Watch this lock picker remove an inventory control tag in one second

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/13/watch-this-lock-picker-remove.html

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Perfect timing. There’s only 41 shoplifting days until Christmas!

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“my wife is usually the “victim” because she usually buys steals a lot more”.
-locking picking “lawyer”

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The Lock Picking Lawyer is one of my favourite YT channels, he demonstrates time and time again how insecure most locks actually are.
This is one of my favourite where he shows 4 simple ways to overcome a gun mount that a police car would have on board to secure a shotgun or rifle.

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Amazing what you can do using the right tool.

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It suddenly occurs to me that I’ve never seen a video of one of these things erupting. They carry such ominous messages about the potential to cause injury when removed. Sounds exciting!

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I once heard a cop explain that they had a way of angling the shotgun out of the gun mount without even unlocking it first in case they needed to grab it in a hurry without looking for keys. I gather those locks are largely ornamental devices for discouraging potential snatch-and-grabbers.

The right tool being the one that he and BosnianBill made.

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So, uh, clothing wholesalers and retailers would rather see a garment completely ruined than see some enterprising and clever thief make off w/ it? That’s fucked up. The store could actually learn something! There’s simply no appreciation for good old fashioned smarts any more!

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I didn’t have a strong enough magnet and had to resort to my trusty Boing Boing approved rotary tool.

I thought the whole point of these tags was that they’d set off an alarm at the door if they were still on the garment. So how does one buy clothes with them still on? Do they not pretend to set off alarms and are just relying on the dye packs to keep people from stealing them, or do the alarm systems in stores not work so often that one can walk out the door with the tag still on?

Yeah. You are watching Boing Boing, the web site that does not advocate the cool crime of robbery.

Well, you just accidentally pass the item around the outside of the detector, or accidentally put the item in a Faraday cage you accidentally left in your backpack.

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Except in cases where those tags have seen a lot of use and the pin is bent, it acts like a duck’s corkscrew penis. Trying to decouple the tag from the backing without breaking the ink tubes when the pin is bent is maddening (I worked in the office at a clothing resale shop).

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Where I worked the tags were just ink, no sensors to speak of.

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I think the oblong ones have RFID tags but the round ones are just ink.

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Those systems are wildly unreliable.

The alarm systems are usually triggered by a small, soft magnetic tag inserted into the hem or label of the garment. They look like this:

The store is supposed to disarm them after sale by running them over a powerful magnet.

However:

  1. The disarming routinely fails; false alarms are extremely common.

  2. You can also disarm the tag just by bending it a lot.

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This week on Inside Baseball.

The best part is after you liberate the tag from your new clothing (however acquired) you now have a fun new toy to attach to someone else’s nice new jacket!

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They made a neodymium magnet? From scratch? Kudos!