Mark Rober’s GlitterBomb 5.0 Targets Car Thieves

Package thieves, AKA “porch pirates,” are the bane of modern consumers. The problem isn’t only one of convenience and cost, but also violation. There is some universally infuriating about the audacity of someone grabbing your property from your own porch. Mark Rober turned his vengeance into an annual holiday tradition with his GlitterBomb prank bait packages and those videos are always his most popular. Rober plans to put an end to the tradition after this year, so that meant he had to go all-out. The new and improved GlitterBomb 5.0 features a number of devious innovations and even targets car thieves.

The only thing more frustrating than a porch pirate is a thief who breaks into your car, because they’re both stealing your valuables and breaking your windows. The iPad they steal from your car might only be worth a couple hundred bucks, but it’ll cost more than that to replace your shattered window. Rober’s GlitterBomb 5.0 baits everyday porch pirates and car thieves in the San Francisco Bay area — the capitol of car break-ins in the United States. The police do little to combat or prosecute these crimes (even when there is video evidence), so Rober’s pranks are the best deterrent on the streets. In fact, Rober noted in this video that he has seen a decrease in the number of bait package thefts over the past five years.

The previous GlitterBombs were all fairly similar, but GlitterBomb 5.0 is a complete redesign. It's disguised as an enticing Oculus VR headset and like in previous years, it is equipped with concentrated fart spray. But instead of a couple of small bottles, it has a massive one-liter jug of the stuff that continuously sprays out via a peristaltic pump and drencheseverything in the vicinity. In place of smartphones to track the package and capture the action, Rober used a pop-out 360° video camera and a single smartphone to monitor the GPS location.

Finally, Rober put glitter-dispersal to the extreme. As the name suggests, the GlitterBombs explode (very fine) glitter all over the room. But Rober wasn’tsatisfied with dusting a single room in glitter, so he armed the GlitterBomb 5.0 with a pair of autonomous drones that fly around a house while dropping glitter everywhere they go. The drones are smart enough to avoid anti-aircraft swats, so they’ll occupy the thieves for quite some time while the fart spray does its magic.

Rober tweaked the GlitterBomb 5.0 slightly for the car thieves as a safety measure. As much as Rober dislikes the thieves, he didn’t want to accidentally cause an accident by flying drones around inside their moving cars. The car thief version can respond to remote activation via test message, which lets Rober trigger each feature independently. If they’re in the car and moving, he can unleash the fart spray. But if they’re at home and open the package, he can trigger the full assault.

We’ve come to look forwardto Rober’s annual holiday GlitterBomb videos and we’re sad that this is the final year. But Rober certainly went out with a bang and this year’s video is as satisfying as all the others.