Thank you for your comment! I would like to say, I don’t think I worded my original post well about which box was which.

It was the white iPhone container box (you know how they come in new white boxes with a picture of the phone on the front) was empty. It was still inside a brown shipping box. So someone opened my shipping box, grabbed the white iPhone box out, opened it and removed the phone, then put the iPhone box back in the shipping box.

I had grabbed the iPhone box, from the top of the brown shipping package, and ran to the phone store with it, and opened it there in front of the associate, where we found it was empty, so clearly deliberately stolen.