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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

#71

Post by segmondy »

jacurtis wrote: post #10

This is interesting because I always thought these "background checks" were just a formality. Like something needed for their insurance or to weed out a few extreme individuals (like those with multiple-DUIs or a heavy history of wrecks on their record). But the fact that they can ease up on background checks and see an immediate large bulk of car thefts is damning evidence that the background checks were truly havin…

real background checks tied to the real person. without background check, then you can't tell if someone used a stolen credit card or if it's the real person.

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

#72

Post by cerberusss »

nneonneo wrote: post #41

Shame we can’t have nice things. Car2Go operates in my city, and it’s a remarkably convenient way to get around (even moreso given that Uber/Lyft are still banned by the city council - thanks to the taxi lobby...). They’re competing with a local car-share company for market share so their rates are very low. I do wonder what their rates of theft are here...

But you can have nice things. The whole thing looks to me like an localized, one-time incident. In my (European) city, there are multiple car sharing companies active, and it has caused me to sell my (gasoline) car and use the (electric) car sharing system.

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

#73

Post by dogecoinbase »

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…

Systemic racism -> poverty -> crime. It's not complicated -- your facts are racist because they're facts about a racist system.

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

#74

Post by humanrebar »

pergadad wrote: post #67
hooande wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sound like this was certainly an organised group and had strong local presence. But could as well be a daring youth club rather than organised crime.

How is a club of people stealing cars not "organized crime"?

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

#75

Post by WalterBright »

MegaButts wrote: post #26
cobookman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gps trackers cant penetrate a thick lead shield. Simply shield the electronics from being able to emit. Then deal with it at a later point

You don't even need lead - just use metal (iron, steel, aluminum - anything highly conductive). Hell, I haven't tried, but I bet a small amount of aluminum foil (much less than you'd get on a single roll for a few dollars) would work. You just need a faraday cage, and GPS signals are already fairly weak.

It's easy to test. Wrap your cell phone in aluminum foil, then call it and see if it rings.

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

#76

Post by TeMPOraL »

humanrebar wrote: post #74
pergadad wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sound like this was certainly an organised group and had strong local presence. But could as well be a daring youth club rather than organised crime.

How is a club of people stealing cars not "organized crime"?

It technically is "organized crime", and I'd guess legally it would be too, but it's not what people usually associate with the phrase.

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

#77

Post by whytaka »

anonthrowaway2 wrote: post #37
orev wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t have causation without correlation.

You definitely can. A control system causes a signal to be ~constant and thus ~uncorrelated to whatever you care to name.

But there’d be another variable that is correlated.

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

#78

Post by craigzucchini »

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.

Credit scores measures behaviour in the same way that financial standing measures character or skin colour tells you something useful about a person. It try's to proxy one with another and fails, because really they're two independent variables and life is complex. Someone's ability to pay down debt at any given time is not behaviour, at least it's a tenuous argument.

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

#79

Post by jsemrau »

fencepost wrote: post #65

How is this "sharing?" This seems like app-based short term rentals little different from what I could get from Avis and the like. My initial thought was that this was allowing individuals to rent out their cars and my reaction was a hard 'oh hell no.' What's the term from the various "my expensive camera /lens was stolen" stories? Voluntary parting? Pretty sure that would apply to your nice car as well.

I still can't wrap my head around it why car rental companies like Hertz and Avis don't have this market completely cornered. They have the infrastructure, the assets, the know-how. Why is it still so inconvenient to get a car through them ?

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

#80

Post by MrScruff »

onion2k wrote: post #59
icxa wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

True but the first poster to mention race was the one bringing up the issue of racism.
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