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After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day
- neonate 7y agohttp://archive.is/MuNrZ http://archive.is/MuNrZ
- chance_state 7y agoUnrelated to the story, but could my ISP possibly be blocking archive.is? Is this a known issue with that site? None of the links ever work for me, but it seems that I can access it anywhere but my home network.
- vortico 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
- chance_state 7y agoThanks!
- george_perez 7y agoUsing Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
- chance_state 7y agoYes I am. Thank you!
- sbr464 7y agoFor a provider as big as 1.1.1.1, it seems like they would aggregate DNS from multiple sources to solve cases that specifically didn’t work from 1.1.1.1. Not sure how things work at that level but if DNS can be broken simply because of the provider source address, it seems natural to query behind the scenes from multiple sources to cache the more correct value.
- samplatt 7y agoarchive.is is blocked in Australia and some other countries, along with many other sites. For Australia this happened in May this year. Most ISP's just use DNS-filtering to block it, so getting around it is as easy as changing your DNS settings.
- cstrat 7y agoI am in Australia and the link worked fine, so this must only be true for certain ISPs?
- bigiain 7y agoAre you using your isp's dns servers? My isp's nameserver responds with "REFUSED". Quad 9 works just fine: $ nslookup archive.is 125.253.59.220 Server: 125.253.59.220 Address: 125.253.59.220#53 ** server can't find archive.is: REFUSED $ nslookup archive.is 9.9.9.9 Server: 9.9.9.9 Address: 9.9.9.9#53 Non-authoritative answer: Name: archive.is Address: 51.38.113.224
- Causality1 7y ago>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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cobookman 7y agoGps trackers cant penetrate a thick lead shield. Simply shield the electronics from being able to emit. Then deal with it at a later point
- MegaButts 7y agoYou don't even need lead - just use metal (iron, steel, aluminum - anything highly conductive). Hell, I haven't tried, but I bet a small amount of aluminum foil (much less than you'd get on a single roll for a few dollars) would work. You just need a faraday cage, and GPS signals are already fairly weak.
- viraptor 7y ago> and GPS signals are already fairly weak You could try stopping the GPS signal from getting in, but you could also stop the (likely) GSM signal from getting out.
- WalterBright 7y agoIt's easy to test. Wrap your cell phone in aluminum foil, then call it and see if it rings.
- londons_explore 7y agoSealing 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.
- mc32 7y agoIf 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.
- org3432 7y agoI think it's also due to having a population that has nothing to lose.
- klyrs 7y agoPeople downvoting parent probably don't understand cost-benefit analysis outside of their caste
- graeme 7y ago....criminals are not a large percentage of the population. Especially when you exclude people convicted on harmless offences such as drug possession. It takes more than being poor and downtrodden to turn to well planned theft. (I mean harmless in the sense that only the person using drugs has potential harm.)
- toasterlovin 7y agoFWIW, 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.
- jacurtis 7y agoThis 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.
- dvdbloc 7y agoCorrelation does not imply causation
- orev 7y agoYou can’t have causation without correlation.
- anonthrowaway2 7y agoYou definitely can. A control system causes a signal to be ~constant and thus ~uncorrelated to whatever you care to name.
- whytaka 7y agoBut there’d be another variable that is correlated.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoIf a control system's output is uncorrelated with what it is controlling, then it's not really controlling it. Also, to see a clear linear correlation, you might need to know what you're looking for. A controller output may look uncorrelated with the target system state, until you realize it's a I controller, so you need to look for correlation between controller's output and the integral of the system's state.
- 7y ago
- supernova87a 7y agoNever 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.
- mgramsey 7y agoDo you have any citations for what seems like an extreme claim in your second paragraph?
- lettergram 7y agoCredit scores? This is a fairly widely known fact that honestly shouldn’t need citations. There’s a reason banks secure credit cards from people with no credit history. There’s a reason insurance in Florida is different than the rest of the U.S. etc
- URSpider94 7y agoFirst off, credit scores don’t necessarily correlate directly to honesty, they correlate to likelihood to pay back a debt, which could be driven by unfortunate circumstances like a sudden medical expense or loss of a job. Someone who is hit by a car and spends six months in the hospital may have a crap credit score and still be an honest person. Second, the whole concept of “bad neighborhoods” where people aren’t trustworthy is partly a racist trope (there are good and bad people everywhere), and partly the result of generations of well-documented racist policies by the government and banks that prevented those areas from being developed. Third, nobody said the cars were getting stolen from “bad neighborhoods”. What the article says is that the vehicles were being driven to an area just outside of the Car2Go coverage area and dumped there.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- orliesaurus 7y ago> They couldn't figure out which car to remotely disable. Well - that's why then!
- nneonneo 7y agoShame 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...
- cerberusss 7y agoBut 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.
- rocgf 7y agoWhat city is this, if I may ask? Or at least what country?
- iforgotpassword 7y agoHere in Germany they are cropping up too in many cities. Mine is ~200k in size and their specially marked parking spots pop up everywhere. We even got bike sharing now which I'm still skeptical of, seeing how it failed in many European cities so far either due to reckless vandalism or by people parking them in the most idiotic ways. The ones here at least have fixed spots where you have to pick up or return them so that should at least solve the second problem, but it also makes things a lot less flexible.
- geoka9 7y agoI can say that describes the situation in Vancouver (Canada) Although not sure about the taxi lobbying part - but personally I'm glad Uber is not here.
- mohoromitch 7y agoVancouver?
- thinkloop 7y agoPeople are throwing around the terms "clever" and "enterprising" but it was just fake credit cards and joy riding.
- AtomicOrbital 7y agoquite 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
- masenf 7y agoThe article includes a graph of "Vehicle thefts in U.S. cities where Car2Go operates* in 2018" and Chicago is at the top of the list. If that was their pilot city, interesting choice. Alternatively, if they rolled out the policy change in all locations at the same time, interesting choice. Article doesn't report problems in other cities...
- Fins 7y agoI 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.
- fencepost 7y agoHow 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.
- notatoad 7y agoIt's not sharing, but the term sort of makes sense because they're competing with the actual sharing companies like uber more than they're competing with rental companies. You can rent a car2go for an hour to do a big grocery run, that's not economical or practical with avis.
- jsemrau 7y agoI 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 ?
- MrBuddyCasino 7y agoExactly! They are asleep at the wheel. German car rental company Sixt does this now.
- falsedan 7y agoEnterprise bought out the car share system which started in the city I live in.
- djmobley 7y agoBecause their upside is in profitable up-sells like extra insurance and additional drivers, and their downside is fraudulent rentals and renters returning damaged vehicles. Having face-to-face interactions with renters is surprisingly effective both at maximising upside and minimising downside.
- IloveHN84 7y agoPlot twist: what if someone bribed some employees and got their help with the backend?
- orthoxerox 7y ago> 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.
- icelancer 7y ago>> How come they haven't contacted the police immediately after that? This happened in Chicago. Police response times are... more than a little slow.
- empath75 7y agoI definitely would have said no if my boss told me to go reclaim a car from a ring of Chicago car thieves.
- linuxftw 7y agoWhy 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.
- CPLX 7y ago> Why should the police respond when you're being clearly negligent. The purpose of the police is to maintain order and enforce personal and property rights, not to educate the population on concepts of responsibility.
- hsbaut76 7y agoThe 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).
- taejo 7y agoIt 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).
- londons_explore 7y ago"self-drive truck hire" is pretty much the same. People who don't really know how to drive a truck are suddenly put in control, and lots of accidents happen...
- AdrianB1 7y agoThere 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.
- iforgotpassword 7y agoI 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.
- slhck 7y agoThat'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.
- jwildeboer 7y agoSo 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.
- rmtech 7y agoI would be interested to see the racial breakdown of the thieves. I'm guessing that very few of them were Asian-americans, for example.
- msquog 7y agoThis is your take-away?
- MrBuddyCasino 7y agoWhat is yours?
- WAHa_06x36 7y agoThat is what being a racist is like.
- IvanDraga 7y agoWhy not?
- throwaway3627 7y agoWhat does race have to do with anything? Is this some sort of racist dog-whistle?
- dang 7y agoPlease don't take HN into flamewars, and especially not racial flamewars. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- andy_ppp 7y agoCouldn't this just have been bad timing and they were targetted by organised thieves?
- seattlebarley 7y agolol chicago... anyone wanna have a guess at the thieves' skin color?
- baybal2 7y agoReminds 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.
- segmondy 7y agoThief? Sounds like a collector.
- lcrc123 7y agoI 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.
- excar2gothrow 7y agoThis 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.
- snarf21 7y agoIt seems like the thieves were mostly targeting Mercedes and other high end cars. It seems like there is an easy solution to just rent domestic mid-size cars and/or add the extra security checks in for people who want luxury cars. Car2Go made it too easy to steal luxury cars seems more like the real issue.
- dwyerm 7y agoMaybe, but at the other end are the bike- and scooter-share systems. I suspect the perceived cheapness of the products contributes to how many of them end up thrown off the ends of piers. Personally, I really miss Car2Go's old SMART cars. They sucked. They sucked sooooo bad. They were terrible cars. I hated them! But they were damned easy to park, they were dead-simple to operate, and they were easy to spot on the street. I want those back, and would rather not drive a 'luxury' car where I spend the first two minutes of my rental trying to figure out how to adjust the seat and turn off the radio. So maybe making the cars more luxurious makes them less likely to be abused.
- glenneroo 7y agoAccording 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?
- Konnstann 7y ago75 vehicles from one car-sharing service? If those cars were the only ones stolen that day then sure, crazy coincidence. I don't think that others didn't get stolen though.
- glenneroo 7y agoThanks! That was a total reading comprehension failure on my part.
- jacurtis 7y agoOn 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.
- broahmed 7y agoThose 22k car thefts are all car thefts in Chicago, not just Car2Go thefts.
- sschueller 7y agoI 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.
- broahmed 7y agoTo be clear, I'm pretty sure that means 22k car thefts in general, not 22k thefts from Car2Go.
- pstrateman 7y agoThat's still astronomical.
- fallingfrog 7y agoSounds like someone identified an arbitrage opportunity.
- throwaway3627 7y agoThey didn't flip the cars, they stole them.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- NimmohN 7y agoI thought they conducted background checks, quite interesting! https://finance.uonbi.ac.ke/node/128741 https://finance.uonbi.ac.ke/node/128741
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