With the rise of e-commerce has come the rise of porch piracy—the theft of packages right off someone’s porch or front steps. Though loss estimates vary widely, it’s clear that porch pirates are making off with billions of dollars’ worth of merchandise per year.
While package theft can happen anywhere, some states have higher rates of theft than others, according to digital mailbox provider iPostal1. Based in New York, iPostal1 is a tech company that lets customers “rent” a mailing address at one of its 3,000 locations for safe receipt of postal mail and packages.
In a bid to identify the biggest hotspots for theft, iPostal1 analyzed nationwide online search data for key terms related to stolen packages (like “Amazon delivery stolen”), using data collected between March 2023 and March 2024. The states with the highest average monthly search volume per 100,000 people were named the worst states for porch pirates.
By that measure, Alaska took the crown, with 76.70 average monthly searches per 100,000 people, 58% higher than the nation’s average of 48.27. Alaska was followed by Hawaii, Vermont, North Dakota, and North Carolina. On the other end of the scale, the state with the fewest complaints about porch piracy was Michigan, with just 35.72 relevant searches per month. Michigan was followed closely by Oklahoma, Ohio, Mississippi, and Indiana.
“In 2023, Capital One Shopping revealed that 75% of Americans had their packages stolen within the last year of the study, equating to 0.46% of all packages, not including those lost or misplaced by delivery services,” iPostal1 CEO and Founder Jeff Milgram said in a release. “To prevent packages from being stolen in the future, people can take certain measures to ensure that porch pirates do not target their homes, such as [using] a digital mailbox or a visibility camera.”
