If you set up a house as "burglar bait", how many could you off before they got wise?

[astro]

@Cervaise

This was the first thing I thought of. I read a few years ago that because Americans in recent decades are, for whatever reason, tending to shun the company of their immediate neighbors, crews of well-organized burglars are able to pull a moving van into a target house’s driveway and, in full view of the neighborhood, empty the house completely, without anybody getting suspicious. For myself, if there were suddenly a lot of moving-type activity around the house on my left, I wouldn’t know whether or not it was legit.

Presuming there’s something to this, what’s your plan for getting rid of the vehicle?

If it’s a bad neighborhood I imagine that problem will take usually care of itself re an unattended vehicle.

[Cervaise]

@astro

If it’s a bad neighborhood I imagine that problem will take usually care of itself re an unattended vehicle.

No, actually, on further consideration, there’s a more complicated logistical concern here. Seems to me that any burglars organized enough to use the moving-van method are going to be working in teams, say three people at minimum, because that will make the operation appear legitimate to the casual neighborhood observer. What happens when one of the burglars notices that their compatriots have gone missing? If you’ve got several guys who are planning to go in and out on a staggered basis, the fact that there’s a problem will become obvious almost immediately.

[Hypno-Toad]

@Cervaise

Presuming there’s something to this, what’s your plan for getting rid of the vehicle?

First, I’d have to have outdoor surveillance to see where the intruder came from. Then get the keys from the corpse to drive it off and dump it somewhere.

As for teams of guys, I might try to create rooms that had really valuable things that required two or more people to lift. A smallish safe might be a good idea. That way, the burglars would have to get two or more people to move it and you could trap them all in a kill room. It would have to be something that was not so heavy that they wouldn’t try to open it there or just leave it.

Another method to handle teams might be to divide and conquer. Lock them into separate rooms for convienant disposal.

[Boyo_Jim]

Well. if you’re going to have to deal with criminal teams, then I think you need to be able to seal rhe whole house, and flood everything with poison gas. And then some kind of decontamination or neutralizing gas to clean things out afterward.

I think you could probably get away with attaching extra gear to a forced-air heating or AC system.

[flurb]

First off, I find it hard to believe that the local miscreants are going to just say to themselves, “Golly, here’s new mansion full of plasma screen TVs in the middle of cracktown – what a break!” Your proposed scenario is so anomolous that they’re going to assume it’s a trick or a trap. And if they do decide to test the waters, they’re going to be more likely to take precautions like working in a team, closely surveiling the premises and probably just jumping you when you come out of the panic room to do your grocery shopping.

Also, I assume that the residents in your imaginary 'hood are going to get a bit suspicious when some stranger buys a run down house, pumps tons of money into fixing it up and filling it with high-tech goodies, then disappears. I think your house is going to be surveilled around the clock, not necessarily by theives, but by curious neighbors.