
After Car2Go eased its background checks, 75 vehicles were stolen in one day - throwaway3627
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-11/mercedes-thieves-showed-just-how-vulnerable-car-sharing-can-be
======
jacurtis
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.

~~~
sytelus
I am doubting this data points. AirBnB has virtually no background checks and
people are not robbing away houses en mass. Why AirBnB has such a different
track record vs Car2Go?

~~~
rickyc091
As a renter, you have to provide several verifications (email, linkedin,
google, phone number). I think you can get away with a single one. Sometimes,
you'll be asked to provide a driver's license or passport for proof.

80% of the rentals I've been in weren't their primary home, so even if someone
was to rob the place, there wasn't much to take. The most valuable thing would
probably be the TV, but most places only had a 32-40" tv which goes for a few
hundred bucks new.

While people aren't robbing Airbnb homes, there are several cases where they
are getting completely destroyed.

~~~
sytelus
I highly doubt if car2go renter provides less personal information than AirBnB
renter. I also think it would be easier for bad actors to get away for AirBnB
robbery by simply claiming that missing items didn’t existed. In many places,
in fact house owners would have little recourse because they are conducting
hotel business without commercial license to start with. From economics
perspective, it is absolutely amazing that AirBnB hasn’t became a gold mine
for the professional thieves. We should investigate and understand these
forces better and reuse them in other gig economy scenarios.

~~~
dwild
> I highly doubt if car2go renter provides less personal information than
> AirBnB renter.

The article is pretty clear about theses instances happening when they
deactivated their background check. They may still provide more, but if they
aren't check, it's meaningless.

> I also think it would be easier for bad actors to get away for AirBnB
> robbery by simply claiming that missing items didn’t existed.

Sure easier, but as the comment you were responding to said, theses aren't
primary home, they doesn't contains much things that are worth stealing. Sure
the renter will be able to claim he isn't guilty, but at the end of the day,
if it takes you a day and cost you 100$ to steal 120$, it's not worth it.

> From economics perspective, it is absolutely amazing that AirBnB hasn’t
> became a gold mine for the professional thieves.

It's more like a coal mine, sure there's money to be made, but you can't
always make them profitable.

------
excar2gothrow
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.

~~~
snarf21
It 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
Maybe, 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.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Yeah, the Smarts were great. And you could pop the rear window open and tuck a
bike in the back, with the wheel wedged under the front seat and the front
fork sticking out the car. Best car for supplementing bike transit.

~~~
dwyerm
FWIW, Lime appears to be trying to answer my desire for tiny carshares with
their 'LimePod' branded fleet of Fiat 500s in the Seattle. I haven't tried
one, yet, so I don't know how well it works, or if you can wedge a bike in the
back. :)

~~~
sbierwagen
I rented one a couple weeks ago to, coincidentally, drive back to my apartment
to get a replacement inner tube for a stranded bike. If there's a way to get a
bike in one without damaging the seats, I couldn't figure it out.

------
mc32
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.

~~~
org3432
I think it's also due to having a population that has nothing to lose.

~~~
toasterlovin
FWIW, 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.

~~~
pas
Yes and no. After all, there are millions of people in deep poverty in the US.
And at least a fraction of them has serious constraints on what they can do to
get out of there (for example they have family, so they can't just pack up and
go to a different state to start a new life).

Student loan cannot be written down in a personal bankruptcy process.

Many people have insufficient money for medication.

... and so on, so they dip their toes into crime, just selling weed at first,
or laundering money, and then naturally they either get greedy, or get
pressured into taking more risk, or simply get caught. (or maybe some
successfully get out.)

and then there are people fleeing from very rough places (drug cartel
warzones, etc.) and they usually don't have much more than their name, so they
can try to do whatever makes some money.

Do circumstances make theft right? No. Of course not. But sitting idly while
people are starving is also a form of wrong, which quickly turns this into a
hard pragmatic question with only grey answers.

~~~
MagnumOpus
> there are millions of people in deep poverty in the US.

Sure, but "deep poverty" today is what "middle class" life used to be for
their grandparents or great-grandparents and normal student life is like for
most college students. Having to cook from scratch rather than eating out
every day, or maybe even only having meat a few times a week. Having to go to
a laundromat rather than having your own washing machine, and riding public
transit or a bike/motorbike with rudimentary knowledge on how to fix it.

These are hardships only when compared to extremely lofty standards of living
- and if that makes you become a career criminal, it is hard to have sympathy.

~~~
habnds
I think this is inaccurate and you need citations to justify the idea that
those in deep poverty are better off then they were 25, 50, 100 years ago.

Health outcomes, (obesity, nutrition, drug addiction ) could easily be worse.

Security outcomes, (violent crime, domestic violence, police violence) could
easily be worse.

Economic outcomes (job security, lifetime earning expectations, minimum wage)
could easily be worse.

Social outcomes ( close friends, community ties, connection to close family
memebers) could easily be worse.

Remember that looking at averages is misleading if the distribution is
changing around a constant mean.

Further, the idea that crime is an economic choice, and not a socially
determined choice is highly suspect. For instance, street level drug dealers
make very little money [1], the average US bank robber steals ~$4,000 [2].
Crime is rarely a "rational decision" it's made in a socially constructed
context.

[1]
[https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/sp/5049.pdf](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/sp/5049.pdf)
[2] [https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/06/11/what-you-
sho...](https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/06/11/what-you-should-know-
before-robbing-a-bank)

~~~
vorpalhex
There is no way that Health and Security outcomes are worse today than maybe
50 years ago. The crime rate has fallen dramatically since the 90s, and health
outcomes are dramatically improved between advancement of medical tech and
generally improved care.

Do we have an obesity problem? Sure, that's kind of a self caused issue. You
could blame our food being too cheap, but the alternative is starving to death
which is far less in your realm of control.

Minimum wage is at its highest in direct value, luxury goods are at their
cheapest. Now instead of writing a letter or traveling significant distances,
you can chat with your friends all damned day.

Is life hard and imperfect? Of course it is, but to suggest that somehow life
is harder now than in the past 25 or 50 or 500 years is absolutely foolish.

~~~
habnds
So it should be easy for you to find sources.

Life Expectancy in the US is going down [1]. That's happening as many people
are living longer than ever. The difference comes from plummeting life
expectancies at the bottom.

Real minimum wages peaked in the 1980's [2]

Calling obesity "self caused" is unreasonable. Access to food, particularly
for poor people is very different today than at any time in the past,
Malnutrition is totally possible alongside sufficient caloric intake.

Why is the cost of "luxury goods" relevant to anything?

[1] [https://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/21/health/us-life-
expectancy...](https://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/21/health/us-life-expectancy-
study/index.html)

[2] [https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-real-value-
u-s-...](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-real-value-u-s-minimum-
wage/)

~~~
vorpalhex
Life expectancy in the US has dropped by about 4 months in the last 3 years.
In the last 40 years it has increased over 8 years.
[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?location...](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=US)

Remember that real wage is a deflection based on cost, but the cost of living
is absolutely localized whereas the minimum wage is federal unless overridden
by the state. Therefore as an average that might be true, but is generally
incorrect for any given actual datapoint. Just because minimum wage is garbage
in Mountain View doesn't mean it's not perfectly fine in Ohio.
[https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_microeconomics-theory-
th...](https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_microeconomics-theory-through-
applications/s14-01-nominal-wages-and-real-wages.html)
[https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/index/north-
americ...](https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/index/north-america)

Obesity is absolutely self caused unless you're on a feeding tube. You can get
2400 cals a day for about $4 from McDonalds - don't even need to cook. Yes,
your fresh organic vegetables that had to be trucked in from halfway across
the US costs more than a bag of processed corn chips that can sit on a shelf
for 2 years. You can still eat very healthy for very little money.

The cost of luxury goods is relevant because things like laptop computers, the
internet, cellphones, cars, and so on are considered luxury goods. And hey, it
turns out it's pretty hard to get a job if you can't email, and it's hard to
be connected if you don't have a phone. You can get a functional phone for $20
and a plan for about $15 or less a month - something mind boggling compared to
a few decades ago, not to mention more portable than a telegraph or a
landline.

~~~
habnds
Again, you're looking at the average life expectancy, but we're talking about
the poor, not everyone.

CoL in NYC/SF has almost no effect on the overall price index, it's much more
representative of middle america.

Completely missed my point about someone being malnourished because they get
all of their calories from Mickey D's.

You'd be surprised how many poor people continue to have low access to email
and find jobs by physically walking into retail stores to apply.

~~~
vorpalhex
To repeat back your own line, sources?

Are you making the claim the rich now live forever and the poor die much
younger compared to previous years? They _do_ still include the poor in the
average.

CoL has everything to do with the poor and their quality of life. A $0.10
raise in the price of a gallon of milk has no effect on the middle class and a
dramatic effect on those living in poverty.

While there are nutritional issues with McDonalds (far too much fat, not
enough vegetables, too much sugar in many of their products), you probably
aren't going to be malnourished if you eat their food. Chicken/Beef, bread,
some starches and fats. That's not an altogether terrible diet, it certainly
isn't unsalted rice for 3 meals a day.

~~~
habnds
> In 1980, the richest cohort of middle-aged American men could expect to live
> until about 83 and the poorest to 76. By 2010, the richest American males
> had gained six years in life expectancy, living to 89 on average, while life
> expectancy for the poorest men hadn’t improved. [1]

Regarding cost of living, the question is whether minimum wages have gone down
, and the answer is yes, because cost of living has increased, they have. It's
isn't just mountain view CA.

It's common knowledge that mcdonaldds cannot provide a fully nutritious diet.
Take a look at Super Size Me, the book or movie. It's pretty amazing.

[1] [https://www.vox.com/science-and-
health/2018/1/9/16860994/lif...](https://www.vox.com/science-and-
health/2018/1/9/16860994/life-expectancy-us-income-inequality)

------
orthoxerox
> 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.

~~~
nabnob
From personal experience driving for Uber, I've noticed that facial
recognition technology isn't that accurate if you're not white.

~~~
woodrowbarlow
does uber use facial recognition in vehicles? can you expand on that? in my
city i haven't seen any evidence of facial recognition in uber/lyft vehicles.

~~~
rnotaro
Probably when verifying the driver's information. Not the riders.

------
Causality1
>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.

~~~
cobookman
Gps 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
You 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.

~~~
WalterBright
It's easy to test. Wrap your cell phone in aluminum foil, then call it and see
if it rings.

~~~
londons_explore
Sealing 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.

~~~
WalterBright
I just tried it. Just fold the edges over with your fingers and press them
with your fingers. Not hard, works fine.

------
nneonneo
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...

~~~
cerberusss
But 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
What city is this, if I may ask? Or at least what country?

~~~
iforgotpassword
Here 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.

------
thinkloop
People are throwing around the terms "clever" and "enterprising" but it was
just fake credit cards and joy riding.

------
hsbaut76
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).

~~~
taejo
It 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).

~~~
AdrianB1
There 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
I 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
That'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.

------
Fins
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.

------
supernova87a
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.

~~~
hooande
Given the scale, I would suspect a ring of professional criminals more than
people with low credit scores from "bad neighborhoods".

This is _Hacker_ News, after all. This is a system and someone hacked it.

"In several cases, hackers with lists of email addresses and passwords have
written scripts to locate car-sharing accounts using those credentials. Once
they find the accounts, they sign out cars and disable their GPS trackers,
causing them effectively to disappear."

This does not sound like it's related to businesses going to certain
neighborhoods due to demographics. It sounds like smart thieves took advantage
of your biases and drove to certain neighborhoods in order to get you to
suspect an Other of their crimes. That's sure what I would do

~~~
lultimouomo
The article makes it quite clear that this was not a planned operations where
75 cars were stolen, GPS disabled, and shipped abroad or stripped for parts.

People were just refusing to give back cars, parking them inside private
garages, using immobilizers, and stuff like that.

FTA:

> There was little indication that the people who took the cars had more than
> joyriding in mind. According to police reports, all the pilfered cars had
> functioning GPS trackers and license plates that started with the letters
> AX, and many still had visible Car2Go stickers on them, so officers
> patrolling the area had little trouble spotting them. On a single day they
> arrested almost two dozen joyriders.

~~~
close04
But later on it goes on to say:

> She adds that the other types of fraud have been rare at Car2Go and that its
> GPS trackers can’t be physically disabled.

Other than physically disabling or jamming the GPS what other ways of
disabling it are accessible to the potential thief? And what makes Car2Go's
GPS impossible to disable physically when we're talking about people with the
willingness and ability to steal and strip down a car?

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/MuNrZ](http://archive.is/MuNrZ)

~~~
chance_state
Unrelated 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.

~~~
george_perez
Using Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317)

~~~
sbr464
For 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.

------
sschueller
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.

~~~
broahmed
To be clear, I'm pretty sure that means 22k car thefts in general, not 22k
thefts from Car2Go.

~~~
pstrateman
That's still astronomical.

------
AtomicOrbital
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

~~~
masenf
The 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...

------
fencepost
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.

~~~
jsemrau
I 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 ?

~~~
londons_explore
In the UK, those companies all require a driving license, passport, credit
card, many thousand pound deposit, credit check, 2 bank statements, and a code
from the government showing driving offenses...

They then proceed to print off paper forms which they staple other forms to,
scan them in, print them off again, fax them to the headquarters before
emailing them as well, and print them out a third time just for luck, before
finally handing out the keys to the car.

Either the whole industry is unreasonably scared of theft, or theft is an
actual problem and they need to do everything that can to keep it low to stay
profitable.

I can see why they haven't moved to app-based rentals. It's hard to fax
handwritten sketches of your ID card via an app...

~~~
kaybe
Then they only do these things when they're open (although you can return cars
at all times), so too early, too late or Sundays are out.

They also only have one location in the city where you can get cars, and it's
usually much further away than the closest car sharing option.

For longer trips (and one-way rentals which are great for moving city) they
are still a good option, but if you need a car for an hour to get some heavy
tools from the hardware store they're out.

(The other option would be to borrow a cargo bike which is free from the city,
but again only when they're open and requires more travel to and from the
place.)

------
andy_ppp
Couldn't this just have been bad timing and they were targetted by organised
thieves?

------
baybal2
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.

~~~
segmondy
Thief? Sounds like a collector.

------
jwildeboer
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.

------
IloveHN84
Plot twist: what if someone bribed some employees and got their help with the
backend?

------
orliesaurus
> They couldn't figure out which car to remotely disable.

Well - that's why then!

------
fallingfrog
Sounds like someone identified an arbitrage opportunity.

~~~
throwaway3627
They didn't flip the cars, they stole them.

------
glenneroo
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?

~~~
Konnstann
75 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
Thanks! That was a total reading comprehension failure on my part.

