Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/21/mexico-city-residents-carry-fa.html
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I did this on my business trips to Colombia, Brazil and Panama a few years ago. My colleague and I would carry “decoy” phones and wallets in case we were mugged - old flip phones and cheap wallets filled with a few bucks of worthless currency and expired gift cards.
Fortunately we never got to find out how well it worked.
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In Puerto Rico you could get killed for doing this. If you don’t make the mugging worthwhile you will get shot out of spite.
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what about a fake iphone that blows up if you try to access it!?!?
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The Amazon questions say that the screen is printed. For $20 I would expect a little more functionality than that. (Maybe if it at least served as a power bank and/or flashlight?)
Also I am sure that the sellers are already having to deal with angry customers complaining that “This Fake Phone Dummy Phone Model Replica Non-Working that you sold me isn’t doing anything!”
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In my town (I’m sure this is done other places too), there’s thriving businesses who you can pay to make your brand new expensive bike look like a piece of shit (repainting it, adding fake rust, fake crappy cables, etc) that still rides like a brand-new bike but is way less attractive to bike thieves.
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This sounds like a bit of an urban legend. You can never perfectly predict what someone high on drugs or desperate for the hit will do next, but if they were really willing to kill that easily then the whole mugging part seems superfluous.
A better option might be a real but very cheap phone with tracking built-in and always on, even when the phone is “off”. Normally cops are pretty lazy about enforcing property theft cases, but if you can show that you can track them down immediately they may be slightly more inclined to investigate. At the very least you might get the guy’s fence.
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For $20 you can buy a real phone. Even better since all phones look basically the same these days the muggers won’t know that it’s a total shitshow inside.
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Do the make some like this with candy in them?
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Not sent from an iPhone.
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Was gonna say. Though I’m aware some muggers would turn their noses up at my cheap android.
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You mean like a Samsung Note 7?
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I suspect that that gets very dangerous very fast once the element of surprise wears off.
Against a naive opponent a dummy phone could easily conceal enough shaped charge to provide your retributive justice in ‘extra chunky’; but if the mugger has heard of that trick already they might…invite…you to unlock the phone before handing it over; which would go poorly.
I kept my girlfriend’s old damaged iPhone 6 for this express purpose. It can’t even charge up. I suppose I’d say, “Sorry, the battery just died!” as I haul ass in the opposite direction.
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The decoys described in the article are more sophisticated than the one in the Amazon link:
Costing 300 to 500 pesos apiece — the equivalent of $15 to $25 — the “dummies” are sophisticated fakes: They have a startup screen and bodies that are dead ringers for the originals, and inside there is a piece of metal to give the phone the heft of the real article.
Also FTA:
Time and again, those who resist or refuse are hit in the head with a pistol, or simply shot and left to bleed on the floor of the bus.
“Now you have to be careful to carry money, because if you don’t, the thieves get angry and you run the risk that they’ll shoot you if you’re not carrying money.”
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Plot twist: Decoy phones get so popular that people start getting mugged for them.
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Except this is no legend. A friend of mine had the audacity of activating a time delayed kill switch when he was carjacked. The jacker showed up at his building the next day and got in a gunfight with the security guard when he tried to get to his unit to shoot him for having a kill switch.
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Spoiler Alert!
Mexico City residents can’t do this anymore thanks to the Internet.
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Which relates to why I think keeping the registration to your car in the glove box, as you are told to do, seems like a bad idea.
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