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Thwart Porch Pirates

I have a neighbour on my street who, it seems, has something sitting on his front doorstep every day. Sometimes the stuff is gone the next day. Sometimes it stays there for several days. I see cases of bottled water and packages from Amazon among other things.

Doorbell Camera Image of Porch Pirate

If ever there was a way to signal to someone there’s no one home, this is how to do it. I’m not certain how many times his house has been broken into, but I do know it was broken into once in broad daylight on a weekend afternoon.

But that’s not the only risk of having stuff delivered and left at your front door. Your stuff can also be stolen by a “Porch Pirate”.

According to finder.com, 1 in 4 Canadians had had a parcel stolen from their home after it had been delivered by an online merchant. For 1 in 10 cases, the loss was over $250.

Want to avoid being a victim? Here’s what you can do.

Basic Procedures

Require a signature for deliveries so packages are not left sitting outside where they’re visible. It may require you to re-schedule a delivery or to go to a pickup location, but that beats having your stuff stolen.

Arrange for online purchases to be picked up – either at a bricks-and-mortar store or a courier depot.

Ask couriers to deliver to a neighbour’s home. Be sure to let your neighbour know so they’ll be there and ready for the delivery.

You can buy secure drop boxes for your front porch that can be accessed only by combination lock. You can direct couriers to place deliveries in the drop box and provide them the instructions on where it is and how to access it. Make certain the box is secured to the house in some way; otherwise, the thieves will just steal the box and all its content.

It’s also possible to buy a porch pirate bag – a reinforced nylon bag that is secured to your front door or gate. These are good for documents and small packages.

Here’s a photo of the original Porch Pirate security bag.

High-Tech

Place motion sensor lights about your entrance. They act as a deterrent – especially for thefts after dark. Most thieves shy away from the spotlight.

Set up security cameras around the exterior of your home. Wireless versions are best, because determined thieves will simply cut any cable from cameras that are wired in. Be sure they cover the front entrance and will capture the face of a person approaching it. Be sure they can capture images in low light, as in at dusk or after dark.

Install a doorbell camera at your front entrance. These usually are very good for picking up images of faces of persons approaching the front of your house and have a wide field of view to be able to capture people approaching from different angles. You’d be surprised at how many porch pirates have been caught by doorbell cameras – even ones installed on nearby properties.

Security measures aren’t perfect. They’re not guaranteed to catch a porch pirate in the act. But having them in place can serve as a deterrent. And isn’t that all you really want?

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How to Prevent Frozen Pipes

Over the past month, a partner I work with and one of my nieces had pipes freeze and burst. The partner is based in Atlanta. My niece is in Raleigh, NC. Hardly areas where you’d expect super cold weather.

Here in Canada, frozen pipes are more common than we think and our cold winters are ideal conditions to trigger a frozen pipe. When water freezes, it expands, and this will stress the copper tubing in our plumbing to the point that it will rupture.

Frozen pipes are more than just a nuisance. They can damage possessions and furniture (usually) in your basement. Most homeowner insurance policies will cover at least a portion of the damage but, still, filing a claim just adds to the hassle.

Check out these suggestions:

  • Locate your main water shut-off valve inside your home and add a tag or label to it, so it is easy to locate and turn off quickly if pipes burst in your home.
  • Seal air leaks in your home and garage to stop cold air from getting in. Check around windows and doors, electrical wiring, dryer vents and pipes.
  • Insulate pipes in your home most prone to freezing including near outside walls, in the basement, or in a garage with an outside water supply. Use foam pipe covers available from building supply or home improvement stores.
  • Keep the house warm even if you’re away to prevent indoor plumbing from freezing, especially in the area near the water meter. 
  • When temperatures are below -15C for a few days, you can choose to keep the water moving in your pipes by running a pencil-thin stream of cold water from a tap in the lowest point of the house e.g. a sink or tub in the basement. Ensure the drain is kept clear of debris to prevent overflowing or flooding. However, if you choose to take this step, you will be charged for the water you use. 
  • One thing we tend to overlook is outside faucets. If the outside faucet is closed, and the water supply valve on the inside is also closed, sub-zero temperatures can cause the water in between the two valves to freeze and expand, which causes the pipe to burst. Best way to prevent this is to close the water supply valve inside and then open the outside faucet to allow any water to drain out, then keep the outside faucet open through the winter.

The City of Toronto has more suggestions on how to prevent pipes from freezing. Just visit toronto.ca/frozenpipes, where you’ll find all the details, plus a video to guide you through some of them.

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Don’t Be A Victim of Phishing

There have been a number of phishing schemes active recently that you should be aware of.

Phishing is a cybercrime in which a target or targets are contacted by email, telephone or text message by someone posing as a legitimate institution to lure individuals into providing sensitive data such as personally identifiable information, banking and credit card details, and passwords.

How to Spot a Phishing Scam

The Organization

Someone who is phishing will try to present themselves as an agent for a bank, Revenue Canada, Service Canada or some other governmental institution. Most often they will contact you by phone, but you may receive communication by text message or email.

The Bait

The message you will receive will be a pretext for something that is important to you and that you would normally act. upon. Your bank account is overdrawn, your credit card has suspicious charges, you have outstanding income taxes or Service Canada is after you for overpayment of employment insurance. There is a good chance you have received phone calls based on one of these.

Sometimes, the scammer will have your full name, mailing address and phone in addition to your phone number and may try to confirm one of more of these to make them sound legitimate.

The Hook

Let’s say you pick up the phone and receive a call suggesting your bank is contacting you because there are suspicious charges on your credit card.

Most likely the call will be a robo-call: i.e., the calls are placed by a computer that leaves a prerecorded message. A phishing call will give you a callback number and/or ask you to press “1” (or some other number) to be connected to a live agent.

If you actually end up speaking with a person, the clue that it is a phishing scam is that they will ask you to verify something to “prove you are who you say you are”. That information could be a social insurance number, a credit card number with expiry date and CSC number or a bank account number. This is what they rare really trying to get.

What are the Consequences?

If it’s credit card information they’re seeking, it could trigger a series of purchases made under your name.

If the information the scammer is requesting is a social insurance number, it could result potentially in identity theft. A social insurance number allows someone to get a drivers license, a health card or some other type of document that could allow someone to do illegal things in your name.

Someone could take out a mortgage on your house without your knowledge. You might only become aware of this when you try to sell your home.

How to Not Be a Victim

If you receive a phone call that sounds like a pre-recorded message, simply hang up. If the call really came from Revenue Canada or Service Canada, you would receive a letter from them if they had an issue. This is usually their first way to contact you and you would receive a phone call only if you failed to respond to their letter.

If you listen to a message and it sounds suspicious when the message says something like, “To speak with an agent, please press 1”, do not press the number. Hang Up.

If you get a text message that seems suspicious, do not reply. Delete it. Banks, credit card companies, and government agencies do not generally send text messages to communicate with citizens or customers.

If you get a suspicious email, do not reply. Delete it. And, once you’ve deleted it, empty your trash bin on your computer to ensure it is gone for good. An easy way to determine if an email is legitimate is to check the URL portion (e.g., @XYZcompany.com) of the email address to see if it is the same as the URL of the agency or company the email suggests it is from. If it’s not the same, it’s probably fraudulent.

The hardest tactic to counter is when a person calls you and wants to discuss an issue with you. As we noted above, they can seem very convincing when they have your name, address and phone number. They may event give you an employee ID number to sound legitimate.

When they ask for some kind of personal information from you, ask THEM some questions to confirm they are who they say they are and that they are indeed legitimate employees of an organization you deal with.

For calls about credit card charges, ask what the last balance was on your card and when and how much of the balance you paid. Only someone who works for the organization will know this and they should be able to answer that almost immediately. If they are slow to respond or sound hesitant, just hang up.

If the caller says they’re from a government agency, ask them what the amount was that was payable on your last income tax return and when you paid it. Similarly, with Service Canada, when did you last receive an EI payment and how much was it. If they can’t answer, hang up.

If you feel hanging up is being overly rude, you can simply say you don’t give personal details over the phone. A legitimate representative will understand why you are saying that and not take offence.

How to Not Become a Target

Guard your personal information as much as you possibly can. Never give this out unless you are 100% confident that the person you are giving it to is a legitimate employee or agent.

Phishers get some of their information about you by hacking corporate or government websites where you might be registered as a user. It’s not the easiest way, but develop a habit of changing your passwords regularly – every 6 months or so. You also can make your passwords harder to decipher if they are longer and contain a mix of character types: upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters.

Set up your email system to identify potential spam or phishing emails and separate them from your inbox. You can set up rules for your email service to follow to know what to look for. Sometimes there will be a folder called Spam or Junk and your email system can learn how to differentiate between legitimate email and fraudulent email. You can teach it to do so.

Sometimes email phishing could trigger installing malware on your computer that can send personal information back to the scammer in the background. Run regular scans for viruses or malware. To make it simple, you can set up these systems to perform scans at preset times. Windows 10, for example, has a very powerful anti-virus and anti-malware application called Windows Defender. It’s free.

The Toronto Police Service also has tips and resources to help you prevent fraud. Click here to visit their page on Financial Crimes.

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LBNA Now on YouTube

Over the past several weeks, we have been producing videos for the 2020 Long Branch Virtual Tree Fest.

We created several that are related to tree canopy preservation and stewardship and several of these are instructional videos on how to care for the trees in your yard.

To enable these to become resources, we posted them all to a new YouTube channel for the LBNA, and we invite you to click here to browse the videos we have available.

If you find the videos helpful, please subscribe to the LBNA YouTube channel so you can be notified when we have new content to share.

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Swimming at Marie Curtis Beaches

Our webmaster was away on vacation, so our page where we have assembled the City’s testing results of the water at the Marie Curtis beaches with daily rainfall statistics from Environment Canada was not being updated daily as we planned.

We have now updated the page. Check it out.

We wanted to have something that would be more predictive than the City’s postings, which is why we added rainfall data. A good rule of thumb is that if we receive more than 10mm of rain, the beaches will be unsafe for the next one or two days.

We hope you find this helpful and we invite your comments and feedback.

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Preventing Basement Flooding

Long Branch is no stranger to flooding. Part of our history is the catastrophic flooding that came from Hurricane Hazel in 1954. Seven residents of Long Branch lost their lives and many more homes were destroyed or washed into Lake Ontario.

With more modern storm sewer systems and flood control, it is much less likely that we will see residents lives at risk from storms and flooding. More likely is that flooding will rear its head in our basements, where it can be an expensive nuisance.

Many residents of Long Branch are aware of the network of underground streams in our neighbourhood and we have frequently warned developers about the potential impact on residents by taking down trees and reducing soft landscaping that soaks up storm runoff.

A recent article in the Globe and Mail suggests that the cost of a flooded basement can be as much as $43,000, and this may not be completely covered by household insurance. in some cases, insurance companies are refusing to offer flood damage coverage on household insurance policies.

What can you do?

Fortunately, preventing basement flooding is not outrageously expensive and can cost less than $250 as the Globe article suggests.

Clearing out eavestroughs helps ensure your downspouts will be able to direct runoff from your roof away from your foundation. In some cases, you can do this yourself with a ladder, a trowel and a bucket.

Installing a backflow preventer will cost more that $250 but insurance companies will often give you a reduced rate for flood damage that will help you recover the cost over time. Also the City has a program of giving rebates to homeowners who install them.

A backflow preventer is a valve installed in your sewer line that only allows flow in one direction – to the main sewer line. It is intended to help prevent sewer backups which are far more messy to deal with than water coming in through basement walls and windows.

Waterproofing your foundation usually involves excavation around the foundation, replacing damaged weeping tiles and installing a waterproof membrane around the foundation to prevent groundwater from getting through your foundation and directing runoff to the weeping tiles that direct runoff away from your foundation.

It’s not cheap to do this, but it is better than seeing furniture or other valuables get damaged by flooding.

Installing a sump pump in your basement is a way of collecting groundwater and pumping it away from your house. New homes are required to have a sump pump installed.

We hope we’ve given you some tips you can use. Please let us know how else we can help you.

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