Revealed, the reality about porch pirates: Mail investigation exposes the sneaky approach ‘well dressed’ doorstep bundle thieves work, learn how to inform when you’re a goal, the time they strike… and learn how to foil them

The moment she saw the elegant, biscuit-coloured cashmere sweater, Lisa Parkins knew she had found the perfect Christmas gift for her mother.

Even better, there was a pair of matching trousers. So, the December before last, she excitedly ordered both and waited for her parcel to arrive so she could get the present wrapped and under the tree.

Her items were dispatched via a courier, and a few days later Lisa got confirmation that her parcel had been delivered, including a picture of it sitting on the metal letter boxes in the entry area of her block of flats in East London.

At 5pm, she arrived home to collect it, only to discover it wasn’t there. ‘I was furious,’ she says. Footage from a CCTV camera monitoring the entrance hall showed a man letting himself into the building a couple of hours after Lisa’s delivery, slipping in behind an Amazon driver.

‘The driver was propping open the front door with a huge bag with multiple deliveries, as the thief walked past,’ says Lisa. ‘He was tall, thin and wearing a backpack. He looked smart, as if he was coming home from work, and snuck in as the door closed. I watched him put my delivery into his backpack and leave.’

Lisa reported the crime via the Metropolitan Police’s website the next day, more in hope that a record of the incident might pressure the building’s management into making the entrance system safer, than expecting the criminal to be caught.

Parcels for residents of the 12 flats in her building were usually left by the letterboxes to the side of the building’s front door. ‘As far as couriers were concerned this was safer than leaving parcels on an open doorstep – but people walking past could see everyone’s post,’ she says.

‘The front door closed slowly so it was easy for criminals to follow delivery drivers, who didn’t realise they weren’t residents, and grab parcels.’

Such theft – so-called ‘Porch Piracy’ – has become a routine feature of life around Britain, not just in apartment blocks but in suburban streets and quiet villages.

The latest figures – revealed through freedom of information requests to every police force in Britain made by technology company Quadient – show that a record £376.6 million of parcels have been reported stolen over the past year.

People like Lisa, living in blocks of flats were 24 times more likely to be victims of parcel theft than those living in houses, with gangs raiding communal areas.

But parcel theft has become a problem everywhere, with the current period – Black Friday, tomorrow, then the run-up to Christmas – being the most intense as online shopping goes into overdrive.

Neighbourhood WhatsApp and Facebook groups are full of doorbell videos showing thieves stealing parcels from doorsteps.

Miss a delivery notification and you may well find your precious online order left on your doorstep, or half-hidden behind a hedge or waste bin, put there by a hard-pressed courier on a tight delivery schedule and a target for thieves.

Porch piracy rose by 287 per cent between 2019 and 2022 and almost doubled over the past year. Some studies suggest as many as 23 million parcels go missing every year, with as few as one in 300 such thefts reported to the police.Post pandemic, many workers have returned to their offices, meaning deliveries are left unattended for longer – research shows parcel theft is most common between 9am and 5pm. 

And of course, police, too stretched to even investigate burglaries, rarely take an interest, even when the crime is caught on camera. Unsurprisingly, opportunists have been getting more brazen, such as the smartly dressed thief caught on a doorbell camera running up to Ben Palmer’s semi-detached home in Southampton in broad daylight in September last year, where he grabbed three Amazon deliveries and ran off.

Palmer, 45, head of operations at Octopus Energy, reported the theft. Police put the case on file pending further evidence. A couple were also captured on video, stealing a package from lingerie company Victoria’s Secret, which had been flung over the locked gate to a home in West London by Evri a few months earlier. Doorbell footage shows a woman using her leg to drag the package towards her between the bars of the gate before they flee.

Rachel Swinford, 34, a teacher from High Wycombe, Bucks, had a £200 dehumidifier stolen from outside her front door. Her fiancé, Jack, 33, a chef, had answered the doorbell to the delivery driver remotely, while he was at work. ‘He told the driver to leave it outside our front door, which was stupid,’ recalls Rachel. Jack arrived home from work to see a man picking up the humidifier and running away from their terraced property.

‘Jack chased him for a street and because he was gaining on him the thief dropped it in the back garden of a house – we don’t know if he lived there – and ran towards the house,’ says Rachel. At which point Jack picked up the humidifier and told the thief he had seen him steal it. He denied it, and, at a loss to know what else to do, Jack returned home.

The theft was recorded on the couple’s doorbell camera. ‘I screenshotted an image and posted it on our local Facebook group, telling everyone to beware of their parcels because this man had just stolen mine,’ says Rachel, who was inundated by messages saying he was a known thief. ‘One woman messaged me with his name. We reported it to the police online, along with our doorbell footage, but never got a response.’

Sian Thomas’s story takes porch piracy to a new level – a woman apparently attempted to steal a Christmas gift Sian had bought for her daughter when it was delivered to her by mistake. She was wrapping presents when she realised one was missing: a luxury £35 make-up brush holder her daughter, Beth, had asked for.

Panicked – by December 22 it was too late to order a replacement – she logged on to eBay and saw it had been sent, but she had forgotten to include the name of her workplace in her delivery address. The street name and postcode of the tiny village where she worked only contained a few houses – so, surely, she reasoned, someone living there would have taken delivery of her parcel.

Knowing the parcel must be near, Sian, a mother of two and project manager who lives with husband Stephen, 68, a retired maintenance worker in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, went out during her break next day to knock on the dozen or so doors that shared a postcode with her workplace.

‘I politely asked people if they’d received a parcel in my name. Everyone said no.’

At the last property, a man in his 30s answered the door. Unlike his neighbours, Sian recalls, he seemed ‘disgruntled. I wasn’t sure why. He said his wife ordered online all the time but wasn’t home. He didn’t to want to look for the parcel, so I left’. By chance, on her return to work, she bumped into the postman. ‘When I told him my name, he remembered delivering the missing parcel – to the very house I’d just visited. He said a woman had signed for it and that the Royal Mail system could pinpoint the house that had taken it if necessary.’

Furious, Sian trudged back in her lunch break, this time arriving at the property to find the man she’d spoken to in police uniform, apparently a policeman ready to start a shift.

‘“It’s me again,” I said. “Yes…” he said,’ recalls Sian. ‘It was all very awkward. I told him the postman had delivered my parcel here and that a woman at his address had signed for it.

‘He mumbled something about having to speak to his wife. He said she was a midwife and out in the community. I asked if he could call her and gave him my number. Then he curtly shut the door.’

At work, Sian received a call from the wife, who admitted that not only had she signed for Sian’s parcel she’d wrapped it and placed it under her tree for her daughter.

‘She said she ordered so much stuff online she couldn’t remember it wasn’t hers. I asked her to drop it off at work. She said she’d see what she could do.’

Sian, 60, adds: ‘I couldn’t believe it. I take parcels for people all the time. I’d never dream of keeping them.’ That afternoon the woman arrived at reception carrying the brush holder. ‘My colleagues asked if she wanted to bring it to me, but she didn’t,’ says Sian. ‘I thought “fine by me.” I didn’t want to see her anyway.’

Online forums are awash with consumers complaining their neighbours have stolen their deliveries. TikTok user Emily Lin went viral after posting a video of herself leaving a decoy parcel filled with rubbish and a note saying ‘I’m onto you,’ for whoever in her block of flats was stealing her parcels. ‘I just want them to know that I hate them,’ she said.

Research shows those reporting stolen deliveries are split evenly between telling their courier and telling the retailer, while only 17 per cent report the crime to police. In fact, says consumer disputes expert Scott Dixon, aka The Complaints Resolver, under Section 29 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015, goods remain at the retailers’ risk until they come into possession of the consumer, so the shop should always be your first port of call.

‘If goods go missing from your doorstep a retailer is responsible for issuing a replacement or refunding you. Yes, it’s a crime but we all know police don’t have the resources or desire to investigate parcel theft.’

Of course, delivery drivers are under intense pressure as well, often finding people aren’t home and faced with the dilemma of what to do with packages.

One anonymous self-employed agency employee, working for Amazon, recalled delivering up to 300 parcels a day in Christmas 2019: ‘The traffic is really bad at this time of year and you can be in queues for hours on end.’

Emma McGovern, 34, didn’t bother reporting the theft of her daughter Tabitha’s birthday gifts from her block of flats last year.

‘We had no CCTV and I didn’t think the police would spend their resources looking for an 11-year-old’s birthday presents,’ says Emma, a mother of four and teacher from South London, married to musician Neil, 40. His parents had posted a present for Tabitha’s birthday and when it didn’t arrive, Emma says, ‘I assumed the post was slow.’

It wasn’t until the next morning that Emma saw torn wrapping paper under the stairway of the four-storey building where the family has lived on the third floor for ten years. On it she recognised their address, written in her mother-in-law’s handwriting.

Somebody had stolen Tabitha’s presents, along with a neighbour’s Amazon parcel, and scarpered. ‘It wasn’t anyone in the block – we have a WhatsApp group and babysit each other’s kids.’

She went back upstairs to relay the upsetting news to her children. ‘I told Tabitha that Grandma had sent her some gifts but sadly Mummy had found packaging and nothing was left. I was sad something her grandmother had put a lot of thought into but was of little value to anyone else was gone.’

Although Scott Dixon says ‘courier firms will not readily admit responsibility for stolen items, as missing goods in transit is such a big problem,’ Royal Mail will consider claims from either the sender or recipient, provided they’re made within 80 days of the date of posting. Emma’s mother-in-law had bought Tabitha leggings and T-shirts and a children’s history book, and enclosed a £20 note from her great-grandmother.

When Emma posted about the theft on her residents’ WhatsApp group it transpired that three of the other ten households in the building hadn’t received deliveries due at the same time.

Emma has now asked family not to send Christmas gifts to their house at all. ‘I’ve said we can exchange them when we see each other – it’s safer,’ she adds.

Lisa, whose cashmere sweater and trousers were stolen, was sceptical about calling the police, so she was ‘pleasantly surprised’ that within a week of the incident, two years ago, a female officer called her and arranged for her to send the CCTV footage.

A few days later the officer contacted her to say the man in the video was wanted in connection with a shoplifting incident.

Police later told Lisa he had been charged and convicted. ‘I was glad I’d helped him get caught,’ she says. ‘I know it’s only a Christmas present, but I find theft appalling.’ And especially galling when it happens outside your front door.