The Anti Cacher
As many of you know, despite being from New Brunswick I go to university in New Zealand and I’ve enjoyed some great geocaching in that part of the world. Recently, someone near Christchurch has taken a really strange dislike to geocaching and has started kidnapping geocaches.
Looking for a geocache?
To late… You’ve been archived by the Anti Cacher!
(If you want your cache back deposit one bag of pineapple lumps in the nearby mail box… come alone… don’t call the police! Joke about the pineapple lumps! but there will be an opportunity to get your cache back! Stay tuned!)
(Pineapple Lumps, by the way, are a popular made-in-New Zealand candy.)
When this first started happening in mid-January, and people began posting about it on the Geocaching New Zealand Facebook group, I was confused about where these “ransom” notes were being found. It turns out, the Anti Cacher is removing the cache and leaving his/her own small container with this note inside. Numerous caches have gone missing around Christchurch, which is leading many COs to change their caches to Premium Only. Unfortunately, a couple of weeks ago some Premium Only caches were also kidnapped. No one knows who the Anti Cacher is, and now that PO hides are also disappearing, people don’t really know what they can do about it. The Anti Cacher has become of particular concern because in October, Christchurch is hosting the 3rd NZ Mega.
What would you do, if this was happening here?
hide an outdoor sports camera ( those used to see if deer come to your bait )
(They are motion sensitive) Should do the trick.
How would you choose where to hide it? At one of the existing sites that have been kidnapped, in case they come back?
Why don’t you put the camera near one of the caches where he is making a demand for the pineapple bits. You know he will be re-visiting that area.
Sounds like time to set up a few trail cams.
i’d plant a new cache and leave some pineapple lumps and wait with a baseball/cricket bat during the hours i was available.
Very frustrating. I mean, what is the point to it? They obviously are getting some sort of sick thrill out of doing this, going so far as to even make a premium account and paying money to do it. In most instances, he is only taking a container and contents worth probably 5 bucks, but the aggravation and frustration levels of the cachers being affected must be pretty high, especially with a Mega looming.
Has anyone crunched any numbers to look for patterns? Does he go after FTFs, certain locations preferred, certain cache types more vulnerable than others, new vs. older? A little stats might help narrow the window and you *might* have a chance of catching him in the act. As others suggested, a trail cam would work as well, and I think something similar has been used to grab a cache/TB thief in the past (if memory serves). But an image on a trail cam really wouldn’t do much unless you were able to ID the culprit.
The problem is that even if he stops or is caught, he can very, very easily start back up again, as this hobby allows for a lot of anonymity if one desires.
So my understanding from the posts is that it’s hard to find any kind of a pattern. The caches are from numerous locations around the city. They’re from several different hiders, although some hiders have been hit a few times. Sometimes they’re standalone caches, sometimes they’re part of a series and 2 or 3 in a row will be taken. Sometimes they’re regular caches, sometimes they’re Premium Only caches. Someone suggested looking at which cachers had look at the PO cache pages, since that’s one feature of PO caches, but frankly he’s only taken one or two of those and so that’s not necessarily going to help.
It’s hard to put up a camera to catch someone when you have no idea where they’re going to hit next. With several hundreds caches in the city, you’d have to be pretty lucky to put the camera at the right one. And even then, what’s to stop them? Has a law been broken (doubtful)? Would peer pressure do it?
Wonder if this could be some sort of stunt by the Mega organizers? Also, putting pineapple lumps in a mail box? How would they know when to get them out? Do they pass by regularly, maybe as a mail carrier?
Has there been any more incidents of this since heathtree has been back in Canada? 😉