BOSTON – When Austin Sweazy pulled into the parking lot of an auto-repair shop, his fiancee reminded him that even though their errand inside would last just a few minutes, it would be smart to lock the car doors.
After all, she said, “you don’t want anybody to steal your GPS.”
Sweazy heeded her advice. But it didn’t matter. In the few minutes the couple were inside the store, a thief smashed the window of Sweazy’s car, snatched his $600 TomTom portable navigation unit off the windshield and fled into the gathering dusk.
Valuable stuff has been swiped from cars forever, but the theft of portable satellite-navigation units is dramatically increasing in many places. Crime analysts blame an alignment of economic and technological factors, while victims lament that the units, which cost several hundred dollars, are rarely recovered or replenished by insurance.
In Maryland’s Montgomery County, outside Washington, D.C., 620 portable navigation devices were filched from cars through Aug. 31, blowing past the 189 taken in all of 2006. In downtown Philadelphia, GPS thefts jumped to 88 in the first eight months of the year from 33 in the same period of 2006.
Police in San Francisco and the Boston area also have cited increases – as have authorities in Australia and Britain.
Police say the perpetrators are getting more brazen, stealing units in busy places during the day. California Attorney General Jerry Brown’s Lincoln Town Car had been parked outside a state building in San Francisco’s Civic Center for only about 10 minutes recently when a thief grabbed the GPS device inside.
Even people who take their GPS gadgets off their dashboards when they leave their cars are returning to find windows smashed, as thieves gamble that an empty plastic cradle suction-cupped to the windshield means a GPS unit has been hidden somewhere in the car.
That happened to Jessica Jaross when her car was parked outside a church in San Francisco one morning this summer. Even though she had stowed her $300 GPS unit in the car’s center console, she left its empty holder stuck to the windshield. A thief busted the driver’s side window in search of the treasure, and got it without setting off the car alarm.
It gets worse: Taking the plastic cradle off the windshield might not be enough if the suction cup leaves a ring of film on the glass. That alone can signal a thief.
That’s why police in Montgomery County, Md., handed out 1,200 microfiber cloths at a fair last month and told motorists to clear suction-cup rings. Cops in Alexandria, Va., advise using moist towelettes.
Unless the mark is wiped away, a thief is going to bet the GPS unit is in the car, said Cpl. Jimmy Robinson, a spokesman for Montgomery County police. “The least you’re going to get is a shattered window,” he said.
Police say several things have come together to make this a lucrative crime – so lucrative, in fact, that victims often say GPS thieves ignored other valuable items in their cars.
The units – which gather real-time location information from global-positioning satellites and display that on digital maps – have come down in price enough to become relatively popular in higher-rent districts. One leading maker alone, Garmin Ltd., will sell a few million this year.
Yet the devices are still not ubiquitous – Garmin also estimates that only 10 to 12 percent of North American drivers have portable or built-in GPS in their cars. That leaves a huge market of people to be enticed by cheaper-than-retail GPS units on sale in pawn shops or online, where thieves love to fence their finds.
No monthly subscriptions are required to keep the devices running. Plus there’s the somewhat ironic twist that even though these units are in touch with satellites all the time, they’re just receivers, so their location can’t be tracked for easy recovery.
Some GPS makers have given police free units for use in sting operations, but they say there’s little else they can do, other than advise users to take precautions.
Users should etch a marking into the devices and write down their serial numbers, then report those to police and the manufacturer if a theft happens.
But that is probably of limited impact. TomTom’s North American president, Jocelyn Vigreux, said that while the company maintains a list of serial numbers corresponding to swiped units, “not a lot of thieves send back the device that they’ve just stolen for repair.”
GPS owners can also activate a password mode in which a four-digit PIN is required to run the unit outside a designated “safe location” like the customer’s home. Yet the manufacturers say that protection is used by a tiny percentage of customers. At best, it could just give a victim the satisfaction of knowing the device was rendered useless to anyone else.
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