Car Thief Gets Instant Karma (the FINAL Glitterbomb 6.0)

These guys just broke into my car in San Francisco and stole my backpack.

What they'll soon find out is that thanks to some high tech glitter and fart spray delivery mechanisms, that's no ordinary backpack..

- Nobody's back there right?

- And this guy's also trying to break into my car.

But what he doesn't realize is those are bulletproof windows because that's just funny.

Every year, 20,000 cars are broken into in the city of San Francisco.

But who's behind all these break ins?

Like, is it organized crime or gangs or just random individuals?

And then what happens to all the stuff that they steal?

Well, just like when we use the power of glitter to infiltrate and shut down those terrible scam call centers in India, I'm happy to report that having teamed up with a veteran investigative reporter and gotten our bait car broken into 25 five separate occasions over the past eight months, we now have a much clearer picture of what's going on and even some thoughts on how to stop it.

And as this video is the conclusive finale to the whole Glitter bomb series (this time for real), I'm so happy to report that we finally got some really good reactions to that perfectly harmless yet wretchedly abhorrent fart spray.

Including one that's not too far off from Macaulay Culkin's here.

Now, if you haven't seen any of my other glitter bomb videos, the 15 second recap is that five years ago, these two took a package from my porch which inspired me to combine my engineering skills with my Christmas time affinity for Kevin McCallister.

And that not only led to different versions of glitter bomb bait packages that would spin spray, flash, stick, punch or fly.

But it eventually led us over to India where we ended up infiltrating, then shutting down five of those terrible scam call centers.

But Mark, you object, you said last year was the final glitter bomb.

And that was true until earlier this year.

I had the unfortunate realization that glitter and fart spray hadn't solved all forms of crime worldwide when my own car was broken into.

I'm missing a window.

Not cool San Francisco, not cool That also made me realize our 11th hour cobbled together car package last year never got enough footage to uncover who was actually behind all the San Francisco car break-ins.

So 10 months ago, for one final time, we completely redesigned the glitter bomb from the ground up, only this time it would be custom built just for cars.

For starters instead of using centrifugal force to fire the glitter, this year, we'd be using 900psi of compressed gas.

Because if you take a CO2 bike tire inflator and attach a pipe to the outlet, then connect the high torque server motor to the opening valve and then repeat that configuration and stack them on top of each other, well then when you load those pipes with copious amounts of biodegradable glitter and fart spray and then trigger the Servo motors that highly compressed CO2 is gonna very quickly push out anything in the pipe that gets in its way.

At the core, we still have a custom printed circuit board that will make all the decisions for the device in addition to talking to us via a two way cellular connection.

Then we slap on a car horn for good measure and place that whole compact form factor into the base of a custom-sewn backpack with external access to the outlet nozzles.

Like in years past we will still capture footage using a pair of phones that get tucked into the sides with the added benefit of serving as the backpack GPS and the speakers for the countdown timer.

And once these backpacks are stolen, they'll of course be on the move all over the place.

And since there's no guarantee, we're gonna get them back for the third year in a row, we turn to my friends at T-Mobile to make sure no matter what we get the footage from the cloud given the complete coverage and crazy speeds of their network that I've actually gone out and benchmarked myself before.

Finally, we lock up the bottom compartment to prevent tampering.

Then use a rubber stopper glued to a patch to plug and conceal the outlets.

Then as a decoy to divert suspicion, we got some clothes and a bunch of old nonfunctional laptops to place in each bag.

We also created a second version with a suitcase form factor and identical guts in case word got out about the backpacks.

Then the car itself has eight hidden dash cams all powered by a 2000 watt hour camping battery in the trunk that also plugs into the backpack with two barrel jacks.

One to keep the entire device and both phones at 100% charge until stolen and the other to serve sort of as a digital tripwire.

So the backpack knows exactly when it was stolen to initiate the stolen bag protocol.

We also served up two more surprises this year by first creating a bait car with impossible to break polycarbonate windows, which is the same stuff bulletproof glass is made of.

That car also has the added benefit of a microphone in the trunk for detecting when someone's trying to break the window, which will of course release the air in this tank, triggering this pneumatic piston with a special surprise on the end.

And as a final idea, we took an actual gaming laptop, remove the extra fan and in its place, added a GPS tracker that would continuously stay charged by using the laptop battery.

That way we'd always know where it was.

Even if they wiped the hard drive, the thought here was to put that laptop in a backpack to actually get it's stolen with no glitter involved.

And then with the help of Dan Noyes who spent 30 years as the chief investigative journalist for the San Francisco ABC7 news team, we could trace the laptop's footsteps to try and get some answers.

So after a couple of months of designing, testing and building, we put them out in a few different cars and we waited.

And we didn't have to wait long.

But before I subject you to gratuitous amounts of broken glass, I'm gonna start off with a little broken glass of my own.

Three. Two. One.

Nice shot Eloise. I'm Mark Rober.

And for over a decade, I've been making YouTube videos to showcase what it means to think like an engineer.

But what exactly does that mean?

You ready?

Whoa, thoughts.

- Probably less catalyst.

- Good call.

It means, you know, failure is part of the process.

It's how you learn and thinking this way makes you a better soccer player or piano practicer because you're resilient and you keep tweaking and trying until you get it right.

Or you can just come up with a totally different solution.

Because if you think like an engineer, you think differently and that unlocks creative new ways to have fun.

And that's exactly why I created CrunchLabs where you get a super fun toy that gets delivered to your porch every month.

- Thanks Mark Rober!

- You're gonna love that one Sarah. See you next month.

And then you put it together with me as I teach you all the juicy physics that make them work.

So if you want to train your brain to see the world in a whole new light while having a ton of fun at the same time, just go to crunchlabs.com right now and reserve yours.

You nailed kid.

Out of the gate, It was pretty clear if our goal was to find out who was behind all these car break ins, they were going to do everything in their power to not be found out.

But the advantage of teaming up with an 18 time Emmy Award winning investigative journalist is that when one of our a cameras catches these guys nearly causing an accident, we can play it back so Dan can run their license plate, which must be precisely why they'd removed their license plate.

Thankfully, on our third break in our luck can improved.

And this time we struck pay dirt because once Dan ran the license plate, he made a shocking discovery.

Turns out this car belonged to a long time SF State college professor who also sits on the board of a prestigious Oakland charter school.

And so like any good investigative journalist, Dan found his home address and showed up to confront him except he turned out to be a really nice guy who informed us that his license plate was stolen from his car a few weeks prior.

And what Dan would eventually learn on nearly all the other license plates he would run over the course of our operation is that not only do the thieves commonly drive around with stolen license plates, - We got Georgia plates.

- but they tend to steal from a similar color and model as their own vehicle to avoid an obvious mismatch.

So the car thieves showed they could handle our cameras and investigative techniques.

But now the question was, how would they handle a little bit of harmless glitter.

Spoiler alert.

Not very well.

Notice how the first thing he does is check the trunk by pulling down the seat trying to unsuccessfully steal our strapped down battery.

This is pretty common for them to do and it's why leaving valuables in your trunk isn't really a great option.

In the end, he changes his mind, not just about our backpack, but our laptop too.

This next one is truly one of my favorite reactions ever because one of the guys proves there actually is honor among thieves as he takes the full blame for the fart spray stench.

And I'm just gonna let the tape roll to give you an exclusive first person viewpoint of what it's like to ride along with some of these smash and grab thieves.

And we were surprised to learn that more than half of the steals weren't from thieves, traveling in cars, but that still leads them to developing their own strategies.

For example, this guy here has already scoped out and wants to seal our backpack.

The problem is all these people over here would see him.

That is unless he just waits for the perfectly timed obstruction.

This guy not only has an official construction worker type vest on, but his technique is to break it on foot, then walk his new found treasures back to his car where he can now discreetly lean in through the window to see what he got, which probably works out really well, 99% of the time, but it's hilariously the worst possible strategy in this case.

Because in the end, he leaves the backpack behind and drives off having stolen just our fart spray and glitter.

Now, one thing all the thieves had in common was how quickly they could break the glass, which is actually surprisingly difficult to do if you don't have the right technique because all car windows are made from tempered glass.

Which by the way, as far as inventions go is an incredible feat of engineering because it not only makes the glass much harder to break.

But if it does break it shatters into harmless pebbles that aren't going to leave deep cuts.

The one achilles heel to tempered glass, however is, it's extremely vulnerable to highly concentrated points of stress.

So while this window can easily withstand my soccer ball baseball and even wrench.

If I take a simple spark plug and harvest just the ceramic insulating part, the sharp ultra hard aluminum oxide is able to create a tiny localized stress point on the window.

And that's all it takes.

And that's why in every case, they're using some form of this spark plug in a handle form where the tip is a really sharp piece of ceramic or hardened steel at which point it doesn't take much force at all.

And since it's typically so easy for them, while the pop up face didn't activate because of a dead battery issue, it was still really heartwarming to see them deal with our bulletproof window, when a juicy piece of luggage was just sitting right in plain sight.

Only to eventually leave in frustration, totally empty handed.

And to be fair, quite a few of the break ins were from individuals it would be a stretch to classify as seasoned professionals.

For example, this guy tried to use a blowtorch to break the window, which definitely isn't a thing.

He eventually finds a screwdriver to snap the edge of the glass, but then realizes he broke the wrong window and the backpack won't fit out.

So he goes to unlock and open the door, but now he set off the alarm.

So he has to ride off to avoid suspicion with mission unaccomplished.

Or there's this guy who spends about an hour tracking the car pacing back and forth to come up with a plan and work up the courage to make the steal.

Only to eventually learn this hopeful life lesson on taking stuff that isn't yours.

Now before I end this video and the whole glitter bomb series for that matter, with hands down the best reaction to the fart spray we've ever got in six years, I wanna revisit the question Dan and I hope to answer through all these break ins in the first place with regards to who's behind these and why.

And I'll start by saying typically on the news you'll see organized groups like this because that just looks really intimidating.

But that was much more of a rare occurrence in our experience.

More than 80% of our steals were just individuals acting on their own.

So like not some kind of organized gang operation and a majority of the 80% that were individuals honestly didn't seem like they even did this very often.

So then why are they doing it?

Well, as we were trying to figure that out ourselves, we sort of hit a breakthrough on our GPS tracking laptop because after it was stolen, it came to this location for about a half a day.

But then after that, it made its way over to this neighborhood and that's where it's been ever since.

But the thing is Dan recognized that first spot because he did a news report more than a month and a half earlier when he told the story of a video producer who tracked his stolen gear there because the thieves knew it was a fencing operation where they could quickly exchange the gear for money.

- He's on the phone with the San Francisco police officer when he sees his camera gear arrive at this location in the 300th block of Leavenworth.

- And he goes, oh yeah, that's a known major fencing operation.

Everybody in the bay area knows that they can bring their stolen goods and offload them there.

- And look, there's a whole host of things that leads to 20,000 cars per year getting broken into and people taking stuff that isn't theirs.

And some of the core issues down here are super complicated and require nuance and public policy to address.

But right below people stealing from cars are these fencing markets.

There's a demand for these stolen goods.

So it feels like shutting down these markets and not having a place to exchange stolen goods for money so incredibly easily would go a long ways to stopping car break ins.

This is also why you see people stealing things like soap and toiletries from a place like Walgreens.

The thief doesn't need that much soap, but when he knows he can easily turn it into real money in less than an hour, you eventually get stores that look like this or just permanently have to shut down altogether.

And I can't imagine I'm telling the city something they don't already know.

But when you have a public news report about a spot, apparently everyone knows you can go to, to sell stolen items.

And then 1.5 months later my laptop goes to the exact same spot to be sold.

It certainly feels like more could be done here to remove the incentive for the break ins in store thefts to occur in the first place.

And so with that, I'll leave you with this.

And I feel it's very important to point out here that this fart spray is perfectly harmless to breathe.

It just truly smells really, really bad Because after breaking, not one but two of our windows, he yells out a racial slur ostensibly at an innocent bystander and in the most perfect definition of instant karma ever.

Two minutes later, the dry heaving ensues.

So that's it.

My official final wrap on the whole series.

And if you've been keeping score at home, we've had 167 porch pirates glittered on themselves as well as 29 car thieves, we've returned $50,000 to elderly scam victims and had five scam call centers shut down with 53 of those scammers arrested.

So thanks for watching and sharing these heartwarming videos over the years.

And of course, a final thank you farewell to these two without which none of this would have ever happened.

If you want a Christmas morning reaction like that.

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Thanks for watching.