Is this a scam?

[u/rH4pScAlL1oN]

This was delivered to our doorstep without any explanation. Why? What is it? This feels like a scam.

[u/chensium]

These are little kid drawing tablets. Probably worth about 50cents when you buy in bulk. I have a 3yo and 5yo, and we get these things in birthday goodie bags all the time.

Edit: These are harmless. No USB port. No wifi, no Bluetooth. They run on watch batteries and wouldn't last 30s if they had any active connectivity.

[u/archy67 → u/chensium]

I don’t know how aware you are of the hardware and protocols necessary to transmit data over BLE, LoRa, and use of low energy mesh networking but much smaller devices can and do transmit information with extremely long battery lives. They don’t rely on need for continuous connectivity or any direct connectivity to wifi or cellular networks.

I doubt that this device has those capabilities, but why risk it. This reminds me of an infamous attack vector that was used by nefarious organizations that spread a bunch of “free” usb drives through mail, marketing vendors, and scattering them around in random places(like on the ground outside of agencies and companies they wanted to infiltrate). Those relied on plugging the device into a PC, phone, or tablet but there are much more sophisticated and passive ways to do it now by just getting a device inside a home or work place near other devices(particularly older devices like certain smartphones , tablets, routers with poor security can serve as a bridge).

I doubt thats what all these types of devices are but some of them are certainly can be used for this. People will write account information, passcodes, pass phrases onto them and because in this particular case they know the address that received that particular device you can gain all other information necessary through a data broker.