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Back when I was a kid, some 20–30 years ago, my aunt used to get her car regularly “stolen” overnight. The car was parked in the street, locked, but it was an e
by ornornor 4y ago
Back when I was a kid, some 20–30 years ago, my aunt used to get her car regularly “stolen” overnight. The car was parked in the street, locked, but it was an entry model (or whatever you call the smaller cars a company makes) and was easy to open and start without the keys.
Every so often, someone would “steal” the car overnight, and then bring it back with a full tank.
This went on for years. We never found out who was doing it or where they were going. My aunt never reported it because a full tank was quite a bit of money for her at the time and the car wasn’t so fancy that she cared so much about it.
- Edd314159 4y agoIt would be so cool if this was just a case of someone regularly mistaking your aunt’s car for their own. “Huh, my key’s not working, oh well, I know a trick to get ‘er started”
- mhh__ 4y agoSome old cars can basically be opened with a spoon so it could even be that the key did work
- cheese_van 4y agoHappened to me. The key for one car worked on another car of the same model. Nice elderly lady at work asks us to take out her car at lunch to diagnose a noise. We found her '73 Buick Skylark in the multi-story car-park and went to lunch. Ran great. Afterwards I asked, "I thought you were Baptist? Why did you have a St Chris statue on the dash?" Of course she didn't. We had found the "wrong" car on a lower deck of the car-park but when we got back from lunch parked it on the uppermost deck, unaware it belonged to someone else. When we discovered our error, we imagined what the owner might go through when the car was discovered missing but we kept our mouths shut, fearing some sort of liability. I bought that old lady's Skylark. Ran like a dang tank.
- freemanofthewan 4y agoPlot twist: Someone posts in this thread how THEIR uncle who worked nights' car was "borrowed" regularly through the daytime and always returned empty. (waiting for that free fill-up of course)
- xattt 4y agoThis scenario is neatly summarized in the children’s book, This Moose Belongs to Me. (1) https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&cm_sp=SearchF-_-home-_-Results&tn=THis%20moose%20belongs%20to%20me https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&cm_sp=S...
- yarg 4y agoDouglas Adams' biscuit story: http://www.math.toronto.edu/beni/bERNARDO_nOT_fOUND/fUNNY_sTUFF/Entries/2007/11/27_cookies.html http://www.math.toronto.edu/beni/bERNARDO_nOT_fOUND/fUNNY_sT....
- rkuykendall-com 4y agoBluey - Turtleboy https://blueypedia.fandom.com/wiki/Turtleboy https://blueypedia.fandom.com/wiki/Turtleboy
- macNchz 4y agoCertain 80s/90s Toyotas had something funny about their keys, where they were widely interchangeable between different cars. A friend of mine tells a story about how there were a few students at his high school with identical looking blue Camrys, which caused major confusion when they learned–by getting in the wrong car and driving home–that their keys worked in each other's cars.
- treeman79 4y agoMy 90s Toyota truck got moved from one side of the street to the other one day. Turned out friends dad noticed it was street sweeping day so moved it for me. His Toyota keys from a different year / model truck fit it just fine.
- grecy 4y agoEven easier, someone has the same car and their keys just work. When I was learning to drive in a 1990 Ford I locked the keys in. Dad just asked a random person in the parking lot with the same car to borrow their keys. It opened the door and started the engine no problem.
- InCityDreams 4y ago# not salford.
- herodoturtle 4y agoDid they rack up any mileage? Or was it just a fan of your aunts, filling up her tank whenever it was low?
- madaxe_again 4y agoProbably being used for Crimes - a little old lady’s car is ideal for all sorts of reasons.
- cjrp 4y agoCan't imagine they'd fill it up; lots of cameras at gas stations.
- kelnos 4y agoI wouldn't be surprised if the resolution of those cameras 20-30 years ago was bad enough that it'd be easy to hide one's face/features. And since the car wasn't theirs, they wouldn't care about the license plate showing up on a camera.
- madaxe_again 4y agoThe latter. I knew a guy who used to steal a neighbour’s car to run weed across state lines between the pet stores that ran the show. He made more than enough to fill it up, which he did, religiously, as he felt it was bad karma not to - he usually did it one village over. Dude even got the thing valeted one time, although that was because one of the aquariums sloshed. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it was something similar - I know that the whole setup was something his boss at the pet store had devised, including the “treat the car nice, fill it up” thing, so I’d wager this was maybe a Thing. Unless OP’s aunt lived in Chicagoland, in which case it’s maybe a more specific Thing.
- MisterTea 4y agoThose cameras were likely broken. CCTV was mostly crap back then. The old monster cctv cameras had tubes in them, before ccd's and so on. They had a habit of burning out, tube vacuum fouls giving blurry or little image, coax cable issues, etc. Even the CCD cameras were a pain as the recording tech was also crap. Recording was done on time lapse VHS vcr's which were really expensive costing around $1000+ USD at the time. And they only recorded one channel so you had to buy a costly multiplexer so you only recorded a few seconds of each camera losing all video between switching. Video was shoppy due to time lapse trying to record 24 hours onto one VHS tape. So after all this money was spent once something broke it was so expensive to repair they usually let it stay that way hoping the presence of a seemingly working CCTV system was enough of a deterrent. Most small mom and pop shops couldn't afford the repairs.
- MikusR 4y agoA full tank cost more than the car?
- Archelaos 4y agoBack in the good old days, a friend of mine had a sticker on his Citroën 2CV reading: "Can you also double the value of your car with one tank of fuel?"
- kelnos 4y agoUnlikely, but the point is that the car kept getting returned, so it was (reasonably) safe to assume that it would continue to be returned after each crime spree. Sure, the thief could have crashed the car at some point, or gotten caught (and the car impounded), but I think it's not entirely crazy to judge that risk worth the benefit of the free gas. Now, I probably wouldn't come to that same conclusion, even if I had a cheap/old/crappy car, but I can see how someone might.
- jmyeet 4y agoEntirely possible [1]. Now in this case there was a disposal fee for old cars so if someone could take it off your hands for less, it was a win. [1]: http://www.jeremyclarkson.co.uk/cheap-car-challenge/ http://www.jeremyclarkson.co.uk/cheap-car-challenge/
- postalrat 4y agoA full tank over the course of a year or five.
- ornornor 4y agoProbably not but why would it be relevant in that case?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]