
The Curious Case of the Disappearing Nuts (2017) - acdanger
https://www.outsideonline.com/2186526/nut-job
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OrangeMango
> Ultimately, Parker’s bigger contribution to stopping nut theft had little to
> do with ­police work: in the wake of the Crain theft, he ­began training
> Tehama County nut processors in basic security precautions, and there have
> been no fictitious pickups there since 2013, despite increased problems
> elsewhere in the state.

The big takeaway. Make yourself a little harder to steal from, and nobody will
bother, because everyone else is still terrible.

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MisterTea
Indeed. Another tidbit is this:

 _Inventing a fake trucking company is easy, he said, as is impersonating a
legitimate one. The only people in the shipping industry responsible for
verifying truckers are brokers, who connect customers with trucking companies.
Wadhwani looked into vetting practices at a major brokerage several years ago
and asked the company to describe its process. An em­ployee said, “We ask the
trucking company to send documents, we pick them up off the fax, and we file
them away. We don’t look at them, we don’t read them.”_

So it seems the industry is very lackadaisical as a whole in terms of security
practices. Vetting people costs money.

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blantonl
It seems like there is a lot of opportunity for technology, in this case GPS
Asset tracking, to be of real use here.

These are really crimes of opportunity, and time is of the essence for
criminals in these cases. Sweeping a load for GPS trackers that are now so
inexpensive and small seems to be prohibitive and could easily start to help
to diagram out the networks that are part of these thefts.

~~~
jandrese
The article briefly touched on this. One company attached GPS trackers to its
packages, but they were stolen anyway and the thieves were not tracked. It
didn't explain why, but if I had to guess an outfit as sophisticated as this
is probably smart enough to plop a GPS jammer in their trucks when moving
around the hot nuts.

~~~
criddell
Is jamming GPS necessary? Wouldn't it be easier to jam the cellular signal
that they use to report the GPS coordinates back to the owners?

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jandrese
GPS jamming is ridiculously easy. You can buy $50 devices off Alibaba that fit
in your pocket and only require you to flip on a switch.

Jamming cell signals is much harder because there are so many different bands
and the transmitters are much more powerful. It requires bulky expensive
hardware and some expertise to do it properly.

Plus you are more likely to be noticed if your vehicle is a rolling cell
deadzone.

I listened to a talk a couple of years ago from a company that specializes in
detecting GPS spoofers and one of the side effects was that they were able to
watch people cheating their rental mileage agreements on box trucks via GPS
jamming as they drove around London. The jammers would trip their sensors one
after another as they drove down the road. There were hundreds of them
operating in the city during the day.

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justausername4
I work for one of the organizations cited in the article and worked on this
investigation. There were several arrests in 2016 and things have mostly been
back to normal.

You're right about jamming. I'm aware of several thefts in which covert cargo
tracking or driver cell phone tracking was employed. At the end of the day
they jam the signal, search the trailer, and discard the device or in the case
of driver tracking..just turn it off. Tracking isn't the way.

There is very little the shippers can do to prevent it as well. It's up to the
shipment broker to vet and identify identity theft of the trucking carrier
when the load is being booked. Very few of them have any sort of security
practices. The industry is woefully susceptible to even basic social
engineering attacks.

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ncmncm
Bofa.

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Accujack
Russian organized crime wants to own the world the same way they do Russia.
Trump is helping them out.

