HN Reader

I wanted to buy a playdate when they first came out, but unfortunately they weren't shipping to my country.

Now they do, so I just placed an order 15 mins ago and my partner just received a call from the bank to verify that it wasn't a fraudulent transaction.

She just asked me - what is this "play date" you just sent $300 to? Oh dear. :D

The thing that surprised me the most about it is that FedEx didn't just pay them the 400k for lost shipment. They had all the proof that it was lost, all that Fedex had was a signature of someone who doesn't even work at their fulfilment centre. Even after their "higher ups" got involved all that FedEx could do was "huh, sucks to be you I guess?" Does freight shipment not have insurance? What's going on here?

Surprised by HN again. 1st Place „Story“, wanted to read because no headphones with me, ending up reading a podcast transcript, and TL,DR out.

Imagine being the thief in this case and getting stuck with an entire pallet of these weird indie handhelds that you can't fence because nobody knows what they are just hanging out on your garage.

Love this quote in particular:

> Thanks so much for listening, and please don’t steal our Playdates. Because we will find you.

wait FedEx just delivers 400k worth of stuff without any KYC or OTP verification??

Interesting choice to go with a PI who's focused on recovery rather than criminal convinctions. Given the lack of sophistication in this operation, I suspect recovery would have happened either way, and the thieves might have faced some actual consequences. As is, they didn't lose anything other than the stolen items and will likely continue to capitalize on similar opportunities in the future.

Huh, so a half-baked crime of opportunity, as opposed to a sophisticated operation.

Still unclear on how the delivery managed to get put (or taken) to the wrong side of the road at a construction site. Fedex mistake? Trickery by thief? Misdirection by thief that took them from loading-dock?

I suppose the key insight is that mandatory device registration really saved them. Everyone loves the concept of an entirely open device that doesn’t require this, but if Panic didn’t have registration, it would’ve been impossible to locate the devices, and end up being a $400k write off.

I summarized the transcript into an article: https://gist.github.com/justjanne/1e1254bf207c4d98862e040136...

Not sure if it helps anyone else, but for me it made the story a lot easier to grasp.

I wrote most of it by hand, using an LLM just for a rough outline which I then manually rewrote line by line, streamlined, removed hallucinations, double-checked all quotes, reordered and added images and links.

Strange things are afoot at the circle k.