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Woman wears Amazon vest while stealing packages
PHOENIX - Thieves are getting creative when it comes to stealing packages from your front door. In this particular case, a woman is dressed like an Amazon delivery driver.
Video shows a woman with an Amazon vest dropping off a Walmart bag, then picking up a package in front of someone's Phoenix home in the Westwood neighborhood near 19th Avenue and Camelback Road.
The porch pirate grabbed that package just a few minutes after the actual Amazon driver dropped it off. The homeowner quickly uploaded the video to social media to warn his neighbors.
"The guy dropped off the packages, and she picked them up right away. So I said, we've been ripped off," David Gibson, the victim, said.
He says she used a Walmart bag as an apparent decoy.
"She dropped off a Walmart bag with an empty shoebox. So, she is pretending she's delivering something, and she drops that and picks up our boxes and takes off."
A neighbor replied to Gibson's social media post that their package was also stolen from the same person.
"This is the house just a little bit down the street from me where she comes in, and you can see she's bringing in a fake package. She drops it off and steals the neighbor's package, and then she's going into, police say, it's like a 2013 Nissan something rather, but it didn't have a license plate on it," Gibson said.
The suspect's photo was also seen on a Neighborhood app posted by a different neighbor.
"She walked right over to my neighbor a few houses down and grabbed a big box, started walking off with it. So, I ran after her and told her, 'Stop it, put it back. That's not yours. I'm calling the cops,'" a neighbor named Kristen Castro said. "It's just frustrating to see that people just think they can walk around and walk on someone else's property and take their things, you know, that aren't theirs. I just don't understand how someone can even do that. I really don't."
Amazon says, unfortunately, there are bad actors who wear look-alike apparel to steal packages.
Amazon's full statement on this incident reads, "While the vast majority of deliveries make it to customers without issue, we recognize that, unfortunately, there are bad actors who wear look-alike apparel to steal packages from customers’ homes. We encourage anyone who’s been a victim of package theft to report it to the police and we’ll work with law enforcement to help as much as possible. Amazon’s customer service is also available 24/7 to help with any matters related to deliveries."