TACOMA, WA (KCPQ/CNN) - It’s called the Blank Box, and the goal is to make sure that thieves get away with nothing more than a scare, said the device’s creator, Jaireme Barrow.
“I got tired of all my packages coming up missing,” Barrow said. “I’d be at work and then I’d get home and they wouldn’t be on my front porch. And I'd watched my surveillance and see someone running away with them.”
Barrow said the out-of-the-box idea came out of necessity. Last December, he started booby-trapping empty boxes using shotgun blanks and fishing wire after he caught thieves on his surveillance camera stealing multiple deliveries from his front porch.
“I wanted a way to scare them safely,” he said. “When you scare them, hopefully they’re going to drop the package and run away and never come back.”
He said his Blank Box works. Footage from his camera show thieves running from his front porch after trying to steal packages, time and again.
“It’s like any alarm system. It’s just a loud noise to deter theft,” Barrow said. “It just happened to be a 12-gauge blank in this case.”
Now his Blank Box has turned into big business.
“It’s all hands-on, made in America. Every one of these was built with love,” he said of the devices, which he tests himself for safety.
He’s now selling the device on his website, theblankbox.com. He’s also selling T-shirts that say, “Don’t touch my package.”
Barrow said his neighbors are big supporters.
“It deters people from coming onto their porches, too, because they never know if what they have on their front porch is actually a Blank Box or a legit package,” he said. “My hope is that it makes people think twice about what they’re doing.”
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