The season to give is also the season to steal. Burglars are always looking for great deals—you know—the house that looks like nobody’s ever home; the house that has lots of shrubbery crowding out the doors and windows so that nobody can see the prowler spending 20 minutes trying to break in; the house with the huge Christmas tree in the window and a three-foot-high pile of gifts engulfing it.
Here’s how to make your house look very unappealing to burglars:
- Make it look occupied at all times. When you leave, leave some lights on. Leave a TV on so that the flickering can be seen from outside. Better yet, check the preventative BeOn burglar deterrent home security system that adds a layer of security using light and sound as deterrents to stop break-ins before they happen. Their Kickstarter campaign is rocking two Boston sports celebrities, check it out! Backing BeOn on Kickstarter helps accelerate development of these features to make the occupied home even more convincing.
- Don’t just automatically open the door when the doorbell rings unless you know who’s on the other side. And, it is not rude to ignore someone at your door! “But it might be a neighbor!” You’re not obligated to answer your door if you don’t know who it is. Unless you can clearly see it’s a trust person, don’t answer.
- When you order something to be delivered to your house, make an effort to be there to receive it so that a casing burglar doesn’t see an unattended package and think, “Nobody’s home.” Its also a good idea to set up a UPS and Fedex account to be notified of such deliveries.
- Keep the gifts that are under the tree invisible to the outside.
- If you travel, put your newspaper and mail delivery on vacation hold.
- If you’re traveling, notify the police that you’ll be out of town; ask them if they can drive by every so often to make sure things look okay.
- If you have a dog, see if you can arrange to have someone house sit so that the dog can stay at the house to bark in response to any prowlers.
- Don’t leave the boxes, that expensive items came in, sticking out of your rubbish at the curb. Tear them down so that they can be concealed inside the trash cans.
- Do not reveal your travel plans online, and instruct your kids not to.
- If you have a security system, put their stickers on all your windows and their sign in your yard. If you don’t have a system, get ahold of some stickers and signs anyways and put them up.
