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After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

bloomberg.com

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Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#51

Post by dmix »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #32
mgramsey wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any citations for what seems like an extreme claim in your second paragraph?

The crime statistics in the neighborhoods should suffice. One thing I periodically see on HN is how companies are discriminating against (group here) because they aren't operating in high-crime neighborhoods. Obviously, a company maximizing revenues and minimizing liabilities will avoid such areas. So will most individuals delivering to them that don't want to get robbed (most likely), raped, or killed. They're more…

> That's because they think the same things

It’s mostly because this type of worldview filters everything through the lens of power and when viewed through this context the way to ‘fix’ it is by tipping the scales culturally by not acknowledging the things that may cause a stigma and prevent ‘access’ to resources and jobs.

So it’s probably less about what they believe to be true vs they think it’s not helpful to say it out loud.

Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#52

Post by lettergram »

Spooky23 wrote: post #30
lettergram wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit scores? This is a fairly widely known fact that honestly shouldn’t need citations. There’s a reason banks secure credit cards from people with no credit history. There’s a reason insurance in Florida is different than the rest of the U.S. etc

Credit scores measure behavior, not your attributes. The issue here was fraud. My credit score doesn’t help you assess risk if someone else is impersonating me.

Your zip code and the zip code of said transactions play a role in fraud.

Credit score likewise plays a role.

There are many many attributes taken into account when discussing fraud. Some models use methods which take in all attributes. There’s many kinds of fraud as well, some of which will be impacted by credit score (for instance if you have more credit, and use your credit card more often, you’re more likely to be a target for a “hacker”. This means fraud will be more likely to occur on your account).

For reference: I’ve built fraud detection models being used at banks.

Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#53

Post by nerdponx »

toasterlovin wrote: post #44
org3432 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's also due to having a population that has nothing to lose.

FWIW, there has never been an easier time to be alive. When you frame things like that, it really drives home how utterly unfit for modern life a person has to be to justify a life of crime in 2019. Life is always a struggle, but we’re not exactly living in a Dickens novel.

I suspect your "modern life" has been quite different from other peoples'.

Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#54

Post by hooande »

supernova87a wrote: post #12

Never underestimate how much cleverer than you people will be when it comes to money. They spend their full time on figuring out how to use the system in ways you didn't expect, whereas you don't even spend full time on getting the things to work the way you barely took the time to think they would. Secondly, take away the lesson that there's a reason that banks/stores/merchants don't lower their standards and go int…

Given the scale, I would suspect a ring of professional criminals more than people with low credit scores from "bad neighborhoods".

This is Hacker News, after all. This is a system and someone hacked it.

"In several cases, hackers with lists of email addresses and passwords have written scripts to locate car-sharing accounts using those credentials. Once they find the accounts, they sign out cars and disable their GPS trackers, causing them effectively to disappear."

This does not sound like it's related to businesses going to certain neighborhoods due to demographics. It sounds like smart thieves took advantage of your biases and drove to certain neighborhoods in order to get you to suspect an Other of their crimes. That's sure what I would do

Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#56

Post by taneq »

whatshisface wrote: post #48
scarface74 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody thinks rich brown people are automatically criminals. Really? You’ve never heard of racial profiling? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/w... https://newsone.com/3812066/black-doctor-racial-profiling-at...

The parent's theory would conclude that the police were using race as a proxy for being rich or poor, not as an end in itself. I guess you could test it by putting everybody's credit score on their license plate. Yikes, what a nightmare.

Precisely. I suspect the chain of inference is much more like "black -> poor -> bad" than directly "black -> bad". I mean, neither is fair but understanding the process is crucial to fixing it.

Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#57

Post by mieseratte »

hooande wrote: post #54
supernova87a wrote: post #12

Never underestimate how much cleverer than you people will be when it comes to money. They spend their full time on figuring out how to use the system in ways you didn't expect, whereas you don't even spend full time on getting the things to work the way you barely took the time to think they would. Secondly, take away the lesson that there's a reason that banks/stores/merchants don't lower their standards and go int…

Given the scale, I would suspect a ring of professional criminals more than people with low credit scores from "bad neighborhoods". This is Hacker News, after all. This is a system and someone hacked it. "In several cases, hackers with lists of email addresses and passwords have written scripts to locate car-sharing accounts using those credentials. Once they find the accounts, they sign out cars and disable their GP…

Or organized crime already in that community.

Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#58

Post by axaxs »

lettergram wrote: post #18
mgramsey wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any citations for what seems like an extreme claim in your second paragraph?

Credit scores? This is a fairly widely known fact that honestly shouldn’t need citations. There’s a reason banks secure credit cards from people with no credit history. There’s a reason insurance in Florida is different than the rest of the U.S. etc

I'm generally with you until the end sentence. But, insurance in Florida is like insurance anywhere else, so not sure what you're alluding to...

Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#59

Post by onion2k »

icxa wrote: post #27
URSpider94 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, credit scores don’t necessarily correlate directly to honesty, they correlate to likelihood to pay back a debt, which could be driven by unfortunate circumstances like a sudden medical expense or loss of a job. Someone who is hit by a car and spends six months in the hospital may have a crap credit score and still be an honest person. Second, the whole concept of “bad neighborhoods” where people aren’t tru…

> the whole concept of “bad neighborhoods” where people aren’t trustworthy is partly a racist trope The concept of a "bad neighborhood" comes from crime statistics, not racist tropes. Either crime (theft, robbery, fraud, et all) is high, or it is not high, race be damned. Subscribers to a particular political ideology need to calm down with the whole "your facts/science are racist" bit, because it hurts everyone over…

The level of crime in an area correlates far more closely to poverty than race, so suggesting a bad neighbourhood is bad because of the race of people who live there rather than other factors probably is racist.

Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day

#60

Post by masenf »

AtomicOrbital wrote: post #55

quite possibly this change of policy was just a slick marketing gimmick by enterprising Car2Go execs with price of dozens of stolen cars factored in - certainly its publicity just got a big bump up

The article includes a graph of "Vehicle thefts in U.S. cities where Car2Go operates* in 2018" and Chicago is at the top of the list. If that was their pilot city, interesting choice. Alternatively, if they rolled out the policy change in all locations at the same time, interesting choice.

Article doesn't report problems in other cities...

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