After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
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 having a real impact on preventing theft. It really is fascinating.
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.
If there’s one thing enterprising thieves know how to do, it’s ruining things for honest people and why we can’t have good things.
You really have to think like a thief when you want to serve the public because the public provides a cover to the crook and if you let your guard down it’ll bite you in this day and age.
> 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 their cars at inflated prices. This means they don't have the most basic foreground checks in place. Here in Moscow carsharing companies have cameras in their cars and the face of the driver is compared with the photo ID they have provided. I think it also tracks unsafe behavior, like holding a phone to talk or text.
If they really relaxed their checks to the point where a single credit card was all that was needed, they brought this upon themselves.
>its GPS trackers can’t be physically disabled
That's just a silly statement. Anything can be physically disabled; the question is how difficult and time-consuming disabling it is. Maybe it's encased in a steel block in the engine compartment in series with vital wiring connections but even then some work with an angle-grinder and a soldering iron could get around it given a couple of hours.
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...
People are throwing around the terms "clever" and "enterprising" but it was just fake credit cards and joy riding.
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).
I am pretty sure that despite TFA's claims, stolen cars were being taken to the West Side (of Chicago), not to West Chicago, which is a suburb about 30-40 miles away.
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 into certain neighborhoods, in the name of "lowering barriers to entry". (or demographics in this case) It comes with a lot of crime/fraud/loss, and unless you're actively fighting it or have figured a way around it, you will lose.
I am amazed at the stats a bit into the article.
22.7k vehicles were stolen in 2018 in Chicago (metropolitan statistical area) alone. That seems like a huge number.
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
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.
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Couldn't this just have been bad timing and they were targetted by organised thieves?
Reminds me of Ofo venture to Almaty. Some thief spent weeks methodically picking up every Ofo bike in the town, until the only ones left were broken or thrown into unreachable places.
So obviously this could be taken as an excuse to install face recognition systems in these cars to “enhance” security by forcing customers to give up privacy.
Plot twist: what if someone bribed some employees and got their help with the backend?
> They couldn't figure out which car to remotely disable.
Well - that's why then!
Sounds like someone identified an arbitrage opportunity.
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?
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I thought they conducted background checks, quite interesting!
I rarely gave background checks a second thought when signing up for platforms such as Airbnb or Car2Go. Definitely an interesting read and unfortunate event that occurred.
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lol chicago... anyone wanna have a guess at the thieves' skin color?
I would be interested to see the racial breakdown of the thieves. I'm guessing that very few of them were Asian-americans, for example.