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.
That sort of implies that there was some river of theft intent that they were keeping dammed up.
Which, could be the case, or it could be that announcing the policy change was the equivalent of announcing your upcoming month-long backpacking tour on Facebook after posting your address and photos of most of your valuables.
(It might be less declaring open season on theft, than a perceived increase in vulnerability triggering a surge in attempts to exploit it, more of which succeed than usual due to some actual increase in the odds of successful theft, complicated by the additional security risk posed by the confusion associated with a major policy change.)
You'd really need to dig into the surrounding data to find out which model is valid and in what proportions.
The "background checks" were probably excluding a lot of low-hanging fruit, like attempts at creating accounts in fake names with stolen credit card details.
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?
real background checks tied to the real person. without background check, then you can't tell if someone used a stolen credit card or if it's the real person.
> 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.
No, it isn't “damning evidence”, it's at best a suggestive indication which is easily consistent with other alternatives.
In fact, there is extremely compelling evidence that the old background check policy was not what was protecting them in the article: “By midweek the company suspended service in Chicago altogether, an acknowledgment that it couldn’t figure out how to distinguish legitimate customers from the group of thieves.” The obvious first guess of how to distinguish legitimate customers from thieves would be exactly the method they had been using right before the event that has supposedly prevented similar evebts—suspend every new account that was checked until they agree to a background check and it is completed and, if the old method was really working, everything would be fine. This is so obvious that if they just threw up their hands and couldn't figure it out, it means either they didn't believe the system was doing it or they didn't believe the problem in Chicago represented a general problem that should be protected against, just a local aberration; either way, it doesn't really seem consistent with the idea that even they believe there is some widespread general problem that the background checks were preventing.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Why should the police respond when you're being clearly negligent. It's not societies problem you car was stolen, it's your own stupid fault in this case.
As we learned in another thread here on HN (some photo equipment sharing site), this is a case of 'voluntary parting' in which the cars weren't necessarily stolen, they were obtained fraudulently, which apparently is a civil matter.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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
>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,
Sorry, but stealing and robbing is not something clever in this case.
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
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...
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.
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 ?
It's not sharing, but the term sort of makes sense because they're competing with the actual sharing companies like uber more than they're competing with rental companies.
You can rent a car2go for an hour to do a big grocery run, that's not economical or practical with avis.
The premise I think is that you're "sharing" the ownership of the car with your neighbors and fellow users. So instead of a model where each person owns their own car, these cars are "shared" between various drivers.
Presumably there's an implied distinction between this model, where people share ownership of their primary car, and the typical rental car model, where people are presumed to be traveling or otherwise renting the car to supplement their existing car ownership.
Not saying it's some brilliant insight, but there is an internal logic to the use of the term.
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.
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.
[+] [-] jacurtis|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gervu|6 years ago|reply
Which, could be the case, or it could be that announcing the policy change was the equivalent of announcing your upcoming month-long backpacking tour on Facebook after posting your address and photos of most of your valuables.
(It might be less declaring open season on theft, than a perceived increase in vulnerability triggering a surge in attempts to exploit it, more of which succeed than usual due to some actual increase in the odds of successful theft, complicated by the additional security risk posed by the confusion associated with a major policy change.)
You'd really need to dig into the surrounding data to find out which model is valid and in what proportions.
[+] [-] caf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sytelus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] segmondy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|6 years ago|reply
No, it isn't “damning evidence”, it's at best a suggestive indication which is easily consistent with other alternatives.
In fact, there is extremely compelling evidence that the old background check policy was not what was protecting them in the article: “By midweek the company suspended service in Chicago altogether, an acknowledgment that it couldn’t figure out how to distinguish legitimate customers from the group of thieves.” The obvious first guess of how to distinguish legitimate customers from thieves would be exactly the method they had been using right before the event that has supposedly prevented similar evebts—suspend every new account that was checked until they agree to a background check and it is completed and, if the old method was really working, everything would be fine. This is so obvious that if they just threw up their hands and couldn't figure it out, it means either they didn't believe the system was doing it or they didn't believe the problem in Chicago represented a general problem that should be protected against, just a local aberration; either way, it doesn't really seem consistent with the idea that even they believe there is some widespread general problem that the background checks were preventing.
[+] [-] dvdbloc|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ryanlol|6 years ago|reply
I don't see anything here that would exclude coincidence.
[+] [-] excar2gothrow|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edraferi|6 years ago|reply
https://truepic.com/
[+] [-] mc32|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] orthoxerox|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] empath75|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icelancer|6 years ago|reply
This happened in Chicago. Police response times are... more than a little slow.
[+] [-] nabnob|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linuxftw|6 years ago|reply
As we learned in another thread here on HN (some photo equipment sharing site), this is a case of 'voluntary parting' in which the cars weren't necessarily stolen, they were obtained fraudulently, which apparently is a civil matter.
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
Simply shield the electronics from being able to emit. Then deal with it at a later point
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nneonneo|6 years ago|reply
I do wonder what their rates of theft are here...
[+] [-] cerberusss|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mohoromitch|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thinkloop|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hsbaut76|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fins|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supernova87a|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] mgramsey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IvanDraga|6 years ago|reply
Sorry, but stealing and robbing is not something clever in this case.
[+] [-] neonate|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chance_state|6 years ago|reply
None of the links ever work for me, but it seems that I can access it anywhere but my home network.
[+] [-] sschueller|6 years ago|reply
22.7k vehicles were stolen in 2018 in Chicago (metropolitan statistical area) alone. That seems like a huge number.
[+] [-] broahmed|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AtomicOrbital|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masenf|6 years ago|reply
Article doesn't report problems in other cities...
[+] [-] fencepost|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|6 years ago|reply
You can rent a car2go for an hour to do a big grocery run, that's not economical or practical with avis.
[+] [-] CPLX|6 years ago|reply
Presumably there's an implied distinction between this model, where people share ownership of their primary car, and the typical rental car model, where people are presumed to be traveling or otherwise renting the car to supplement their existing car ownership.
Not saying it's some brilliant insight, but there is an internal logic to the use of the term.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] andy_ppp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baybal2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwildeboer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IloveHN84|6 years ago|reply