It’s all about raising the bar for mishandling. Sure, if an unethical handling company messes up your shipment they could go at it and try and reset the indicator(s), but they could also just get the job done right and not risk getting sued if the client does detect the tampering. On the other hand, without indicators there’s nothing stopping them from pretending they didn’t just throw your box around...

It also tends to make it rather obvious fraud.

While replacing a sticker is legal, doing so to trick someone into paying you is usually criminal fraud.

Criminal liability is a _far_ bigger leap than normal deceptive business practices.

Especially since these stickers (and those like them) have serial numbers, and the sender typically notes the serial numbers in an email or similar when the item is shipped. The effort required to reset one without it being noticed is pretty high.

There are two reasons why you would ever want to use something more complex: determining when the triggering happened (ie. who to blame) and ascertaining after the fact whether the trigger event was really meaningful for the package contents. You can build such an electronic sensor and it even can be cheap if reusable, but it mostly is not cost-effective.

On the other hand trying to build such an thing is good source of interesting stories, like sales reps of three different semiconductor manufacturers calling you at 4AM and wanting to know what the hell you are designing and whether it in fact is not missile guidance system or some other ITAR covered thing...

>In practice they aren't hard for a motivated person to reset but a person who mishandles boxes wouldn't seem to fit that description. Foolproof.