Bad article in the Times.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09 ... -saboteur/

Not only is it very old news, but very unnecessary to point the finger at Geocachers who also suffer significant theft from the moor. Not helpful to either group, who share more in common than they don't - including many actively involved people!

This has also been on Facebook and in the local paper. It is only going to make the problem worse,It has been going on for years even before geocaching was invented. It is wrong to blame the geocachers, I agree they probably have the same problem. It is also not just catalogue boxes affected. WOM and Charity walk boxes go missing.

I panicked when I saw the subject title: I wasn't aware of a Times article too!! I think its far too soon to say that this news article will make things worse. I have no idea if geocaches suffer as much theft as Letterboxes. Perhaps we'll see an article about this in the morning. Maybe in another paper. BTW, my quote - which is more detailed in the online version of the Telegraph piece - was from a 2014 post on my blog. I agree this is hardly breaking news!

It seems that it is mostly the easy to reach letterboxes that go missing. I was out this week, the ones that have a fairly hard walk to were there but so many were missing within easy reach of car parks.

Very Sad.

The problem is no longer a thief but several thieves and I suspect they are having a competition between themselves to see how many they can collect...
There isn't much we can do except catch them red handed... and even then there is nothing we can do as a Dartmoor letterbox is classified as litter.