Funny reading this. I had the same experience with a rental bmw 530 in italy.
Nothing stolen, only window shaddered and SoS going blind.
I left for Germany that day though, so I must have been lucky.
Thanks for posting
A Dutch first: Ingenious BMW theft attempt
321–325 of 325 posts
Re: A Dutch first: Ingenious BMW theft attempt
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
Romania is not in Schengen area so they shouldn't get there, the farthest they would get to in that direction is Hungary, at least in theory. Anyway a few year ago my car was stolen in Slovakia (the insurance paid out so my loss was minimal) and was found after a year in Hungary - the thieves were trying to sell it but it was found out they tried to change the VIN. Because apparently you can't register a car with a s…
> Romania is not in Schengen area so they shouldn't get there Why is that? Plenty of stolen European cars roaming in Algeria and Tunisia. And with the help of corrupt officers they are registered here.
As I said, in theory, it should be very hard to get out of Schengen with a stolen car. But of course corrupt officials can help.
Registering a car with a stolen VIN should not be possible within the EU. Of course "should not".
Re: A Dutch first: Ingenious BMW theft attempt
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been thinking about that. A good one with parking mode and cloud support sets you back about 800 euro including installation. It could be worth it but the chances of the cops actually catching someone based on the footage is quite slim. For hit and run accidents in which you can record a license plate it might be worth it.
Cut the cloud storage, install yourself, and buy direct from Asia. Except the flash card, buy that from Amazon. Then it should cost less than US$100 per side.
Oh dear. So we figured out that SD cards „directly from asia“ are either counterfeit, fake or low quality. But apparently cameras are fine? Well, good luck then.
Re: A Dutch first: Ingenious BMW theft attempt
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
My solution wasn't to protect against that - if you're up for desoldering stuff you may as well just replace the ECU with your own one which is happy to start the car. This was just an idea to thwart installation of compromised firmware by thieves via the diagnostics port. It's just a little layer of security, not designed to be bulletproof, merely to slow down thieves by forcing them to actually swap the hardware.
if you're up for desoldering stuff you may as well just replace the ECU with your own one which is happy to start the car. I demand a source that teaches me how to do this. :) Orrr if you're in Chicago let's go figure it out ourselves!
In Europe: https://ecu.de/
Re: A Dutch first: Ingenious BMW theft attempt
#325I used to fix cars for a living. Sometimes it involved “cracking” alarm & immobiliser systems. My clients all claimed they broke/lost their keys to their car - most of the time they were believable (car stuck in front of their driveway, etc). Sometimes less so, but I’d do it anyway because I needed the money and I had no proof of the contrary (innocent until proven guilty right?), although given the sad conditions of…
> unless it’s been going on for a while but executed perfectly so nobody would find a trace My boss's car was stolen in broad daylight in front of a client's warehouse. This isn't a busy area, but it isn't extremely quiet either. The car had GPS tracking, but it disappeared without a trace. The police guessed that it was driven into the back of a closed truck and straight away transported to Eastern Europe.
Heard a similar story except the owner chased the truck while calling police. When they stopped the truck after two hours (not so easy getting police to actually stop a truck on a highway), they found only car parts inside, with destroyed part numbers.