Modern electronic technologies such as GPS and cell phones are wonderfully convenient. But they're also irresistible targets for thieves.
GPS devices are now the number one item being stolen from motor vehicles. You might think that thieves might simply fence your GPS at a local pawnbroker. That's often the case, but a more sophisticated thief will do much more than that.
Consider what happened in one recent case. A couple went to a football game to cheer on their favorite team. While they were there, a thief broke into their vehicle and stole their GPS—and their garage door remote control. When they returned home, their house was ransacked. Everything in the home worth more than a few dollars that could easily be carried out the door was missing.
The MO of the theft was simplicity itself. The thief simply looked up the couple's home address on the GPS and let the system guide him there. Then he used the garage door opener to gain access to it. He knew the couple probably wouldn't return home until after the game ended. That made him reasonably confident he had at least an hour or two to find any valuables in the home and remove them.
How could the couple have prevented the theft? They could have omitted their home address from the GPS, or simply taken it with them to the game. They could also have installed a home alarm system. Even locking the door from the garage into the home would have been a deterrent.
Information you program into a cell phone poses another security threat. In one case I recently read about, a thief snatched a woman's handbag as she was walking down the street. The handbag contained her cell phone. She called her husband from a cell phone to let him know of the theft.
He informed her that a few minutes before she called, he'd received a text message from her cell phone asking for the PIN to their local bank account. He had replied with the PIN.
They immediately contacted the bank, only to find that all the money in the account had been withdrawn. The thief had perused the contacts list in the cell phone and sent a text message to the contact labeled "Hubby."
Several precautions could have prevented this theft. First, never disclose the relationship between you and the persons on your cell phone contact list. Second, never respond to a text message asking for confidential information without confirming that the message came from the person you believe sent it. Third, limit the amount of money you can withdraw at one time from your bank account at an ATM. A few hundred dollars per day should be sufficient.
Finally, keep in mind that if you're ever arrested, in most states, police can confiscate your cell phone and inspect its entire contents, without a warrant. Don't keep anything remotely incriminating in it. Delete suggestive text messages, naked photos, or anything else that a prudish officer might find offensive, or try to use against you.
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Nestmann
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