ORIGINAL: Snook384

Ok here is the best I have seen so far.

If your ladder stand touches the tree in several places use the bolts with one way screw in heads and bolt them through the stand in several pre drilled holes into the tree. The bolt can be skinny but make it pretty damn long so it goes in real deep and is hard to just rip out. Take some very Heavy chain and lock that sucker up to the tree also. Brace the bottom of the stand so that it remains in place as if you were sitting in it. This will allow you to remove the ladder(that you have bolted together) so that they have no way of getting up there unless they have a means to climb the tree. If at all possible use a tree that your stand goes OVER some limbs and there are as many limbs and sticks below it as possible. This deters the thief in the fact that he has to trim branches while climbing up a tree to steal your very well locked up stand.

The best part of this method(true story here from my friends stand) is the rubber snake. Put a fair large dollar store rubber snake in the seat. When the poor bastard climbs up and from below puts his hand up on the seat he grabs a rubber snake. My buddy went to his stand one year and noticed that several branches were broken under it. He then found a note writtenon a3 Muskateers wrapper with this to say "your a f------ a------". we found the snake a month later about 30 feet from the stand. To bad they shot the crap out of his seat cushions but he and I would have paid money to watch that on a game cam.

One other thing I do to my game cams and stand is write on them they are password protected or how they are locked up. It seems to deter them if they know it is just going to be to damn hard to steal from you they go elsewhere. At least no one has stolen our goodies yet.