This guy is stealing my package from a car and this guy took my package off a porch. But what they don't realize is this is the final Glitter Bomb. Glitter Bomb 5.0 and for the final year, when you lift the lid, the glitter is delivered by drones. Five years ago when these two sold a six dollar package from my porch, little did they know that singular act on an otherwise unremarkable, lovely spring morning would set in motion a series of events that would unleash buckets of glitter in the homes of would be porch pirate station wide and eventually lead to the takedown of a 60 million dollar International crime rate.

So today not only will I show you what happens when you combine autonomous drones and glitter and then what happens when you get into a chess match with a bunch of car thieves, but I'll end the whole series with an update on what happened to those massive scam call centers we infiltrated and exposed in. India Now if you're new here, the 10 second recap is that after that package was stolen from my house, the police wouldn't do anything about it even when presented with the evidence. So at that point I knew that to avenge the theft I was gonna have to use my engineering skills to go full. Home Alone And seeing how this is the final Glitter Bomb video I Think it's worth a brief recap of how the box design has naturally evolved over the years out of the game.

Year One: it was a simple concept where when you took the lid off the bait package, this cup would spin, unleashing a pound of the world's finest glitter and then hidden inside to record all the action. We had four Phones Plus a canister fart spray in an effort to encourage the thief to get rid of the box so we can go and retrieve it, and that went pretty well. so we spent the entire next year working on version 2.0 where we doubled the amount of fart spray and drastically improved the formula which ended up nearly killing. Macaulay Culkin I Still smell it We also switched to biodegradable glitter and added a meaningless countdown full and some fake police chatter just to make things more exciting.

Then for year three, we doubled the fart spray canisters once again to a total of four and added a handle the thief would be tempted to grab, which we covered in that super stinky mouse trap goop. And for the previous two years, the package themes would have often shove the lid back on right away, which covered up the cameras. so we added these posts near the top of the box that would passively pop out, which made it impossible to put the lid back on once you'd removed it. We also added flashing police lights and made a doormat that had these conductive charging contacts so we could keep the whole box fully charged until the moment it was stolen.

Then for Glitterbahn 4.0 as soon as you touched the lid, it would get shot straight up into the air complements of these two boxing gloves attached to pneumatic. Pistons We also added an actual car horn to make things more exciting and redesigned the cup so that by using the centrifugal force generated from spinning, you could possibly get three chances to shoot some glitter instead of losing it all in one single shot. Then for the porch, we built a fake planter box that would slide over and hide the package at night so the homeowners wouldn't have to worry about bringing it in and we were guaranteed to get it stolen in the day when the light was better. And all of that brings us to Year Five: Glitter Bomb 5.0 I Knew this was going to be the last year, so I decided to go For Broke and attempt the biggest redesign to date.

And this is a terrible idea by the way, in engineering, if something is working well enough conventional wisdom, States you should basically change nothing but pretend like you change a lot. So for starters, last year we had four vials of heart spray for a total of 20 milliliters. And for this year because we're not messing around, we have a one liter tank and for those of you keeping track at home, that's 50 times more fart spray to pull this off. Instead of using a rotating cam system like before now, we have a peristaltic pump that continually forces the fart spray through two nozzles and basically never lets up.

And because I can't exactly explain how much worse something smells over video. This is a sensor that measures the number of particulates in the air and the more particulates, the more intense the smell. And if we place last year's glitter bomb in the chamber, it measures 250 particulates of nastiness per liter, whereas this year's tops out at 750. which means it's not only going to last a lot longer, but it's going to be three times more intense.

Now, to house that massive reservoir of fart spray, we had to expand the footprint for the box, which means we had room underneath it to house the brains of the system, on an upgraded custom printed circuit board that communicates directly with all four phones. And quick shout out to my friends at T-Mobile because last year we found they have the best coverage. We're replacing the boxes so this year they hooked us up and let us put them all on their Network Then for the glitter delivery mechanism. The idea was to hack some of these mini drones and rewrite their code to make them autonomous where they could fly themselves without needing to be in communication with the computer.

So the idea for this year is the thief would bring the bait package back to their house, then remove the lid which would lower these two doors allowing the drones to wake up and take off. and so instead of a single concentrated area of glitter from a spinning cup like before, the drones would just Meander all around the house, leaving millions of tiny shimmering reminders not to take stuff that isn't yours. And as part of our code, we write: if the proximity sensors register someone approaching, they'll just casually fly themselves to a different part of the room. And all of that perfectly sets up the check bait because while they're fully distracted dealing with the drones, the box starts to drastically change the room's air quality at a rate of one liter per minute.

This design was ambitious and arguably had a much higher risk of failure in the field, but then we took it one step further by designing a sister box that could be used for a car break-in since I lived near San Francisco which is the smash and grab capital of the world. Two years ago, we went right into the Lion's Den, which placed the Box in a somewhat alarming predicament and while tempting, it seemed irresponsible to have a couple drones flying around inside a moving vehicle. So this box could be triggered remotely via text message and can activate the fart spray without needing to be opened and then right before the nozzles kick in. This 360 cam pops up to cover all the action and if at any point the camera senses it's being tampered with just like one of those fancy hood ornaments, it will retract itself back inside the box.

So after about 10 months of Designing building and testing, we set them out on a bunch of porches and in a bunch of cars. And we waited. And we didn't have to wait long. Foreign Fifteen, Fourteen, Thirteen Three Two one activation, complete recovery sequence initiated and I really appreciate the hustle from these guys.

especially because when all is said and done, they just decide to make this their neighbor's problem when we retrieve this next box. as you can see, it was completely destroyed and the phones were gone. But thanks to those blazing T-Mobile network speeds, we were able to recover the following footage from the cloud. but our neighbor here on the camera.

Yeah, no way. What? No new one? huh? Yeah. Can we just leave it in the car for now? Yeah, we'll leave it in the car because we're not. We're not trying to bring attention.

So they eventually took this home and were apparently pretty upfront with their kids about where they got it from. It's a VR so they go for like yeah, you can make money or you can give it back. let's open it. Oh my.

God Mom I think it is a bomb and in addition to porches. just like in years past, we placed some boxes by group mailboxes so that way we could track the number of Good Samaritans that will call the number on the box from year to year. Do it. It's a scam you.

YouTubers Nine, Eight, Seven, Six five, four, three, two one activation complete recovery sequence initiated Switching Gears for a minute For the past two years, I've experimented with placing a glitter bomb in a parked car up in San Francisco because it's considered the car breaking capital of the world and things are so bad. Now, it's not even just the parked cars that are getting targeted. They average 73 car break-ins per day, and at this point people have resorted to just leaving their doors wide open hoping the thieves can verify for themselves. There's no valuables inside so they won't smash the glass just to check.

Now, for the past two years, while we did get the glitter bomb stolen, all we could really do was just play an alarm sound so they throw them out because they never actually opened them in the car. and after doing some research, it turns out there's a reason for that. It's actually a fairly organized system called a fencing operation where the cars will go out in groups and then immediately afterwards they'll bring it to a middleman who will pay cash in exchange for the most valuable things they steal like laptops. But the gut punch is that important documents like a passport or pictures or plane tickets don't really hold value for the thieves.

so they just get thrown in the trash. And now that we knew they didn't plan on opening the box in the car, we designed the nozzles to poke through the lid so that even if they just threw it in the back seat Once the proximity sensor on the bottom registered it was stolen and the Box texted us we could track them using embedded GPS and a simple text message back would raise the camera and activate the fart spray for two minutes straight. So we headed up to the city and placed our modified carbox nice and visible in the car and commenced our Stakeout And you can see this. First black car rolls up and this guy gets out and spots it but doesn't take it and then a little while later this beige car rolls up and he sees it too and the same thing happens.

They're not too long after that this white car rolls up and one once again they clearly see the box, but they just leave it sitting right there without even breaking a window. And after observing all this, our best guess was that it was the size of the box that was spooking them. So we removed the heart and all the other critical components from the large box and place them into a smaller box. And while it occupied a smaller footprint, it maintained all the same functionality of the bigger box while still looking like an enticing item to steal.

So the next day we put it back out on the street. but this time someone came by and actually smashed the window. Only we didn't see them leave with the box and our working assumption was that he just wasn't able to open the door to take it. But when we checked the footage, it told a different story.

Not only did he once again intentionally not steal a smaller box, but the real reason for breaking the small window was to pull the back seat down and check the trunk. Which means if you take nothing else away from this video, you should know putting your luggage in the trunk is not a solution to keep it from getting stolen. The reason they break these little windows so often, but it seems like nothing is missing is because they're pulling down the seat to quickly check what's hidden from view in the trunk. And at this point it was pretty disappointing.

but we realized they'd adapted word must have gotten out from stealing our glitter bombs in previous years that a juicy looking box like this sitting out in plain sight is nothing but trouble. And as an engineer, I never claimed to have all the answers. but I know the process to get all the answers and that's trying and failing and tweaking over and over again. So while we did have a couple useless car boxes and a busted window, we also knew their MO which meant we now had a plan and that plan was to shrink the box down even further to fit it in the backpack.

That did mean we had to make some compromises like losing the camera and reducing the farts for Reservoir down to this improvised power. but to make sure that it was still adequate, we sprayed it on this chair and not only did it still last for two minutes, but we left that chair outside to air out and confirmed a few days later it was still in real bad shape. So with renewed hopes, we once again hit the streets, this time with two backpacks and two separate cars parked in two different spots and his fate would have it, they both got hit within about five minutes of each other. Once again, you can see they're checking the trunk and there's two interesting things to point out here.

Number one: if you look at the jacket on this guy and compared to the jacket from the previous break-in you can see it's the same guy suggesting they probably work the same routes, which means they probably recognize regularly parked cars versus a new visiting car. So I felt especially honored that a train professional like this fell for our backpack, even if it was possibly in a desperate attempt just to find a belt at Number Two, you can see just how quickly it all happens, even breaking the glass. The thing with tempered glass is it's really hard to break until it isn't And while this guy looks like Iron Man here just casually pushing his hand through what you don't see on his palm, embedded in the glove is a sharp ceramic chunk or a spike of hardened steel sort of like this. And as you can see here, if you have the right tool to concentrate the force on a really small point, it safely crumbles to nothing almost instantly.

But more importantly than all that now we had both boxes registering they'd been stolen while we track them both on their embedded GPS Watching as they made their way around, stopping periodically to hit more cars and after they each drove around for about 10 minutes, we sent a command to commence Operation Air Freshener Movement and unfortunately because we had to condense everything down so small sort of last minute. the mic was in the same small box as the pump, so we don't know exactly what was said. But what we do know is that about 90 seconds after the pump started, they tossed the whole bag from the car. And the best part about this is that outside the backpack, the pump and spray are actually really quiet, so the only possible way they could have located the source is if they sniff their way to the answer and as our test showed, they'll continue sniffing it for weeks.

And in the second car it was a nearly identical outcome, ran a little bitter at one point you got to hear them close in on the source and about 20 seconds later their backpack met the exact same fate as the first. All right. So to wrap up: I'll just say that year over year we've seen a decreasing number of package Steals and is steadily increasing number of Good Samaritans And maybe people are becoming more considerate or perhaps everyone just knows what a glitter bomb looks like now. but I Love the idea that at some point someone's package wasn't stolen because it would be porch pirate.

Remember these videos and had second thoughts. One thing that's not conjecture, however, is after so many of you actively shared our video where we infiltrated and glitter bombed those three terrible scam call centers in India, it caught the attention of some international law enforcement agencies and from the press. And because of your efforts, those three centers that had each been in operation for more than a decade doing upwards of 20 million dollars a year, scamming the most vulnerable amongst us of their life savings all got shut down with their top officials arrested. So thanks to all of you for watching and caring.

And of course thanks to these two because without them, none of this would have ever happened. Being an engineer is the best because you can make whatever you can dream up. But what's the first step? Like how do you get started down that path? Well, I'll tell you exactly how it's called the Crunchlabs build Box and it gets delivered right to your doorstep every month. And then we build it together.

While I teach you all the juicy physics that make it work. It's basically like unlocking your own personal. Mark Rover Video every month where you learn a new engineering principle that will have you not just building like an engineer, but more importantly, thinking like an engineer. so you're developing resiliency, problem solving skills.

On top of that, the toys themselves are really fun, like the super Dope Art Machine where we learn about linkages or in the spirit of the Glitter Bomb, this tripwire which you can use to prank your family or I suppose in some cases yourself. So if you want to embark on this year-long journey with me while there's still time to get it before, Christmas just head on over to Cringelabs.com or use the link in the video description or we're giving away two months free as a holiday special.