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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

#171

Post by CPLX »

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.

The premise I think is that you're "sharing" the ownership of the car with your neighbors and fellow users. So instead of a model where each person owns their own car, these cars are "shared" between various drivers.

Presumably there's an implied distinction between this model, where people share ownership of their primary car, and the typical rental car model, where people are presumed to be traveling or otherwise renting the car to supplement their existing car ownership.

Not saying it's some brilliant insight, but there is an internal logic to the use of the term.

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

#172

Post by CPLX »

craigzucchini wrote: post #78
Spooky23 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Credit scores measures behaviour in the same way that... skin colour tells you something useful about a person

Yeah no.

Credit scores, being a composite set of observations of recent financial behavior, are literally the opposite of an immutable genetic characteristic fixed from birth.

Credit scores are far, far, from perfect, but if you have a better way of judging the future actions of a human than compiling a list of their recent actions do speak up.

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

#173

Post by jacurtis »

rickyc091 wrote: post #151
sytelus wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Plus it doesn't really make sense to pay $150 a night to steal a $150 tv either.

Especially when you have announced who you were and provided contact details before you stole the TV. Maybe the theft just isn't worth it at that point.

If I want to steal a TV, it would actually be better to rob my neighbor's house when they are away. They will never know it is me, and I don't have to pay them for access to their house.

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

#174

Post by briandear »

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?

AirBnB does have background checks. You just don’t know about them. I had a friend with an AirBnB account cancelled a few years ago because of a 12-year-old hot check misdemeanor conviction. They provided no way to appeal, no way to even explain, just an email saying he had been cancelled because of “criminal history.”

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

#176

Post by jacurtis »

glenneroo wrote: post #161

According to the infographic, in Chicago in 2018 they had 22,700 vehicle thefts, which if divided by 365 days = roughly 62/day. 75 vehicles stolen in one day doesn't sound completely abnormal?

On a normal day, across all of Chicago (large place) and all the cars owned in Chicago (lots of cars) they would have an average of ~62 car thefts per day.

Then one day Car2Go, a single car sharing service has 75 vehicles stolen in one day. That is 110% the amount of the entire city of Chicago from a single company with a fleet of a few hundred cars.

Keep in mind that Chicago likely still lost their average number of cars that day, but the car2go thefts more than doubled the number of thefts for the entire city.

That sounds abnormal to me.

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

#177

Post by dwild »

sytelus wrote: post #163
rickyc091 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

I highly doubt if car2go renter provides less personal information than AirBnB renter. I also think it would be easier for bad actors to get away for AirBnB robbery by simply claiming that missing items didn’t existed. In many places, in fact house owners would have little recourse because they are conducting hotel business without commercial license to start with. From economics perspective, it is absolutely amazing…

> I highly doubt if car2go renter provides less personal information than AirBnB renter.

The article is pretty clear about theses instances happening when they deactivated their background check. They may still provide more, but if they aren't check, it's meaningless.

> I also think it would be easier for bad actors to get away for AirBnB robbery by simply claiming that missing items didn’t existed.

Sure easier, but as the comment you were responding to said, theses aren't primary home, they doesn't contains much things that are worth stealing. Sure the renter will be able to claim he isn't guilty, but at the end of the day, if it takes you a day and cost you 100$ to steal 120$, it's not worth it.

> From economics perspective, it is absolutely amazing that AirBnB hasn’t became a gold mine for the professional thieves.

It's more like a coal mine, sure there's money to be made, but you can't always make them profitable.

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

#178

Post by briandear »

pas wrote: post #113
toasterlovin wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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,…

> Student loan cannot be written down in a personal bankruptcy process. Many people have insufficient money for medication.

Your typical street criminal isn’t sad about student loans, nor are they stealing to buy medicine. They are victims of a culture, not circumstance.

> but sitting idly while people are starving is also a form of wrong

In the United States, find me one person that has starved to death in the past year. Not only are there food stamp programs, but many churches and charities all over the country have some sort of food program. You would have to be supremely incompetent if you are literally starving to death in the United States. It’s so extremely rare as to be a news story if it happens. Poor people in the US are more likely to be obese than starving.

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

#179

Post by matt-attack »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #155
toasterlovin wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.

H. L. Mencken

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

#180

Post by gooseus »

habnds wrote: post #128
adrianN wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly, when prices are set by what the market will pay then being surrounded by people who are able to pay more for a product will drive that price up and out of your relative reach.

Also, never understatement status-seeking when it comes to motivations for crime, even if your current conditions would have been considered high status 100 years ago, if you are seeking social/sexual relationships you are only going to be judged by your relative status today.

This relative status-seeking is why even rich people will still risk their positions and jail over felonies that will only make them 5% richer.

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