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Dealer-Installed GPS Tracker Leads To Kidnapper's Arrest in Maryland
New submitter FarnsworthG writes A news story about the capture of a kidnapper mentioned that he was caught because a car dealer had secretly installed a GPS device on his car. Apparently this is becoming common for "buy-here-pay-here" dealers. The devices are sold by Spireon, among many others. Raises interesting privacy questions. FarnsworthG also points to this Jalopnik article condemning the practice, when it's done without disclosure. The kidnapping itself, of Philadelphia nursing assistant Carlesha Freeland-Gaither, was captured by a surveillance camera.
Sounds like a great idea but the left complains. They support women being raped and killed.
I think this is a pretty shady practice, don't get me wrong, but it's not quite as "secretly" as the summary made it out to be.
In the article is the statement:
"McDougall said the customer is required to sign a form acknowledging there's a GPS unit in their vehicle. If the car buyer tries to remove it, the dealer is alerted."
Thus it seems likely maybe the perp was informed about the tracking device.
Now the task is to find a hole deep and dark enough for this vile predator.
The world will kill you unless you let everyone track everything you do every day! Repent!
And if we allowed the police to search our homes, cars, and persons on a daily basis, a whole lot more criminals would be caught. I'm glad a scumbag was caught before something worse happened, but let's not pretend that one positive outcome justifies personal tracking, stops-and-frisks, and other countless increases in violations of unreasonable search and seizure in our society.
There's always some child molester caught/charged or person saved by some new'' technology the government would like to see on 'everyone; this is pushed/promoted and used to mitigate the privacy issues.
So whaqt's coming/here already? trackers in every pocket(cell phone), remote shutdown/control of all vehicles(coming 2017?).
etc etc etc
...somewhere in the contract paperwork where you agree to allow them to do it until you pay off the car.
the dangers of the police state pale in comparison to what 40 years of declining wages and eroding worker's rights have done. When it comes right down to it money is freedom. The rich don't worry about stop and frisk....
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Just think of all of the crimes we can prevent or solve, if we place the entire American population in prison camps, with 24/7 monitoring, restricted movement, restricted access to information, and public displays of punitive punishment.
Why is this not being done? Won't someone please think of the children?
North Korea has show the world the way to the future, with our increasing plutocratic societies in the west with decreasing human rights.
Everybody line up to suck my cock.
If you want the rights of ownership, buy the freaking car or have a non-"dog-shit" credit score and be able to get a loan from a bank.
This guy DID NOT own the car.
He was making payments on it with a "Buy Here, Pay Here" lender --- these people finance high risk loans no one else will do and have restrictive terms as a result.
There was so offense against anyone's rights here.
He had horrific credit so had to do "Buy Here, Pay Here" --- which is better than "having to hoof it".
If you want full property rights, you need to actually purchase the property.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
That does not make it a good idea. That this makes the news just shows how exceedingly rare such a "success" is. With sane laws, a practice like this would send the dealer to prison for a few years.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
For those of us who don't know, or those of us who aren't in the states if this is a USA thing, what's a "buy-here-pay-here" dealer?
How is it different from any other dealer?
Surveillance works. Too bad for you geeks, the Real World likes security. Grow up and join the adults who are perfectly willing to give up some of that oh-so-sacred "privacy" in order to be safer.
The suspect knew the vehicle was being tracked as he signed a document stating that fact. He just forgot that fact when he kidnapped someone.
I used to work for a company that tracked vehicle fleets. Every driver knew his truck was tracked yet a driver was convicted of murder when his truck was logged near the site where the ex-girlfriend was last seen and near where her body was found. Another vehicle, different client, was noticed stopped far from it's route in a bad neighborhood. The police were sent and the driver was found selling product out of the back of the vehicle.
People are stupid.
PS. I have no problem with installing the tracker with the knowledge of the purchaser.
Because every article I have seen mentions nothing about a warrant.
The life of the victim trumps the need for a warrant.
In law enforcement and law, hot pursuit (also known as fresh or immediate pursuit) [is] the urgent and direct pursuit of a criminal suspect by law enforcement officers. Particularly under common law, such a situation grants the officers powers they otherwise would not have.
In 1939, Glanville Williams described hot pursuit as a legal fiction that treated an arrest as made at the moment when the chase began rather than when it ended, since a criminal should not be able to benefit from an attempt to escape.
Hot pursuit
A month before Delvin Barnes grabbed a woman off a street in Philadelphia, he hit a [sixteen year old teenager] with a shovel in Virginia and stuffed her into the trunk of a car, authorities say.
She was taken to the home of the suspect's parents in Charles City County, where she was sexually abused, authorities said.
While there, the suspect showed the teen pictures of other girls he said he had abducted, authorities said.
Two days later, the suspect allegedly brought the then-naked girl into the backyard, poured bleach and gasoline on her, burned her clothes and dug a hole.
When he was briefly distracted, the girl fled into the woods. Two miles away, she stumbled onto a business, and employees brought her inside.
Barnes is charged with abduction, forcible rape and malicious wounding with a chemical, among other charges.
"I just want to kill him -- just want to kill him," the girl's mother told CNN affiliate WWBT.
The mother says Barnes allegedly told her daughter that he was going to kill her.
After all that her daughter suffered, the mother said, she ''didn't look like herself'' She called it ''devastating.''
Police: Philadelphia suspect also seized woman in Virginia
It's already offered as an option for those who are willing to sacrifice their privacy for access to preferential pricing.
Rates go down when insurance companies can reduce risk. The ability to monitor things like driving speeds can do that.
Mandatory compliance is probably a decade or so away.
Who would mandate this compliance? The state can not as it would be considered unreasonable search as has been shown in a few recent court cases. Some insurance companies may but there will always be at least one who will not. There will always be a customer base who prioritize privacy over rates and there will always be at least one company to serve that client base.
In europe even if you are financing thru the dealer, it is the financing ONLY which is done. The car is still your belonging. Financing does not mean you are not the owner. Financing only means that somebody loan money to you, maybe with the car as collateral. But the ownership of the car is still yours, with all the privcy implication of not being followed by GPS.
But the point is, I see a whole generation of potential Sith Lords emerging, all getting their crack in hardware by building a scanner to find the tracker installed by the Jabba-the-Car-hut dealerships.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The media conveniently leaves certain things out of its reports. The use of these tracking devices are disclosed in the terms and conditions that people sign without reading. Honestly, this a good use of technology to give people who have fallen on hard times, access to a car. Should we pass a law simply because people will sign a document without reading it?
What? A black woman was abducted and Jesse and Al were silent?
Can someone explain that to me?
It is a common technique among used car dealers who are selling to someone with bad or poor credit. It is intended to aid in recovery and repossession. The purchaser is aware it is installed. And, it is removed when the vehicle is paid off.
The device our company made and sold ( when I worked for them) could be activated with a court order. Activation was not in the hands of the car dealership because of the privacy implications.
Here's a typical disclosure that a GPS will be installed in the car. Not exactly fine print or any trickery involved. Police had plenty of reason to suspect the driver of that car had committed a serious crime.
You license them until the vendor decides you don't anymore.
How they work is the are hidden under the dash, usually with a Y cable running off the OBD2 port just for the power feed. Just plug and play, about a 5 minute install. The devices cost around $100. For a bit more you can get one with a battery back-up, so if the car is left abandoned, it will signal the dealer the vehicle battery is now dead and here is the location. usually once a day (often 23 hours apart) they send their location, so after a few weeks you know the car's typical location day and night.
Many times the customer is not told at all. It's still a grey area if this is legal since the car is property of the dealer. Once the car is paid off the device (and monthly service charge) is disabled. If the customer is told, it's not made clear what the device is used for. There will be a line in the sales contract saying - your vehicle may include an anti-theft device - That's all. What's not said is the anti-theft device only benefits the dealer, and will be used so the repoman can come pick up your car.
In the dealer defense, buy here - pay here customers are the bottom of the credit barrel and no big name dealer would touch them. They will have 1 or more repossessions, maybe 5 or more accounts in collections, a bunch more of charged off accounts they just gave up on and maybe an eviction from their last apartment. So the dealer knows they don't like to pay for things they buy. There is only about a 50% chance they will actually pay off the car they are buying.
I bought a salvaged car (04 grand prix) and whoever the previous owner was, they apparently had an arrangement similar to this guy's. While putting a new stereo in, I found a tracking device inner the dash on the driver's side, kind of behind where the A/C controls where. It was around the size of a pack of cigarettes, had LEDs for GPS and TX/RX if memory serves, it also had a SIM card, which I removed immediately. I looked it up by googling the FCC id number and found the company's web site. I was kind of spooked when I found it until I realized it was probably put there by a dealer catering to high credit risk customers, or perhaps it was a used rental car or something. I eventually just cut the wires and pulled the whole thing out.
The detailed News Articles on this event pointed out that purchaser of the vehicle was informed of the presence of the GPS tracking device. It was apparently a condition of the loan because of the background of the purchaser. I agree that installing such a device without knowledge is bad, but this person was informed.