers, who owns it once it gets sent to the retailer, serialization, being more responsible when it comes to tracking these things when a store closes

and when things liquidate, getting it back to the solution provider. Maybe there's a buyback program. There were a lot of really interesting thoughts there that we're going to continue to look at in 2019. Yeah, that's very interesting. I know in my past on the retail side in multiple locations, serialization was very intriguing when we were dealing with ORC or internal cases. It was always nice to be able to, if we had an internal case, identify what store the detacher came from or an ORC. And I do know that sitting on the other side,

we do have some customers that request serialization, some that don't care. So I'm really interested in the future of that. And then you had mentioned that you did some research early on related to forms and things. During that research, and you may not have come across it, but during that research, did you find videos that said you don't need a detacher? You can take the tag off this way? I didn't, but I think that's definitely an interesting piece that we're going to look at here in the future. The scope of this particular research was looking more at honest-to-goodness detachers that were designed by the manufacturer themselves.

I think that there's a really interesting kind of second avenue that you're alluding to that looks at makeshift detachers. So, you know, can I stack a bunch of magnets together or can I, you know, have my iPhone IR kind of sensor paired with a magnet and all these different types of things. We did interview 20 offenders to pair up with this research. And a lot of what they were talking about was, you know, a plan to be able to somehow defeat this thing. So, for instance, the Sifron technology uses a light strobe, and they thought that maybe they could somehow download a program that would simulate that light strobe on their cell phone flashlight. There were folks that were expressing to us that, you know, I got a buddy that works construction, or I got a buddy that works at a butcher shop, and, you know, these different places where they were very confident that they could get their hands on a magnet that was strong enough to defeat anything. This whole concept of magnets that you couldn't just overpower was maybe a little bit

lost on some of the folks that we talked with. So there's this, yeah, there's additional avenue of devising your own device as well as, you know, just using brute force, finding a way to, you know, I've heard a technique where they take like a hair tie or a rubber band and they just keep twisting it to create enough pressure to pop it. So I think that that's a really interesting piece that we'll look at here in 2019 as well. Oh, that's actually, I guess now you've piqued my interest in the offenders. Out of the 20 offenders in your interview, had any of them ever purchased a detacher before? They hadn't.

They hadn't. I believe I had some individuals that felt very confident that they knew someone that worked in retail, a close friend or family member, and that they would be able to get it from a friend very easily. That seemed to be a more common avenue that people thought that they would pursue. So they seemed less comfortable with going online and trying to buy this thing through commerce or from a stranger, from eBay, so on and so forth. It seemed like they were thinking more along the lines of, I can get this from a friend, which spoke to me to the way that they maybe view this entire kind of enterprise. You know, it's something that you can't just trust anyone with. The folks that end up working together in little, you know, ORC rings or working together, you know, as a lookout person and a person going into the store are often,

you know, family members, or there's a very deep level of trust that's been established there. And that seems to be kind of steering them away from this option of looking for online detachers, which I found interesting. And throughout the whole process, Mike, was there any, I mean, you've been doing this for a while, so this is always what I'm interested in. Was there anything shocking, like truly, if you said the one thing that I was just blown away by, what would that be? Hmm. So I think from the offender perspective, I think that the, the fact that the perception, like the first impression of each detacher type seemed to really tell the story and stick with them. So it was very much about

how intimidating a detacher looked or how, you know, the words that I was using to articulate what it was, whether any of them were particularly impressive. So, you know, light strobe or IR, whatever the case may be. People seemed to form opinions, and it seemed to be more about that initial opinion when it came to their level of deterrence than it was about the technology itself and the actual nuts and bolts of could you defeat this thing? You know, there's a reality out there of, you know, could you take an iPhone and create the light strobe you need? Or could you get the IRR sensor that you need? And those realities did not seem to be nearly as important as those immediate perceptions. And so if we're looking at this from a deterrent standpoint, it's really important,

naming these things correctly, thinking about the way that the technologies that you talk about are going to kind of immediately hit the palate of the offender. If it sounds intimidating enough, then they might avoid it, whether or not the technology is actually sound. And on the flip side of that, if the technology is great, but it doesn't sound intimidating, then you might end up with less deterrence than you'd like to see right off the bat. From the perspective of kind of overall on this study, the thing that was most shocking, I think, was the concierge piece to it. So I found it very surprising.

The customer service level was absolutely fantastic. So it was right on par with American Express or Bank of America or any of these companies that you would expect to see this from. The entire five or six email back and forth occurred over the course of about 48 hours. We were in different time zones, and that didn't seem to hold things up at all. entire five or six email back and forth occurred over the course of about 48 hours. You know, we were in different time zones, and that didn't seem to hold things up at all. It wasn't a tremendously large monetary value, this order, you know, it was a single detacher for around $150. But I was really surprised at the level of kind of, you know, customer service that I encountered. And I think that that really spoke to this larger theme that I was expecting to feel

more like I was in the dark during this process, that I was kind of creeping through the shadows, when in reality, it felt just like shopping for anything else. You know, it didn't feel like I was doing anything wrong, which was really interesting. Yeah, that is definitely interesting, especially with the level of interaction. So are there key takeaways that a retailer should think about or a solution provider should think about? Is there two or three key takeaways based on this, or do we need to do more research? the Impact Conference was a potential opportunity to use the fact that these would-be offenders are gathered at these spaces of the internet and try to come up with some cool advertising. So you can try to buy out ad space on eBay's website whenever someone types in a certain

keyword search of EAS or alpha or whatever. Not only can you do your best as a team to try to monitor that and make sure that none of your product's available, but you could have some sort of banner ad that pops up that says, hey, just so you know, we're doing our best to monitor this, or Walmart's doing this or that, or this store's doing this or that. On the online forums, who knows who owns these things, so it might be a little bit tougher, but it's definitely an interesting thought and potential opportunity for retailers and for solution providers. Great. And so I know what's the next leg of this research study? So what should

our members expect next from this? Because I know it was a multi-part and became a very big and living, breathing research study that everybody was really interested in. So what's the next leg of it? When should people expect to see it? Yeah. So a couple pieces have already been published. I'm going to bring everything together and finish up the full report on this entire kind of endeavor over the course of this Christmas break. So by early January, I'm going to have that out to our membership. That'll go out through our LPRC Connect. Future research we're looking at, we're looking for a partner to look at that advertising space have that out to our membership. That'll go out through our LPRC Connect. The future research we're looking at, we're looking for a partner to look at that advertising space that I just

mentioned. So either a retailer or a solution provider that is willing to work with us on that. We'd love to take a look at how we can affect people in what we would call Zone 5. I think it's a really interesting overall concept. We're doing some of that in our Baltimore iChain with violence. We really want to start to in our Baltimore iChain with violence. We really want to start to understand, you know, who are the decision makers, who are the people that you need to get information in front of when you're trying to spread new information about technologies, about deterrence that are out there. So that's one piece of research that we're going to be conducting in 2019.

It's going to be kind of an additional part of this project. going to be conducting in 2019. It's going to be kind of an additional part of this project. We're also going to look a little bit closer into the kind of ownership of EAS detachers. So, you know, is a system where you're renting it instead of owning it as a retailer? Is that more viable? How effective is serialization? You know, things along those lines. We're going to take a look at those. We're going to take a look at policies of, you know, what do you do when a store is liquidating or when someone's going out of business? Where do these things end up? Is there a process in place for that? And then, as you mentioned earlier, I think a big piece of 2019 is going to be looking at the other side of the coin of YouTube videos that show you how to pop an EAS tag off or that show you how to build your own detacher. So rather than trying to get the legitimate thing, am I trying to build my own makeshift detacher? Or am I trying to just defeat it with, you know, a pair of pliers and a rubber band or that type of thing? So there's a lot of things that we're going to be covering in the product protection group, looking at this kind

of EAS ecosystem and the Defeat ecosystem here in 2019. Well, I think I'm very excited for the next steps. Can you just tell the listeners how they can get involved in the product protection group or the LPRC? I mean, I think the bulk of our listeners are members, but I know there are some that aren't because I often get reached out. So how does one get involved

in the product protection group? How does one get involved in the LPRC? Yeah, that's a great question. So our website's a great place to start for folks that are not terribly familiar with us, lpresearch.org. From there, you can find a sign up button that'll give you all the information you need on how to get involved with our organization. If you're already a member and you'd just like to be part of the product protection group, please email mike at lpresearch.org, just saying, hey, add me to this group. I'll be happy to send you the calendar invite. We had our call for the month of December earlier this morning, and it went very well. We had 25

folks on that call, which I was shocked by it being the last day that a lot of folks are working before Christmas, but really appreciate that. And that's what's allowed us to pump out these cool projects is the level of interactivity and of work that our retail and solution provider members put in in these calls. So really exciting stuff. you've done a lot of homework in this area as well as having a lot of experience and Mike again super job and you can see this is what science is all about it's iterative it takes time but we're always building on what we find in most good research you hear this all the time generates a lot more questions than it does answers and that's fine that's the way it works and this is another piece of really valuable research and you heard Mike's response on, you know, where are we going next? How are we building on this? And we're talking about going out in Zone 5 beyond the parking lot and trying to understand. And again, we're trying to affect, nudge, whatever, the people that are protecting places,

people, assets, and we're trying to do the same thing with those that are offending and, further, those that affect offenders. So there's a method to the madness. We're trying to work together 70-plus retail chains, our science team, and 75 solution or technology companies working together in one LPRC research and results community. So thank you everybody for tuning in again. We've actually got a lot more very interesting, hopefully cool things to talk about in some upcoming episodes. Take care out there. And signing off from Gainesville, Florida, this is Reed Hayes, Tom Meehan for the LPRC Crime Science Podcast. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast

presented by the Laws Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and value information at lpresearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal,

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