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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

#151

Post by rickyc091 »

sytelus wrote: post #130
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…

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?

As a renter, you have to provide several verifications (email, linkedin, google, phone number). I think you can get away with a single one. Sometimes, you'll be asked to provide a driver's license or passport for proof.

80% of the rentals I've been in weren't their primary home, so even if someone was to rob the place, there wasn't much to take. The most valuable thing would probably be the TV, but most places only had a 32-40" tv which goes for a few hundred bucks new.

While people aren't robbing Airbnb homes, there are several cases where they are getting completely destroyed.

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

#152

Post by empath75 »

orthoxerox wrote: post #94

> Car2Go sent several workers to retrieve the vehicles, only to find that a group of thieves had claimed them as their own. Some blocked the vehicles in to prevent repossession; others threatened the company’s employees, according to someone with knowledge of the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity. How come they haven't contacted the police immediately after that? Also, they mentioned that people sublet th…

I definitely would have said no if my boss told me to go reclaim a car from a ring of Chicago car thieves.

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

#153

Post by bluedino »

jsemrau wrote: post #79
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 ?

Are they that hard to use? Last time I used Avis, I did the reservation on my phone, went to pick the car up, which consisted of signing some papers and then taking any car I wanted from a certain section of the parking garage.

Enterprise is just as easy and they'll even bring me the car.

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

#154

Post by privong »

orev wrote: post #29
dvdbloc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correlation does not imply causation

You can’t have causation without correlation.

See Milton Friedman's Thermostat: https://themonkeycage.org/2012/07/milton-friedmans-thermosta...

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

#155

Post by mensetmanusman »

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.

Subjective well being is a function of how well your neighbors are doing. Most millionaires in the U.S. report that they don’t feel wealthy.

What you may be suggesting is that our policy should care less about subjective well being and more about objective well being, but this goes against the progressive milieu.

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

#156

Post by driverdan »

taejo wrote: post #106
hsbaut76 wrote: post #99

The anonymity that these car sharing services provide is already an issue. In my neighbourhood car2go are the most likely to be recklessly driving and harassing people in the streets. They should be tightening their policy not loosening it. I really believe there needs to be a standard for this (if one doesn't already exist).

It probably varies from city to city, but I always assumed that the reason car-sharing drivers are worse than others on average is just because they get less practice, are more likely to have learned to drive in a different country (with different traffic rules, layout of bike lanes, etc.) and perhaps don't know their way around as well (so they're experiencing a heavier cognitive load).

You're charged per minute. It incentivizes you to drive aggressively so you pay as little as possible.

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

#157

Post by linuxftw »

orthoxerox wrote: post #94

> Car2Go sent several workers to retrieve the vehicles, only to find that a group of thieves had claimed them as their own. Some blocked the vehicles in to prevent repossession; others threatened the company’s employees, according to someone with knowledge of the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity. How come they haven't contacted the police immediately after that? Also, they mentioned that people sublet th…

Why should the police respond when you're being clearly negligent. It's not societies problem you car was stolen, it's your own stupid fault in this case.

As we learned in another thread here on HN (some photo equipment sharing site), this is a case of 'voluntary parting' in which the cars weren't necessarily stolen, they were obtained fraudulently, which apparently is a civil matter.

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

#158

Post by excar2gothrow »

This is interesting to me because when I worked at car2go a few years ago something similar happened.

They updated the app sign-up process with a step where you had to take a photograph of your driver's license with your phone, and then take a photo of yourself (to confirm that the license you were signing up with was indeed yourself). These two photographs were not checked manually but were "analyzed" but a facial recognition thing. They did this to streamline the sign up process and get people access to the vehicles with an active membership quicker.

But, when this feature was introduced it was almost immediately abused by a network of fraudsters that had stolen driver's license and stolen credit cards. They used GIS (google image search) to find photos of similar faces to the faces that were on their stolen driver's licenses and uploaded a photo of that face with their phone.

I discovered this when tracking unusual car activity and investigating the new accounts that were driving them and seeing the weird staged headshots of US Senators and other professionally taken photographs that populate GIS results as the submitted "selfie" photo's that were supposed to confirm the new member's identity.

BTW, much like the article mentions, our European counterparts were surprised with this abuse and "hacking" of the system and said they never experienced it over there while running this feature for months before us.

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

#159

Post by slhck »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #146
AdrianB1 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason to assume that people driving cars they don't own are as careful as driving their own cars. This makes a huge difference.

I don't know about the US, but in Germany if you return your car with scratches or dents that haven't been there before they charge you for that, so I wouldn't drive them less carefully than my own.

That's true for normal rental car companies, which are often very picky about damages. With car2go and DriveNow, they don't usually charge for damages anymore. It would be impossible to track. You're paying for the repair with the per-minute costs.

A few years ago, they even stopped asking customers at the start of the rental whether there were any “new” damages with the car, since it's impossible to verify that with dozens of damages, and people would just press “No”. So now these cars all have small damages that nobody cares about, which accumulate until they get repaired.

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

#160

Post by ssully »

MagnumOpus wrote: post #115
pas wrote: post #113

Earlier 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…

You clearly have zero understanding or empathy for what living in deep poverty actually entails.
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