Drone Crime: Yes, It’s a Real Thing

It wasn’t too long ago that drones were nothing more than playthings for tech enthusiasts and innovative tools for aerial photographers, but today they have taken on a darker and more sinister role in our society. Twenty-five year old Jorge Edwin Rivera knows all about the darker side of drones; he was going to be paid $1,000 to pilot a drone from one side of the US-Mexico border to the other. The catch? The drone had company: a lunchbox filled with 13 pounds of methamphetamine that an accomplice planned to retrieve after Rivera landed the drone.

Rivera is hardly the first criminal to attempt to capitalize on the fact that drones are simply to fly, difficult to detect, and incredibly practical for a variety of purposes. Today, criminals rely on drones to do everything from snooping and smuggling to actively outmaneuvering police actions. In the words of U.S District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, “Use of drones appears to be on the horizon. The court needs to be clear that these cases present considerable danger to our community.”

Of course, the United States is hardly the only country coping with UAV technology being utilized for immoral purposes. In the United Kingdom, the number of drone incident reports increased threefold between 2015 and 2016. A photographer managed to highlight just how vulnerable the world is to drone-flyers with malicious intentions when he flew his camera drone down aboard Britain’s largest warship, the HMS Queen Elizabeth. As he told the BBC, “I would say my mistake should open their eyes to a glaring gap in security. This was a bit of tomfoolery but it could have been something terrible.”

Criminals in Australia have also been misusing drones in their drug trades, but not to mule the drugs ashore as you might expect. Instead, criminal rings have been caught using drones to counter-surveil the police who monitor them, like one drug ring attempting smuggle $30 million worth of cocaine into the country.   

The good news in all of this is that law enforcement agencies are keeping up with technology as well. Just as the drone industry has enjoyed steady growth, the anti-drone industry is now worth upwards of $1 billion.  The Department of Defense’s Navy Special Warfare Command just signed a $1.5 million contract with SkySafe to develop a vehicle-mounted radio frequency jammer to disable “enemy drones” before they can do harm. Boeing even developed a Compact Laser Weapons System back in 2015 that can burn through a drone in mere seconds.

Stay tuned for this new type of arms race, and just be careful when you go to fly your own drone in your backyard!