Despite years of police warnings about the dangers of meeting strangers to buy or sell items found online, criminals continue to use social media markets to lure victims into robbery traps. This week, one of those robbers, caught last summer because Chicago police were surveilling the area with a drone, was sent to prison — on his 24th birthday.
It all went down on an August afternoon last year in the 2900 block of West Warren Boulevard, a site where CPD had warned the public that online marketplace rip-offs were taking place. After CPD issued the community alert in June 2024, the number of robberies ballooned over the summer, prompting investigators to tap into the city’s growing fleet of surveillance drones.
As a SWAT team’s drone quietly looked on from above, a 24-year-old Braidwood man rolled onto the street to buy a motorized dirt bike that he saw advertised on Facebook Marketplace. That’s the same scenario CPD mentioned was being used to attract victims to the robbery trap…