The key to stop car thieves

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Automotive wireless technology is something most of us are familiar with. If you are still confused then just look at your car keys or automated home systems for the answer. Your remote car key/smart key is an example of automotive wireless technology. Most new cars today boast of providing this tech to you. However, today, we are not going to be waxing eloquent about its benefits but rather highlighting a pitfall of this piece of technology. 

On May 17, a curious incident struck car owners at a car park in Manchester. Vehicles across an entire car park in Manchester had their locks jammed on Sunday due to a botched criminally-motivated hack.

No one at the Manchester Fort Shopping Park, in north Manchester, was able to lock their car's doors on Sunday evening. Manual locking however saved the day, but still a lot of car boots remained unlocked forcing motorists to wait by their cars. In addition to leaving cars open, the thieves set off multiple alarms. So you can imagine the cacophony that reigned there that evening. A simple alarm ringing gets us all nervous and irritated, think about some 40 car alarms going off all at once. For thieves, it was not a really great day. 

Someone/something was jamming the signal to every car in the car park. The attack was probably carried out using a £30 jamming device bought over the internet.  Thieves can jam radio frequency signals using the device so that when someone attempts to lock their car with a remote fob, the signal is lost and the car doesn’t actually lock. The same devices allow crooks to bypass car coding and re-program vehicles before driving off in them. 

The incident has led to a lot of questioning and probing into the usage of such technology. If thieves steal something from a car using the tactic we will not have to just fear them picking car locks or breaking windows, car owners will have to constantly be on the alert. Victims will also be left with a harder job to claim for their losses against car insurance because it will be difficult to prove they locked their car prior to the theft, leaving insurance firms free to deny liability.

If you just replace the location from a Manchester Car park to a crowded Delhi car park or a Mumbai market, our guess is as good as yours, signal jamming thieves can strike anywhere. So our advice to you would be to go the old school way, manually lock your cars as much as possible. Why leave an open invitation for a thief?

Here's a video uploaded on Facebook 

Have you thought of a possible solution to this problem. Do share it with us.