App review extortionists

I was just reading up on App Reviews in light of another thread, then I came across this reddit page

http://www.reddit.com/r/androidapps/comments/194y4n/just_a_warning_that_there_are_people_out_there/

Excerpt
"I got an email from some guy who was saying he can post as many good reviews for the app as we're willing to pay for. Naturally we just ignored this, the app isn't for public consumption, reviews don't matter. A couple of weeks later I got another email from the same source as the first warning that without his services, our app could lose business. I checked in the play store and saw that there were dozzens of one star negative reviews with comments like, "Ruined my phone."

Is this kind of thing common? Have any of you had an experience like this?

 

Woah didn't know that! Hope things changed since that reddit post was written.

 

They very well might have. If one reads through the comments on that reddit, there is a mention of how google made it such that only plus accounts can review. Would have made it slightly more difficult for these characters to trash apps in this manner

 

This is a reason I'm iffy about publishing to iPhone, ever. I'm not saying Google Store is any better, necessarily, but I really think that the Apple market is unnecessarily toxic.

 

@Asvarduil why you say that? I thought the Android market was considered the most toxic. I'm asking out of curiosity: I don't know much about either (I mostly developed for PC/Mac until recently).

 

I had no problems with the iOS market, but that was some years ago.

--Eric

 

So, I've been researching the mobile market since I released my last project. What I've found out about the behaviors going on in the markets isn't really too good.

Problem I: Flooded by Hacked Copies
Resources:
Copycats causing problems for iPhone App Developers (2009)
How App Store Grifters Clone an Overnight Success to make a quick buck (2013)*

*: Applies to the Android Market as well. The article is a good read.

Apparently, grifters are a huge problem in the mobile ecosystems. These leeches find promising apps, and sometimes just re-upload them after changing their metadata. Every now and then, a grifter will make a reasonably painstaking clone of an existing app, that will be uploaded.

Problem II: WORM! (or Virus, or Trojan. Whatever.)
Resources:
Free Android Antivirus Apps Fail to Cut It (2011)

While I haven't managed to find many details about Apple's products, the antivirus apps out there for Android are notoriously shoddy, and there was an article on Ars that I failed to find again, where the internal antivirus app that Google uses on newly uploaded apps failed to catch certain patterns of malignant software. You can't rely on these companies to properly vet their software.

Speaking of...

Problem III: You Can't Rely On These Companies to Properly Vet Their Software
A major complaint from many mobile game developers that I have seen on these very forums. As the process has apparently become more automated, some really rancid stuff gets through.

In theory I still want to publish to mobile, but the more I read and look for reasons not to, the more I find them. It's not quite to the point of being a fractal of 'you don't want to do this', but it seems like every day makes the app stores a less promising place to publish to.

It's true that some other marketplaces face similar problems (Steam), so this isn't isolated to 'just mobile.' But the lack of protection that goes on in what are marketed as walled gardens is pretty astounding. I'm not sure I should trust these companies with my app if they're going to enable them to be grifted, filled with malware, and possibly used for much more malicious purposes.

 

Thanks for the detailed info and the interesting links @Asvarduil. After reading I'm even more scared of posting my latest almost-finished game on mobile, considering some of my friends had their games cloned after a single week, even when they were just mildly successful and not a hit. Obviously I will post my game when it's finished, because that's what we do, but darn gosh.

Google/Apple should definitely do more, because as you and a lot of people are saying it seems they're indeed not caring at all about protecting developers. Maybe I'm too naive, but I think that an important step would be that, in case a clone is found guilty and thus removed from the store, all the money it earned should go to the original game's developer. That would be a pretty good deterrent.

 

This stuff is very common in online marketing. Companies do it with website marketing. Had a very similar thing happen to one of my sites several years ago. In this case they spammed links to my site all over blogs on the net. As a result I got complaints to my ISP and myself about spamming. In reality I never did it. What I had done was to not reply to one of the dozens of spam messages I got via the contact form on my site offering website promotion services. In fact I received a message worded very much like you describe. That without their help my site was at great risk. There are a lot of a-holes in the world.

 

@Izitmee, I don't think that removing money from a grifter would be a very feasible idea, but I certainly agree that the app should be stricken from the store, and the Apple Developer's License be revoked. Apple is in a position to prevent theft of a hardworking developer's work, and ensure that our IPs are protected. They really need to assert themselves more in that regard.

And, before anyone can say, "yes, but it's also true people will use this principle to attack works that are competing against them," all Apple/Google has to do is what they claim to already make a point of: being the one who decides that. If your app does the same thing as some other guy's, but has a vastly different setup/different source code? Then, it's not a copy. If they compare two apps, and the UI is identical and most of the source code, then someone needs a ban.

 

is it possible to hide your contact during first week? if they cant contact you, they will quickly forget your game

 

The negative extortion bit aside I was quite shocked(although guess I shouldn't have been) when I put my little kids game I made for my son on appstore and received emails from "marketing" companies with rates for buying positive reviews and stars. Opened my eyes a bit that a lot of those reviews are worthless.

 

I find it hard to believe that, of all the checks Apple makes during the app review process, none of them include "is the app's binary identical to any binaries already in existence on the store?"

 

So, first thing first: I'm only researching the various app stores. I do not have a dev license on any of them, nor have I released anything into those ecosystems, first. Just re-throwing that out there to prevent confusion.

However...yeah, I agree. If 90%+ of the binary is the same as someone else's, I'd definently agree it's a ripoff. I find it hard to believe that no one at Apple or Google reads these tech magazines, and learns of these sorts of scams going on. They don't help the companies or the ecosystems. (I'm referring to the extortion tactics and the grifting.)

EDIT: I really think the problem with the App Store - both the extortion, the grifting, and the malware - is all coming from one source: Apple not paying nearly enough attention to the goings-on around their walled garden. I'd actually liken it to a siege in the Middle Ages, really; you've got the extortionists mining under the walls, the malware being delivered as 'gifts' to the vanquishers, more often than not in the form of grifted apps that, because the guards are sleeping on the job, are getting through.

I originally throught I was being extremely off-topic, but really, it all comes down to the same core issue: the Apple (and Google) app stores are not as well-controlled as they market. It's really a nasty place to do business.

 

Alas, it's not that simple, and Unity is a perfect example. How similar do you think the binaries for a pair of simple games made in Unity may be? I can easily imagine a circumstance where the unique content/scripts for a game may be less than 10% of the deploy size. And if you're making an app that's less content dependent, and using open source libraries... it could easily appear to be almost entirely pillaged - how much glue/UI code do you think there'd be compared to what's in the off-the-shelf libraries?

Plus, I'm sure it'd be easy enough to do some sort of scrambling to stop many things from being recognised compared to its source. For instance, you could simply change formats, re-compress or encrypt things for a minimal effort, user-transparent modification that significantly changes the stored data. (Though that's no reason not to check for actually identical stuff, or say >99% identical stuff, with human checking of flagged matches.)

 

Thanks for this

I used to be active in the running of one or two websites, though none of those sites became significant enough to get the attention of these thugs, so I was not that aware of this problem. So I did a little bit of reading up.

Here are some quick tips for anyone reading this thread at a later date

The dubious practice is called SEO extortion. (Google)

A lot of sites document this thing. It consists of a threatening email that mostly looks like this template email

Excerpt:
Hello,
Read this email very carefully.
This is an extortion email.

We will do NEGATIVE SEO to your website by giving it 20,000 XRumer forum profile backlinks (permanent & mostly dofollow) pointing directly to your website and hence your website will get penalised & knocked off the Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) forever, if you do not pay us $1,500.00 (payable by Western Union).

The remedies you can take according to these sites is
1. Monitor your webmaster account frequently
2. Disavow suspicious links
3. Report these kind of emails immediately to Google.

I have no idea how much this helps because like I said I have not faced this problem due my very little experience in running a website but it IS a big enough problem to provide 183000 results on google search.

More info and sources for above at
http://www.getfoundquick.com/google-bowling-and-seo-extortion/
http://www.longtermfix.com/negative-seo-attempting-extort-website-owners/
http://searchengineland.com/google-responds-mass-negative-seo-extortion-emails-200689

EDIT: More info on this 'XRumer'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRumer

 

You can take this another direction as well: Sometimes two binaries for the same game with only a minor change can be so different as to prevent simple patching.

Until recently, a game I played was requiring a complete download of the entire game binary every time they made even the slightest change. This was because of how their game engine compiled everything together. There was no "patch this small change" possibility because any small change would cause radical changes to the entire structure of the download.

To me this means that if some game engines do this naturally, anyone who is stealing an existing game and posting it again can easily bypass any check of uploaded binaries.


The app copying gets even more complicated when you start thinking about non-custom art. If I purchase a pre-made UI on the Asset Store, how do I prove another app is ripping me off instead of just using that same pre-made UI? What if I'm using various script packages as well? I'm sure it's possible to prove the theft, but it gets that much harder and that much more costly.

From the perspective of whatever marketplace the apps are going up on, even trying to compare the clones and the copies to see what are valid and what cross the line into outright theft is probably not cost effective. Considering how little money most apps make (basically $0), for a marketplace to have an employee spend even 10 minutes looking at every app means most apps posted cost the marketplace more money than they will ever earn.

Even paying a programmer to somehow develop analysis software that can tell when one app rips off another isn't necessarily a cost effective solution. You'd also end up paying someone else to sort through potential false positives, then paying someone to deal with whatever steps the marketplace wants to take, and then dealing with appeals to the process.

YouTube and Twitch have it easy with looking for music because they're just pattern matching, yet look at how many false positives both of those services have gone through.


Ultimately, I think we need a better system than we have now, I just do not believe we're going to get it as long as the basic app price is $0 and the common end user just doesn't care. There are currently court cases in the U.S. which are debating what exactly "cloning" entails or allows under copyright law, and that may ultimately be what forces the various marketplaces to start paying more attention to the garbage that is being posted.

Or they could go back to charging a posting fee for every app and using that money to pay for a real review process. I think a lot of independent developers will be opposed to that though.

 

Plus, it's not actually Apple's/Google's problem, it would cost a lot to implement this stuff, it would gain them little, and could perhaps (I don't know... I guess Youtube does ok) open them up to a lot of liability if they tried (people complaining when they failed to make a correct match on stuff actually stolen, and other people complaining about false positives).

 

A few years ago I received one of those pay-4-reviews email and pasted it (w/full headers) into an Apple bug report with security as the type. An Apple engineer replied, thanking me for the report but it wasn't a security problem however he would pass it along to the appropriate group. Pretty sure I've also contacted Apple through the app review team (before they changed the iTunes Connect site).

Sorry, no info on Google and this is the first I'm hearing of the extortion side of it. Pretty discouraging

 

@GregMeach @Asvarduil

I don't think its a huge enough problem yet.

@Asvarduil , I don't think this factor should significantly deter you from even putting your app at the appstores. The clones factor, I dunno. I think if you are creative enough, people always want the original. The dude who only clones stuff and can't make things himself will eventually become boring.

From what I have been able to make out so far, it is not a huge problem yet. At the present time there is a lot of operators offering to put positive ratings - Cash for ratings. This extortion business, though it does exist is not so widely prevalent yet.

I think its more a question of being aware of the problem and being prepared to deal with if and when its hits your app

 

Agreed. If this deters you then it's pretty hard to do business anywhere doing anything... there's almost always someone who can figure out a way to exploit the system, or to whom the punishments of doing the wrong thing aren't a deterrent.

One of the horror stories a business teacher told us was of a startup he'd been involved with where they made a tech demo and sent some materials to a prospective client. The prospective client turned around to an existing software vendor and said "Hey, can you make this?" Their software vendor said yes, and put a larger team with a bigger budget on it, and took it to market. The startup had taken steps to protect their work, but for reasons I can't remember decided they couldn't practically do anything about it. So even though their stuff had been blatantly stolen and given to a competitor, they just walked away and did other things. Despite this, that particular teacher was a millionaire before he was 30.

So, while you should always protect yourself as much as you can, you shouldn't let this kind of thing deter you from giving something your best shot. If he'd a) not tried because of the risk of theft or b) let that theft stop him from trying again, he wouldn't have been in a position to stand in front of a classroom and tell us about it.

 

omg... another seat in the row of perversities inducing the demise of mobile / indie development.

 

I think my app may be suffering from this? I have a a number 4/5 star reviews and number of 1 star reviews, every time I get a couple of 4/5 star reviews I can be sure of a 1 star review with 15 - 30 mins. Ive had an email offering a paid review service that's a pdf hosted on Google! . Numerous request for partnerships and requests to use such and such an sdk to boost my visibility

I think that these people manage both the high and low reviews to try and hook you in, I say this because one of my 5 star reviews had an offensive comment and a 1 star review had quite positive comment.

This is my first game released on the android market I its quite a rough experience. If you couple this with the fact that people just don't want to pay and ads don't make much it just doesn't seem worth while making games for the mobile market as and indie developer right now imho.

I have to agree with Ricks

 

Hilarious....


re.------------------------------------>>
Hello ForceVFX Team!

We will be brief. First, congratulations on successful app Ace WW2 Dogfighter Free. It's a well done high quality product, otherwise (let's be real) - we wouldn't be talking here.

We had a chance of noticing your app since it was high enough in top charts. So did tons of new users. But, will it stay there for as long as you want to? How fast it can turn into an <invisible app with all the outcomes.

Forget about the outcomes. We got this. We're a team of experienced app developers and publishers of mobile apps for the Apple App Store, Amazon App Store. Offering you a unique advertising program that is designed to help you climb and sustain your position in the Top Charts worldwide(!). And to prove this, we are ready to accept payment for campaign according to the results after one is complete.

Try it. You will absolutely love the result. As much as everybody else we've worked with did.
Your new users are waiting for you.

The Awesome Team for awesome apps!
Thank you,
Dan

------------------------------------------>>

You do not want to respond to these maggots!! I learned ..Ex Post Facto..
(I was having a bad day..)

------------------------------------------>>
let me , first try to explain how f@#$% crazy you sound, and why..
a) A Gmail Account:?? No actual Domain..(20 bucks??..cheapskates!!) www.Iam-A-Scam.com
b) No Actual Business name.
c) No Website or hyperlink back to f#$$@! anything,

if you were actual “ experienced app ...publishers”
you would F*&$@$% KNOW THAT!!

“we are ready to accept payment ..”

how about you accept my C%$# IN YOUR M%$#@!!!!
keep trolling
p
------------------------------------------>>


2 Days later..this popped up..and is still on my front page review.
Daily download/financial effect.ZERO..

PORNO??

-------------------------------------------??
vijay prakash bajpai September 3, 2014

I hate it I am just a eight year old child and everyday when I play this game sex videos come can you stop these types of ads because mostly children like me only install games.

ForceVFX September 3, 2014
LET ME BE CLEAR! There is NO NUDITY OR EXPLICIT VIOLENCE in my Game or Ads. This '8 year Old'-see avatar pic, emailed me 4 days ago with an 'Offer' to promote this game, for a 'Price'. When I told him, in no uncertain terms, what to do with that 'Offer'.This was his response. Retaliation, hurt my game by making up lies.Who does that? A Bad Person!
-------------------------------------------??

Live and learn..just do not respond..Like I did

"Sounds GREAT!! Sign me Up!!! QUICK!!!"


p-

 

It's an unfortunate fact of life that wherever money is being made there will always be some low life piece of crap trying to get a piece of it through unethical, if not downright illegal, methods. And no disrespect intended to anyone here but in my experience, both firsthand and from reading similar accounts, nearly all of these are coming from India, China and other countries outside the USA, UK and such. Sure we have those types here too but the Internet seems to bring them in by the thousands.

Of course, some of the blame has to be put on the people who first started hiring them to blemish their competition. It is fairly common for some product authors to engage in such campaigns against their competition. That is one big issue with having an Open Internet Ratings System.

On the bright side it also creates an opportunity for genuine review sites such as Angie's List. It was needed because the bad mouthing negative reviews is used by local businesses to try to knock out their competition as well.

Not sure if there is some independent review site that is the go to place for iPhone and Android apps. If so that is the place to get listed on. If not... maybe someone should start one.

 

Well, with most of the people in the world being outside the USA (yes, Americans - you are NOT the centre of the world!), it's no wonder most of them are not from the USA!

Have a look at oDesk's job offers. You will find many suspicious posts, all of them from Indian companies. They outsource writing reviews of this sort. The worst thing is that people will work for these pathetic amounts they pay. As long as people are willing to work for $1 per review, and enough people pay for fake reviews, these gangsters will continue this sort of thing. The ones who pay for reviews fund the bad reviews too.

 

Have you released on iOS? Their review process is TOUGH. Right now, I'm 15 days into the review of my next title, which includes 11 days of waiting for them to start the review, and 4 days since with back and forth's regarding IAP's. Over the years, I've seen rejections for all sorts of things, from spelling iOS with an 'I' to asking for a '5-star review'.

I love that the high-iOS standards push me to treat a release like a 'Gold' standard. And I hate that it takes so long and that it's a black-box which still leaves me uncertain. One time I had several rejections in a row, pushing the release time to a whopping 28 days!

Android is a different beast entirely.
Gigi

 

...Are we at least the upper-left center of the northwestern hemisphere of the world? Just so you know, I'm going to cry if we're not.

I'm also crying at bringing national stereotypes into this, I don't feel it's necessary...

...even if said extortion/scam operations are being based from India. There was another story I read not too long ago about those who troll computer security scammers, who funny enough are also based in India. Of course, scammers know no national boundaries, they're sort of everywhere.

 

Ye, Lets be careful with the stereotyping, people. Else the mods will be left with no choice other than to shut the thread down.

 

There are some strong suspicions that Flappy Bird gained popularity because people were payed to play and rate the game. Whenever the game fell enough in popularity, it would suddenly rise again very quickly, indicating that shenanigans were likely involved.

 

That's interesting. Do you have any more info on this?

 

Here's one article that talks about possible bot activity:
http://www.bluecloudsolutions.com/blog/flappy-birds-smoke-mirrors-scamming-app-store/

Note the sawtooth nature of the app's rankings. I was reading another article (can't seem to find it) written by a marketing guy. He was saying usually the sawtooth is caused by some kind of promotional activity, such as an email drop. He said that pattern rarely happens by itself.

But who knows. Maybe the app was just unusual in the way it spreads, or it got press coverage at unusual times.


Edit: Ok, I found the other article from the marketing guy:
http://nativex.com/blog/the-story-behind-why-flappy-bird-was-deleted/

 

Thanks, that was indeed interesting reading.

 

It is indeed. But, being the programmer that I am and always looking for edge cases...

... assuming there was traffic buying, who's to say that Nguyen was the purchaser?

That might sound crazy, but consider for a moment that you're a marketer doing research on, I dunno, how the ranking algorithm currently works, or on how much traffic you have to buy to get how many users, or anything else where the results can be drawn from publicly available info. Why make your own app to do the experiment when you can just pick a handful of existing ones which have been around for a while and do it with them? Since they've been around for a while they have historical data, which would actually make the experiment far more effective. Plus, you don't have to make your own apps to run the experiment.

 

Similarly, if each sawtooth represents some kind of marketing, who's to say that Nguyen was actively marketing it and not just reviewers / youtubers talking about the game? I'd imagine that most regular readers / subscribers will watch or read a new review within 24 hours and act upon it (downloading the game). It would lead to similar wave shapes as the game begins to go viral. The later spikes are almost certainly this, as more and more reviewers start talking about it, and their fans go to try it out.

Flappy Bird could be a genuine streak of good luck... if it wasn't for one nagging question - where did the first spike come from? What brought a game that had been out for 5 months back from the dead? To me that's the most interesting question there.

 

A bit over two years since I started developing games, I just had those emails offering review and marketing services, but no threats yet. Knock on wood. The first couple I replied as politely and professionally as possible because I was new to it all, but the rest I ignored.

Why? Because none of them offered a link to their site, or who they are, or any of that sort of info. I mean if you're advertising your self, and you ARE a perfectly legit company, at least post a link to what you're advertising. xD

I also got a few for fundraising campaign promoters emailing me, which did provide links, to a bit overpriced, still very suspicious to me, services. I'm not gonna pay hundreds dollars if I'm trying to gather 100 or 500 dollars. Yeah, I'm poor as fluff, not a cheapskate, don't judge me. I do have a job, but even more expenses. xD
Otherwise I wouldn't be fundraising "pocket change" money. xD

 

This is a pretty horrible story... have you tried contacting Google about the comment? I know opinions can be subjective, but I'd hope that comments that blatantly lie about content, that's there for everyone to see, have to be breaking some rule somewhere...

 

well, it is my fault..really the only reason I shared this..so others', might avoid the same stupid mistake.
I think I like it...look at his picture...he is, like, 65..and he say's "I am 8 years old" Classic!!

(his picture is right next to his comment, which has links to his profile..Mad Genius?)

the comment is now marked as 90% Spam...Google+ has been notified..
I moved on..but it still makes me laugh..(to think that, someone,actually sees this as an actual business?)

p-

 

That's all I meant by that. I just find it odd that so many of these practices come from one or two countries. It made me wonder if they just view things differently and maybe do not see anything wrong with it? But I agree that is not a discussion for here.

Agreed! I am not trying to start wars! LOL! Let's keep it warm & fuzzy here. I do ponder some things such as I wrote above but those are discussions best left for the brain trust colleagues offline.

Just so people know... 3 of my closest friends are from India. I am going to ask them about this stuff.

 

According to his profile he's been in the 8th grade since 1970!

 

A few days ago a I got an email from such&such@apprankerpro, ill not put the link but if you do your googling you will find this man and his website are not from India...... just to bring a bit of balance. No mention of 1 stars and oddly no way of contacting him directly on his website and no prices, maybe he does it out of kindness for his fellow developers?. Seems to have an American accent and is quite brazen with his offer to up those ratings.

I actually got some quite good feedback from some one in India, the old lady did seem to know what she was talking about to my surprise, although the account picture did change to a youngish man after a few days (must have been a pic of his mum? ) and he seemed to give almost every game he downloaded 5 stars...

 

What worries me the most here is the reverse engineering and cloning of your game under different branding.

Has this happened to anyone? And surely if this happens Google and Apple will step in, since this is no longer cloning really but reverse engineering of your IP ?

 

Same here. You can even find tutorials on how to do it on youtube. Especially Unity games. Ran into one on accident recently.

 

Hmmm... I wonder then if making everything server side and using asset bundles would be the best way to combat this?

 

Do you mean keep the game, or parts of it, on a server?

 

Well, make it always online, so all data etc is stored on the server.
And then download asset bundles from the server on a first install.

So yes if your prefabs all come off a specific server, it might be a lot harder to reverse engineer.
I'm not sure how they hack the games but I'm sure these things will make it more difficult.

 

True, but players don't like being always online to play a game, unless that game is primarily online. But you're right about having it online being safer, because that's exactly what most major games are doing, sort of. The singleplayer is offline, but the multiplayer is in most cases exclusively online. And thus, in most cases you can't pirate the multiplayer, since the stuff handling it is not on your comp.

Also, isn't Planetary Annihilation like that? I read somewhere that even single player is on a server. Didn't get a chance to play it yet. But after I read that I checked out piratebay and its not on there. Granted it was only released like 5 days ago.

 

On the subject of how to merely hack a Unity game...

This was found after a single Google search, "How to crack unity game."

The guy (and his goofy voice) pretty much uses .NET Reflector for it all. If the code had been obfuscated in this example, it would have slowed the guy down some, but eventually he'd have found it, between .NET Reflector and his cheat engine tools (pretty much, find the value that matches your money amount at the current point in the game, look for functions that use that variable.)

I tentatively assume that such a setup could be used to bypass certain copy protections, since this guy is actually modding the IL code as part of his hacks.

Nine times out of ten, I'm sure this is harmless, especially in a single-player game, when someone wants to use their programming skill to trump the game challenges. And, it's on their computer - they can do what they like with it, if not 'morally' (as much as that applies to some people), then at least practically.

Of course, you could do what @Meltdown said and make sure all your assets are hosted, your code is obfuscated, and so on, which would be a better bet. Just be advised that, the most you can do to deter a hacker is make it an unreasonable amount of time/work/risk to operate on your title, such that they move on to someone not so adequately protected. Whether such effort has a real ROI is entirely up to you.

EDIT: Let me add one thing. I'm adding this to further the security discussion. As you can see, the blackhats already know what is going on and ways to attack/defeat it. It's up to us to figure out ways to make their lives unlivably harder, through technological means. And no, that does not mean becoming trolls or giving out links to this GIF.

 

Why on earth would they do that?

They are not your publisher. Their role is distribution only.

To put this in context with Yet Another Flawed Analogy, imagine you run a fruit picking business and hire a trucking company to take fruit from your warehouse to shops for you. Someone steals from your warehouse. Is it the trucking company's responsibility to take action about the theft?

Apple's and Google's role here is to put your stuff online, process transactions on your behalf and deliver your goods. That's all. IP protection does not fall under their domain.

 

But it is their responsibility if the theft happens on their trucks ...