9 ms·

The new geography of stolen goods

103 points by tlb 1y ago

nkurz 1y ago
https://archive.is/T50Y3 https://archive.is/T50Y3
dec0dedab0de 1y ago
Sounds like a market opportunity for cheaper phones and cars globally.
- lifestyleguru 1y ago
  Expensive luxury cars are one big pain for society. Draining the economies and fuelling organized crime.
- cladopa 1y ago
  A new aluminium iMac or MacBook Air, or MS surface for 200 dollars? Those are the prices of stolen goods. A lot of people want a metal computer instead of a plastic one, but don't want to pay for it. I was offered stolen goods at those prices and passed. A friend of mine took the bait as was super happy for a month or so until police took his new adquisition from him. Of course he received no compensation as it was stolen and they could prove it, so in the end it was expensive.
IncreasePosts 1y ago
Can anyone just put a container on a ship? I'm curious why the senders wouldn't be registered, and then extra scrutiny is given to newly registered senders, and senders are blacklisted and fined/jailed if it's found they're attempting to ship stolen goods under false manifests.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  It's even more strange than that when you consider that the UK hasn't been any sort of industrial manufacturer for many decades. What is it that is supposedly being shipped? Granted, some British auto manufacturers might be shipping those, but why should containers full of phones ever leave the UK? Every ship leaving their ports is leaving with stolen goods. If anyone cared, this problem could be ended even without the cooperation of the destination countries. But no one hurt by this has enough political sway to do anything about it.
  - rjsw 1y ago
    The crane that picks up the container to put it on the ship could work out the weight, anything that isn't empty gets inspected.
  - dan-robertson 1y ago
    The UK exports a reasonable number of cars (I think less since Brexit now they make less sense going to Europe). Also machinery/technical equipment, pharmaceuticals, alcoholic drinks, clothing, furniture, etc
- cobbzilla 1y ago
  Indeed. If the UK can do something as wild as ChatControl, why not ShippingContainerControl?
culebron21 1y ago
> Encrypted communications have enabled criminal gangs to operate and co-operate more freely than ever before, and establish global supply chains. Is this the payload message of the article? Many cars have GPS installed. Everybody has a smartphone, and even if it's offline, it's possible to see who went offline when the car was stolen. Customs offices have never ending databases of the containers that passed them. How is it impossible to track down a thief? I guess, because there's just too much data to automatically track many cases. How on Earth will banning cryptograhpy and adding more data to the sea, help track the thieves?
- throwup238 1y ago
  From the article: > Fourth, police forces largely remain in the dust. NaVCIS has enjoyed some success, intercepting 550 cars in the past year. But that is a small fraction of what gets through. Mr Gibson is one of three officers on the whole south coast. Britain’s police have yet to catch any high-ups in the business. European forces do not even have dedicated investigation teams. Across the rich world, police resources tend to be directed towards “higher harm” offences. There's just very few people working on it because it's not a priority.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    The state only cares about thieves insofar as the optics of their activity is bad for the state, illicit trade is lost revenue and every score criminals settle among themselves challenges the state's monopoly on violent dispute resolution, it doesn't really care about the peasants' property, it just looks like it cares a little when the interests align.
    - margalabargala 1y ago
      That's grossly untrue in democracies. The people who vote in democracies care. And therefore, the state also cares. You expect them to let pass by such a great opportunity to performatively score points with voters by being "tough on crime"?
antonmks 1y ago
It is pretty strange that a country doesn't control what is going in and what is going out. In a small European country I'm most familiar with, everything is checked by customs officers. Dogs, x-rays, customs declarations, import taxes.
- dec0dedab0de 1y ago
  T̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶i̶g̶g̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶n̶t̶r̶y̶ The more shipments you have, the more officers you need. The more officers you have, the better the chance one of them is working for organized crime.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    Although, your number of entry points should scale like your perimeter, while your population to pull agents from should scale like your area, so unless you have a very weird geometry this should get easier as you increase in size, right? Airports not included.
    - mandevil 1y ago
      Why should population scale with area? The top ten countries in area are: Russia (#9 in population) Canada (#37) China (#2) USA (#3) Brazil (#7) Australia (#54) India (#1) Argentina (#33) Kazakhstan (#62) Algeria (#32) There doesn't seem to be much relationship between the two?
      - macleginn 1y ago
        If we believe that Claude pulled correct data: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d74a7c48-b5a1-4d86-acc2-e8fab85436cb https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d74a7c48-b5a1-4d86-acc2-e...
    - Terr_ 1y ago
      The main factor is the quantity of goods which need to be inspected, and that tends to scale with the population which is buying the goods. > your number of entry points should scale like your perimeter Is that really true? An entry-point is generally something the people choose to create to satisfy the pre-existing need to transport goods, by building roads, rail, harbor-piers, etc. Border-checkpoint facilities don't spontaneously generate in trackless wilderness or barren coastlines, like some fantasy-dungeon that the Adventurers' Guild must periodically raid in to avert a stampede of monsters.
trhway 1y ago
A high Chechnya bureaucrat was several months ago stopped by Dagestan police for reckless driving that happened to be DUI. Before Chechen SWAT came to rescue the police had managed to check the car, and it happened to be stolen in Canada. That was one of the several high-end cars Kadyrov publicly gifted to his ministers.
- lifestyleguru 1y ago
  How Kadyrov came into possesion of multiple Cybertrucks must be an interesting story, probably revealing entire supply chains of few crime organizations.
ur-whale 1y ago
https://archive.is/tQXqC https://archive.is/tQXqC
wagwang 1y ago
> There is also almost no deterrent: Britain’s police solve only 5% of crimes (and 2% of vehicle thefts) Idk how this is acceptable at all. Is the UK literally the state of nature?
- multjoy 1y ago
  Crime statistics are difficult. England & Wales (because policing is a devolved matter in the UK) have very robust crime recording rules. Consequently, the detection rates are low because you record and close crimes where there is literally no prospect of a conviction. You compare this to, say, Japan, where an investigation only starts if it’s likely that the crime will be solved, and you have an explanation for why detections seem comparatively poor. There is also the fact that, despite TVs assertion to the contrary, that solving crime is not easy and it is also true that being able to operate a fully encrypted communication system makes it harder as you rely on mistakes. As we saw with Encro, criminal groups with Signal and modern iPhones can communicate with gay abandon if they maintain decent opsec.
  - WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
    > that solving crime is not easy True. In a healthy society, policing is hard. > and it is also true that being able to operate a fully encrypted communication system makes it harder as you rely on mistakes. Yes. You are describing actual police work; it is how things have always been. Because this was true before robust encryption, we know encryption doesn't change the equation and can be safely omitted from your assertion. > As we saw with Encro, criminal groups with Signal and modern iPhones can communicate with gay abandon if they maintain decent opsec. Governments have never had realtime access to our communications. Humans' communications have been private for as long as there has been language. Privacy is good for us and is better than all other alternatives. Robust encryption is how we maintain that natural, neutral, healthy default. Otherwise, we're talking about gifting new, unprecedented surveillance powers to officials, politicians and their powerful allies. Massive power. Over us. At which point we are less safe.
    - wagwang 1y ago
hatthew 1y ago
With all the technology that exists today, I'm surprised that we haven't invented something that would make it logistically and economically feasible to do a quick scan of e.g. all containers going into a port.
- rimbo789 1y ago
  The volume of containers is unimaginably huge. Take the Evergiven. It can fit ~20k containers. A “quick” check each going 2 minutes would add 40k minutes to loading, or 667 hours or 27 days. A month basically. In a world where time is money no way they are checking all containers.
  - teddyh 1y ago
    You are assuming sequential processing, done by one checker.
  - prmph 1y ago
    But the goods going into the containers are coming from somewhere right. Why are they not checked at source or when they are due to be loaded? If we wait until they are already in the containers, then yes, it is not feasible to check them all. Basically, the checks should be distributed, not concentrated at the port.
    - quesera 1y ago
      This would require a "container cop" at every loading point. Containers get dropped off (empty) and loaded in all sorts of unexpected places. Not just big factories. The big loading points would be easy to inspect, just require an independent property master or something. But you can load a container in your driveway and have it picked up for shipping to anywhere in the world.
  - hatthew 1y ago
    The hypothetical I'm imagining is that the trucks/trains going into a port go through something like a strip photography [0] x-ray machine, which doesn't need the vehicle to even stop at all. Some barcode/QR code on the side of the container connects to some manifest, and then a human (or AI?) can do a quick sanity check of "oh the manifest says this container is full of teddy bears but it sure looks like there's a car in there." Obviously if it were that easy then somebody would have done it already, but I don't immediately see why that definitely wouldn't work. My guess is either a fast x-ray machine is implausible, and/or simply matching the contents to a manifest wouldn't be enough of a deterrent to criminals. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip_photography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip_photography
decimalenough 1y ago
I know this opinion is anathema on HN, but this is one reason I like Teslas. Keyless unlock over Bluetooth keyed to the owner's phone is very difficult to spoof, making it hard to steal the car. If you manage to steal the car somehow, it's wired to the gills, meaning it can tracked and bricked remotely (the apparent fate of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov's Cybertruck). And if you do manage to take it offline and bring it to another country, the navigation won't work and you'll have a very hard time finding spares outside the official dealer network.
- jvm___ 1y ago
  I saw a video of some alpine explorer who recorded a video of himself to be uploaded later. He was on some stupid long 500 mile trek through the mountains when the police texted him. They were paving the parking lot where he'd left his car and requesting that it be moved, so he was hiking towards better signal so that he could start the engine and someone local could move it a few feet.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- crinkly 1y ago
  I prefer my French dumb car. If someone steals it, meh the insurance will pay out and I buy another one. Not that anyone is going to steal it. It’s just invisible. And it’s more comfortable and after 6 years lifetime it cost less than half of just the depreciation on a model S including fuel.
  - decimalenough 1y ago
    You get everything described above in a used Tesla Model 3 that goes for $20k in the US.
    - crinkly 1y ago
      The French dumb car cost me $4000
_1tem 1y ago
Meanwhile police in Canada won't do anything about your stolen car even when you show them it's right there in a rail/shipping yard in your city. - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/stolen-truck-authorities-17-days-retreive-1.7096609 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/stolen-truck-authorit... - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto-man-finds-stolen-truck-in-uae-1.7083615 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto-man-finds-stolen-truc... > Andrew texted the officer a screenshot showing the precise location of the AirTag. As the officer approached the rail yard, Andrew's second AirTag started pinging at the same location, suggesting the Bluetooth signal emitted by the device had connected to the officer's smartphone. (The tracker relies on nearby GPS-enabled devices to determine its location.)
- MichaelZuo 1y ago
  Clearance rates for violent crimes are below 60% in Canada… and even literal stabbing victims often go without any sort of closure, in pretty much every major city across Canada. And it’s been like that for some number of years without any sort of fundamental reform, or enormous police/prosecutor budget increases, in sight. From that perspective it’s amazing any car thefts gets solved at all…
  - kspacewalk2 1y ago
    Just to complete the picture, violent crime in Canada is at historic lows and falling.
    - mc32 1y ago
      Percentage-wise or numbers-wise? Also, some jurisdictions have been known to engage in a practice where criminals are charged with lesser crimes in order to make the violent crime numbers look good.
      - cma 1y ago
        How much does theft coverage add to car insurance in Canada on average?
RobinL 1y ago
130,000 car thefts a year. That's over £1bn loss, probably closer to £4bn. In this context the total police budget of around £20bn seems remarkably low! You'd have thought it'd be worth insurance companies paying people to track down the thieves!
- _1tem 1y ago
  Why bother tracking down thieves when you can just keep jacking up premiums? It's not like customers have a choice.
  - dan-robertson 1y ago
    They can choose to not pay for theft coverage. Different insurers compete but obviously trying to improve theft prevention would have to be a collaboration as it wouldn’t be able to lower only one insurer’s premiums.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      >They can choose to not pay for theft coverage. A mere six or seven figures spend on lobbying and/or wining and dining the legislature will plug that loophole. The legislature will spew some grandiose bullshit about how in an effort to reduce the cost theft coverage is now one of the mandatory parts and half of the population will eat it up. >would have to be a collaboration as it wouldn’t be able to lower only one Which will never happen because reducing costs across the board is bad for insurers. Even if their margins are thin a thin margin on a big number gets you more money. They don't care how high costs go as long as they're uniformly distributed and/or predictable.
  - savanaly 1y ago
    > Why bother tracking down thieves when you can just keep jacking up premiums? It's not like customers have a choice. Insurance companies compete viciously with each other on price. Have you not seen their ads? If one could offer significantly cheaper insurance through some mechanism like that they definitely would.
Taniwha 1y ago
Showing a completely legal electronics market in HQB in Shenzhen and claiming it's selling stolen phones is rather unfair - there is a building not far from that market that sells and recycles phones mostly by stripping them for parts and rebuilding them from scratch, but it's not that perfectly legal market that is so much fun to shop at

103 points by tlb 1y ago

nkurz 1y ago

https://archive.is/T50Y3 https://archive.is/T50Y3

dec0dedab0de 1y ago

Sounds like a market opportunity for cheaper phones and cars globally.

lifestyleguru 1y ago
Expensive luxury cars are one big pain for society. Draining the economies and fuelling organized crime.
cladopa 1y ago
A new aluminium iMac or MacBook Air, or MS surface for 200 dollars? Those are the prices of stolen goods. A lot of people want a metal computer instead of a plastic one, but don't want to pay for it. I was offered stolen goods at those prices and passed. A friend of mine took the bait as was super happy for a month or so until police took his new adquisition from him. Of course he received no compensation as it was stolen and they could prove it, so in the end it was expensive.

IncreasePosts 1y ago

Can anyone just put a container on a ship? I'm curious why the senders wouldn't be registered, and then extra scrutiny is given to newly registered senders, and senders are blacklisted and fined/jailed if it's found they're attempting to ship stolen goods under false manifests.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
It's even more strange than that when you consider that the UK hasn't been any sort of industrial manufacturer for many decades. What is it that is supposedly being shipped? Granted, some British auto manufacturers might be shipping those, but why should containers full of phones ever leave the UK? Every ship leaving their ports is leaving with stolen goods. If anyone cared, this problem could be ended even without the cooperation of the destination countries. But no one hurt by this has enough political sway to do anything about it.
- rjsw 1y ago
  The crane that picks up the container to put it on the ship could work out the weight, anything that isn't empty gets inspected.
- dan-robertson 1y ago
  The UK exports a reasonable number of cars (I think less since Brexit now they make less sense going to Europe). Also machinery/technical equipment, pharmaceuticals, alcoholic drinks, clothing, furniture, etc
cobbzilla 1y ago
Indeed. If the UK can do something as wild as ChatControl, why not ShippingContainerControl?

culebron21 1y ago

> Encrypted communications have enabled criminal gangs to operate and co-operate more freely than ever before, and establish global supply chains. Is this the payload message of the article? Many cars have GPS installed. Everybody has a smartphone, and even if it's offline, it's possible to see who went offline when the car was stolen. Customs offices have never ending databases of the containers that passed them. How is it impossible to track down a thief? I guess, because there's just too much data to automatically track many cases. How on Earth will banning cryptograhpy and adding more data to the sea, help track the thieves?

throwup238 1y ago
From the article: > Fourth, police forces largely remain in the dust. NaVCIS has enjoyed some success, intercepting 550 cars in the past year. But that is a small fraction of what gets through. Mr Gibson is one of three officers on the whole south coast. Britain’s police have yet to catch any high-ups in the business. European forces do not even have dedicated investigation teams. Across the rich world, police resources tend to be directed towards “higher harm” offences. There's just very few people working on it because it's not a priority.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  The state only cares about thieves insofar as the optics of their activity is bad for the state, illicit trade is lost revenue and every score criminals settle among themselves challenges the state's monopoly on violent dispute resolution, it doesn't really care about the peasants' property, it just looks like it cares a little when the interests align.
  - margalabargala 1y ago
    That's grossly untrue in democracies. The people who vote in democracies care. And therefore, the state also cares. You expect them to let pass by such a great opportunity to performatively score points with voters by being "tough on crime"?

antonmks 1y ago

It is pretty strange that a country doesn't control what is going in and what is going out. In a small European country I'm most familiar with, everything is checked by customs officers. Dogs, x-rays, customs declarations, import taxes.

dec0dedab0de 1y ago
T̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶i̶g̶g̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶n̶t̶r̶y̶ The more shipments you have, the more officers you need. The more officers you have, the better the chance one of them is working for organized crime.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  Although, your number of entry points should scale like your perimeter, while your population to pull agents from should scale like your area, so unless you have a very weird geometry this should get easier as you increase in size, right? Airports not included.
  - mandevil 1y ago
    Why should population scale with area? The top ten countries in area are: Russia (#9 in population) Canada (#37) China (#2) USA (#3) Brazil (#7) Australia (#54) India (#1) Argentina (#33) Kazakhstan (#62) Algeria (#32) There doesn't seem to be much relationship between the two?
    - macleginn 1y ago
      If we believe that Claude pulled correct data: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d74a7c48-b5a1-4d86-acc2-e8fab85436cb https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d74a7c48-b5a1-4d86-acc2-e...
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    The main factor is the quantity of goods which need to be inspected, and that tends to scale with the population which is buying the goods. > your number of entry points should scale like your perimeter Is that really true? An entry-point is generally something the people choose to create to satisfy the pre-existing need to transport goods, by building roads, rail, harbor-piers, etc. Border-checkpoint facilities don't spontaneously generate in trackless wilderness or barren coastlines, like some fantasy-dungeon that the Adventurers' Guild must periodically raid in to avert a stampede of monsters.

trhway 1y ago

A high Chechnya bureaucrat was several months ago stopped by Dagestan police for reckless driving that happened to be DUI. Before Chechen SWAT came to rescue the police had managed to check the car, and it happened to be stolen in Canada. That was one of the several high-end cars Kadyrov publicly gifted to his ministers.

lifestyleguru 1y ago
How Kadyrov came into possesion of multiple Cybertrucks must be an interesting story, probably revealing entire supply chains of few crime organizations.

ur-whale 1y ago

https://archive.is/tQXqC https://archive.is/tQXqC

wagwang 1y ago

> There is also almost no deterrent: Britain’s police solve only 5% of crimes (and 2% of vehicle thefts) Idk how this is acceptable at all. Is the UK literally the state of nature?

multjoy 1y ago
Crime statistics are difficult. England & Wales (because policing is a devolved matter in the UK) have very robust crime recording rules. Consequently, the detection rates are low because you record and close crimes where there is literally no prospect of a conviction. You compare this to, say, Japan, where an investigation only starts if it’s likely that the crime will be solved, and you have an explanation for why detections seem comparatively poor. There is also the fact that, despite TVs assertion to the contrary, that solving crime is not easy and it is also true that being able to operate a fully encrypted communication system makes it harder as you rely on mistakes. As we saw with Encro, criminal groups with Signal and modern iPhones can communicate with gay abandon if they maintain decent opsec.
- WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
  > that solving crime is not easy True. In a healthy society, policing is hard. > and it is also true that being able to operate a fully encrypted communication system makes it harder as you rely on mistakes. Yes. You are describing actual police work; it is how things have always been. Because this was true before robust encryption, we know encryption doesn't change the equation and can be safely omitted from your assertion. > As we saw with Encro, criminal groups with Signal and modern iPhones can communicate with gay abandon if they maintain decent opsec. Governments have never had realtime access to our communications. Humans' communications have been private for as long as there has been language. Privacy is good for us and is better than all other alternatives. Robust encryption is how we maintain that natural, neutral, healthy default. Otherwise, we're talking about gifting new, unprecedented surveillance powers to officials, politicians and their powerful allies. Massive power. Over us. At which point we are less safe.
  - wagwang 1y ago

hatthew 1y ago

With all the technology that exists today, I'm surprised that we haven't invented something that would make it logistically and economically feasible to do a quick scan of e.g. all containers going into a port.

rimbo789 1y ago
The volume of containers is unimaginably huge. Take the Evergiven. It can fit ~20k containers. A “quick” check each going 2 minutes would add 40k minutes to loading, or 667 hours or 27 days. A month basically. In a world where time is money no way they are checking all containers.
- teddyh 1y ago
  You are assuming sequential processing, done by one checker.
- prmph 1y ago
  But the goods going into the containers are coming from somewhere right. Why are they not checked at source or when they are due to be loaded? If we wait until they are already in the containers, then yes, it is not feasible to check them all. Basically, the checks should be distributed, not concentrated at the port.
  - quesera 1y ago
    This would require a "container cop" at every loading point. Containers get dropped off (empty) and loaded in all sorts of unexpected places. Not just big factories. The big loading points would be easy to inspect, just require an independent property master or something. But you can load a container in your driveway and have it picked up for shipping to anywhere in the world.
- hatthew 1y ago
  The hypothetical I'm imagining is that the trucks/trains going into a port go through something like a strip photography [0] x-ray machine, which doesn't need the vehicle to even stop at all. Some barcode/QR code on the side of the container connects to some manifest, and then a human (or AI?) can do a quick sanity check of "oh the manifest says this container is full of teddy bears but it sure looks like there's a car in there." Obviously if it were that easy then somebody would have done it already, but I don't immediately see why that definitely wouldn't work. My guess is either a fast x-ray machine is implausible, and/or simply matching the contents to a manifest wouldn't be enough of a deterrent to criminals. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip_photography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip_photography

decimalenough 1y ago

I know this opinion is anathema on HN, but this is one reason I like Teslas. Keyless unlock over Bluetooth keyed to the owner's phone is very difficult to spoof, making it hard to steal the car. If you manage to steal the car somehow, it's wired to the gills, meaning it can tracked and bricked remotely (the apparent fate of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov's Cybertruck). And if you do manage to take it offline and bring it to another country, the navigation won't work and you'll have a very hard time finding spares outside the official dealer network.

jvm___ 1y ago
I saw a video of some alpine explorer who recorded a video of himself to be uploaded later. He was on some stupid long 500 mile trek through the mountains when the police texted him. They were paving the parking lot where he'd left his car and requesting that it be moved, so he was hiking towards better signal so that he could start the engine and someone local could move it a few feet.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
crinkly 1y ago
I prefer my French dumb car. If someone steals it, meh the insurance will pay out and I buy another one. Not that anyone is going to steal it. It’s just invisible. And it’s more comfortable and after 6 years lifetime it cost less than half of just the depreciation on a model S including fuel.
- decimalenough 1y ago
  You get everything described above in a used Tesla Model 3 that goes for $20k in the US.
  - crinkly 1y ago
    The French dumb car cost me $4000

_1tem 1y ago

Meanwhile police in Canada won't do anything about your stolen car even when you show them it's right there in a rail/shipping yard in your city. - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/stolen-truck-authorities-17-days-retreive-1.7096609 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/stolen-truck-authorit... - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto-man-finds-stolen-truck-in-uae-1.7083615 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto-man-finds-stolen-truc... > Andrew texted the officer a screenshot showing the precise location of the AirTag. As the officer approached the rail yard, Andrew's second AirTag started pinging at the same location, suggesting the Bluetooth signal emitted by the device had connected to the officer's smartphone. (The tracker relies on nearby GPS-enabled devices to determine its location.)

MichaelZuo 1y ago
Clearance rates for violent crimes are below 60% in Canada… and even literal stabbing victims often go without any sort of closure, in pretty much every major city across Canada. And it’s been like that for some number of years without any sort of fundamental reform, or enormous police/prosecutor budget increases, in sight. From that perspective it’s amazing any car thefts gets solved at all…
- kspacewalk2 1y ago
  Just to complete the picture, violent crime in Canada is at historic lows and falling.
  - mc32 1y ago
    Percentage-wise or numbers-wise? Also, some jurisdictions have been known to engage in a practice where criminals are charged with lesser crimes in order to make the violent crime numbers look good.
    - cma 1y ago
      How much does theft coverage add to car insurance in Canada on average?

RobinL 1y ago

130,000 car thefts a year. That's over £1bn loss, probably closer to £4bn. In this context the total police budget of around £20bn seems remarkably low! You'd have thought it'd be worth insurance companies paying people to track down the thieves!

_1tem 1y ago
Why bother tracking down thieves when you can just keep jacking up premiums? It's not like customers have a choice.
- dan-robertson 1y ago
  They can choose to not pay for theft coverage. Different insurers compete but obviously trying to improve theft prevention would have to be a collaboration as it wouldn’t be able to lower only one insurer’s premiums.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    >They can choose to not pay for theft coverage. A mere six or seven figures spend on lobbying and/or wining and dining the legislature will plug that loophole. The legislature will spew some grandiose bullshit about how in an effort to reduce the cost theft coverage is now one of the mandatory parts and half of the population will eat it up. >would have to be a collaboration as it wouldn’t be able to lower only one Which will never happen because reducing costs across the board is bad for insurers. Even if their margins are thin a thin margin on a big number gets you more money. They don't care how high costs go as long as they're uniformly distributed and/or predictable.
- savanaly 1y ago
  > Why bother tracking down thieves when you can just keep jacking up premiums? It's not like customers have a choice. Insurance companies compete viciously with each other on price. Have you not seen their ads? If one could offer significantly cheaper insurance through some mechanism like that they definitely would.

Taniwha 1y ago

Showing a completely legal electronics market in HQB in Shenzhen and claiming it's selling stolen phones is rather unfair - there is a building not far from that market that sells and recycles phones mostly by stripping them for parts and rebuilding them from scratch, but it's not that perfectly legal market that is so much fun to shop at