News / 'Chappie McChapface': the $1m warehouse robbery that never happened

Not the actual robot. © Kittipong Jirasukhanont

Fears for the future of humanity from the twin threats of robotics and AI could once more propel supply chains into the spotlight of global attention, after a warehouse robot found itself at the centre of a million-dollar robbery.

The Loadstar was passed details of an extraordinary criminal investigation underway following a break-in at a warehouse in an undisclosed location.

A range of high-value consumer electronic goods worth millions of dollars were stolen from the facility, but police were initially baffled by a crime scene that showed no signs of break-in, had no witnesses nor CCTV footage of the criminals and no evidence such as DNA traces that may have helped to identify those behind what looked like a highly sophisticated burglary.

However, upon learning that the facility, and the unnamed contract logistics operator managing the site, had been experimenting with a new robot equipped with AI technology that allowed it to develop beyond simple pick and pack operations, police turned the investigation to the possibility that cyber criminals may have hacked into the robot.

The robot, nicknamed Chappie McChapface by warehouse workers – a portmanteau reference to the 2015 film Chappie about a police droid, and reference to the UK’s Boaty McBoatface saga – had begun operating at the facility six months before.

Police cyber investigators subsequently discovered that malicious firmware appeared to have been transmitted to Chappie McChapface from the electronic logging device (ELD) of a truck that had recently docked at the warehouse, allowing the gang to control the robot after its human colleagues had finished their shifts.

Investigators followed the data trail from the robot to the truck and were subsequently able to track that to an IP address that led them directly to the doors of an apartment in a nearby town.

At dawn the next morning armed police raided the address and discovered three men, two of which already faced an arrest warrant for a previous charge of operating a phishing scam.

All three were arrested and taken in for questioning but protested their innocence.

Then, in an extraordinary development, police discovered new links from the IP address of the arrested cybercriminals back to the warehouse and where, astonishingly, the stolen goods had reappeared.

“It now looks as if the robot actually hacked him-, sorry, itself, with the intention of framing the criminals for the crime,” a police source told The Loadstar.

“The trouble is, we can’t work out its motive – was it some way of pointing police us to where two wanted criminals were hiding out or, and we’re having difficulty getting our heads round this, was it in some way of showing us the dangers of AI?

“Is this machine so self-aware that it needed to demonstrate that that self-awareness could present a threat to us? The trouble is, it doesn’t have a mouth or vocal chords – it can’t talk which means it can’t answer our questions, no matter how loudly or forcefully we put them to it,” the source said.

He added that the case had left senior police officers in something of a legal quandary.

“We’re not entirely sure what to do next. Should we arrest it? And if we do that, do we read it its rights? Does it have rights?

“Or should arrest its designers and those that wrote its code – turns out about 50% of its code was written by AI anyway, so where does that leave us? Maybe we should just arrest the whole internet,” he said.

The case continues.