Couldn't this just have been bad timing and they were targetted by organised thieves?
After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
121–130 of 241 posts
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and no. After all, there are millions of people in deep poverty in the US. And at least a fraction of them has serious constraints on what they can do to get out of there (for example they have family, so they can't just pack up and go to a different state to start a new life). Student loan cannot be written down in a personal bankruptcy process. Many people have insufficient money for medication. ... and so on,…
> there are millions of people in deep poverty in the US. Sure, but "deep poverty" today is what "middle class" life used to be for their grandparents or great-grandparents and normal student life is like for most college students. Having to cook from scratch rather than eating out every day, or maybe even only having meat a few times a week. Having to go to a laundromat rather than having your own washing machine, a…
Or, you know, unable to afford rent in places where there are jobs, so being forced to live in a car near the Amazon warehouse. Lofty standards indeed.
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#123This 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…
>damning evidence
I don't see anything here that would exclude coincidence.
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#124Shame 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.
What city is this, if I may ask? Or at least what country?
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#125Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sort of implies that there was some river of theft intent that they were keeping dammed up. Which, could be the case, or it could be that announcing the policy change was the equivalent of announcing your upcoming month-long backpacking tour on Facebook after posting your address and photos of most of your valuables. (It might be less declaring open season on theft, than a perceived increase in vulnerability tri…
It’s probably a little of both. Remember Nextel? For a long time push to talk wasn’t interceptable by the police. Nextel didn’t seek out street drug dealing networks as a customer base. But the cops figured out that they weren’t traceable and had great loud speaker phones, started buying them, word got out and suddenly you have a market.
> about 20 people who went on to orchestrate the Mercedes thefts set up some 80 phony accounts in Chicago, using fake or stolen credit cards as their payment methods.
It's not as much the background checks preventing the thefts as the basic identity checks. Even people with some criminal background would find themselves disincentivized to steal/vandalize the car knowing their identity is linked to it. But someone who goes out of their way to create a fake identity and become untraceable, known criminal or not, has no such disincentive.
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easy to test. Wrap your cell phone in aluminum foil, then call it and see if it rings.
Sealing the edges of foil is hard. You need to get contact at least every ~1mm along a seam to stop microwave signals getting in or out reliably.
I just tried it. Just fold the edges over with your fingers and press them with your fingers. Not hard, works fine.
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there are millions of people in deep poverty in the US. Sure, but "deep poverty" today is what "middle class" life used to be for their grandparents or great-grandparents and normal student life is like for most college students. Having to cook from scratch rather than eating out every day, or maybe even only having meat a few times a week. Having to go to a laundromat rather than having your own washing machine, a…
Unfortunately humans care more about their relative wealth than their absolute wealth. So telling them that objectively their life isn't all that bad is not very effective when they see their neighbors having a lot more wealth.
Scarcity means that relative wealth _is_ absolute wealth because we need to compete for resources. Falling too far behind other members of society means not being able to compete for resources successfully. Focusing on relative wealth is perfectly rational.
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#129Earlier 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…
The article makes it quite clear that this was not a planned operations where 75 cars were stolen, GPS disabled, and shipped abroad or stripped for parts. People were just refusing to give back cars, parking them inside private garages, using immobilizers, and stuff like that. FTA: > There was little indication that the people who took the cars had more than joyriding in mind. According to police reports, all the pil…
But later on it goes on to say:
> She adds that the other types of fraud have been rare at Car2Go and that its GPS trackers can’t be physically disabled.
Other than physically disabling or jamming the GPS what other ways of disabling it are accessible to the potential thief? And what makes Car2Go's GPS impossible to disable physically when we're talking about people with the willingness and ability to steal and strip down a car?
Re: After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
#130This 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…
I am doubting this data points. AirBnB has virtually no background checks and people are not robbing away houses en mass. Why AirBnB has such a different track record vs Car2Go?