Thieves Who Stole GPS Tracking Devices Were Caught Within Hours (nbc4i.com) 95
"These devices kind of look like cell phone chargers, so they probably thought they had some kind of street value," said the co-founder of Roambee, a shipping-monitoring services company, in a classic story shared by a reader:
[He's] talking about the hundred or so GPS tracking devices that were stolen recently from the company's Dela Cruz Avenue labs. "The moment we realized they had a box of trackers, we went into recovery mode," Subramanian said. "We notified the police and equipped them to track the devices, and in about 5 or 6 hours, it was done...." It wasn't long before the police were using Roambee's software to locate the devices and the thieves. "We were able to pinpoint the location of these trackers to a warehouse in Union City and two of the devices had gone mobile, and the thieves were driving around with them in the East Bay," Subramanian said. The two men were arrested in Alameda.
Before stealing 100 battery-powered GPS-tracking devices, one of the thieves also grabbed a beer out of the office refrigerator -- and cut themselves -- leaving behind both fingerprints and an actual blood sample.
The company is now using this 2017 episode as an instructive case study. "Roambee wirelessly synced with all 100 devices and remotely set them to stealth mode (so there's no blinking LEDs to alert the thieves) and then switched the location reporting intervals from once every hour to once every minute."
Before stealing 100 battery-powered GPS-tracking devices, one of the thieves also grabbed a beer out of the office refrigerator -- and cut themselves -- leaving behind both fingerprints and an actual blood sample.
The company is now using this 2017 episode as an instructive case study. "Roambee wirelessly synced with all 100 devices and remotely set them to stealth mode (so there's no blinking LEDs to alert the thieves) and then switched the location reporting intervals from once every hour to once every minute."
Re: I *LOVE* TRUMP! (Score:5, Funny)
"Before stealing 100 battery-powered GPS-tracking devices, one of the thieves also grabbed a beer out of the office refrigerator -- and cut themselves -- leaving behind both fingerprints"
BOTH fingerprints? I'm envisioning lobster-like theives here. Are we sure they weren't exposed to mutagens whilst raiding other laboratories!?
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What's the deal with 'murkins being so stupid, is it GMO? Excessive growth hormones in food? Narcissism? Greed? Cultural bankruptcy? Puritanism?
I'm not sure if you are listing causes or evidence.
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Yes, cutting "and an actual blood sample" off from "leaving behind both fingerprints and an actual blood sample" creates a potentially hilarious grammar error that was not present in TFS.
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Wait, wait, are you saying that AND isn't optional?!? Z0mg! Who knew?!
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Lobster don't have fingerprints. Ha! Hilarious...
Why not Zoidberg?
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That shouldn't have consumed six hours, though. They probably shot someone at random and had to fill out paperwork.
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Re:I always suspected this (Score:5, Insightful)
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In this case, I'm not sure what they would need a warrant for since they didn't plant the trackers on the suspects and the victim was more than willing to turn over the information needed to read the tracker location.
As for not shooting people and such, that is a matter of appropriate tactical training and takes no longer than doing it the wrong way. Either way, no warrant is required to do it the right way.
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No cops should act carefully and preserve life and process. That does not mean they should be slow. The rest of the world has no problem with fast cops executing the people who called for help in the first place.
This slashvertisement is convenient (Score:5, Insightful)
I want to buy a cellular-based tracker with its own GPS module and battery. There are absolutely loads of them on the market. I do not intend to use central monitoring, and instead I would like the location SMS to go directly to my Android phone, where I would like to have an app which plots it on a map. Ideally, the app would allow me to change the reporting frequency. Can anyone suggest a good one, preferably from a company which doesn't astroturf?
Re:This slashvertisement is convenient (Score:4, Informative)
If your use is non-commercial, you can use APRS [wikipedia.org]. There are Android apps for cell phones, and numerous devices, some tiny, suitable for embedding. You'll need a ham radio license, which for this community should be little more than a minor formality.
The network to receive and map positions is global. See:
https://aprs.fi/ [aprs.fi]
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If your use is non-commercial, you can use APRS [wikipedia.org]. There are Android apps for cell phones, and numerous devices, some tiny, suitable for embedding. You'll need a ham radio license, which for this community should be little more than a minor formality.
The network to receive and map positions is global. See:
https://aprs.fi/ [aprs.fi]
APRS is a very nice tracking system. I've used it in the past to send location of race participants - such as a bicycle race, where I would travel behind the last rider, and then report the location automatically. You need digipeaters to insure good coverage, which can be set up portably. But worth the effort. They have ground truth of the last riders, the meal people can get an idea of arrival times of the last group, and if an ambulance or sag wagon is needed, an actual location is right there in lat-lon
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The flaw in the astroturf ad is that these devices were charged, switched on and had a sim fitted. Right.
That's what really had me baffled, a whole case of them already powered on? It seems like they would have maybe had a sim preinstalled on assembly, but no way would power have been enabled until delivery. To give them the benefit of the doubt maybe the case was about to be handed over to a customer...
Most decent criminals these days carry a frequency counter with detects all transmitting devices
So here
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Technically receivers cannot be detected - unless they have a leaky mixer or downconverter stage, or if a SDR. a pickup in CPU activity may give a sign. This is how police used to find out if you had a radar detector fitted, for superhets.
If money is less of an issue, security services use a junction detector for inactive devices or salted with diode junctions.
Or a spectrum analyzer, which can also decode packets, and set to concentrate on local signals.
I find if you place your mobile on top of an AM radio,
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Technically receivers cannot be detected - unless they have a leaky mixer or downconverter stage, or if a SDR. a pickup in CPU activity may give a sign. This is how police used to find out if you had a radar detector fitted, for superhets.
Leakage of the local oscillator frequency from the receiver can almost always be detected even at a short distance. A couple of times I did fox hunts of low duty cycle transmitters where I checked and found the local oscillator frequency.
The RF amplifier is often added just to suppress local oscillator leakage but it only has to do so to meet FCC part 15 requirements.
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Most consumer devices are "powered on" from either the moment the battery pack is powered on, or when they're plugged in. They have two states; full power, and low power. Neither of those states is unpowered.
If it has a battery and you didn't even open the case, you definitely have never seen it "off" unless it no longer is functioning. Typically that happens when the device isn't charged and the battery low voltage protection level is reached. Then it requires a simple fix involving a bench power supply, b
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Decent criminals don't get caught!
These guys are the poster boys for Dumbass enhancement statutes and forced sterilization. Keep them out of the gene pool.
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Since you don't want astroturf I won't offer to answer your question, but I will point out that you'll need to learn to do it yourself, and then get far enough into the project to hit some sort of wall, before getting useful answers online. Up to that point, it is all going to be artificial turf. And when you get there; stack overflow if you're doing it on a full system like rpi, stack exchange if you're doing it on a microcontroller. (micros go into the EE section rather than programming)
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Buy a cheap $30 thing off Amazon. Stick a pay-as-you-go SIM in it, with data.
The last one I bought (TK103 - cheap chinese stuff) has GPS and GSM, an internal battery, is just a black-box you fit anywhere in your car, and comes with a bunch of relays for cutting off fuel pumps etc. (if you're into that), a mic for recording the in-car conversation, a button to press to send an emergency text (with location) to a pre-set number, etc.
You just send it text commands from your phone and you can track it (live is
Found him! (Score:5, Funny)
"I never thought they would find me", said Waldo, after stealing 100 already activated GPS's. "People have been looking for this guy for years", said the FBI.
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And Carmen San Diego was smart not to steal them! ;)
Staged (Score:3)
It would be a shame (Score:4, Insightful)
if Amazon didn't use this kind of thing for their lazy thieving Logistics "delivery service"
Nice ad for Roambee (Score:5, Informative)
Trouble is, I find astroturfing despicable.
So, if anybody is interested in GPS devices that phone home and let you recover your property with or without a central server, I wholeheartedly recommend Mictrack [mictrack.com] products: I personally use the MT600 in all my vehicles with great success, and despite being a Chinese company, their customer support is top-notch. And believe me, I've tried a lot of GPS trackers before settling on this company.
There. I'm hoping this will provide some advertising balance...
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That product is listed on Amazon for $150, which is a bit spendy. For that kind of money, I could just buy a cellphone. The listing also says something about a server which is free for a year, then costs $5/yr. The cost is not a problem, but I don't want to be dependent on someone else's servers. Can I just send the data to my own server, or is it locked to theirs?
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You can use your own server - and on a dynamically-allocated IP too. That too is a major selling point for me, and why I chose the Mictrack devices. I use a plain-jane Traccar server which recognizes the Mictrack protocol just fine.
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Nice "news" (Score:5, Insightful)
Read the date on this one: June 7 2017.
C'MON SLASHDOT EDITORS?!? (Score:2)
Dear Slashdot:
We are used to getting week old news that you scraped from other news sites days after they left the headlines.
This story is more than a year old. FROM THE OP.
If you want to push the boundaries of credibility, at least push the limits. Here are a few sample headlines you might try.
"NEW PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE COBOL POISED TO SWEEP THE DEVELOPMENT INDUSTRY"
Or if you want to add a slashdot editor stamp of approval to that headline with some grammatical mistakes, you could try this:
"NEW PROGRAMMIN
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Yea, sure, Don Draper...
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Important unanswered question (Score:3)
How did the police find and arrest these guys without unfettered, complete access to the unencrypted content of their cell phones?
try same thing with laptop/phone (Score:2)
Cops will tell you there arent any units available at the moment, even if you have a live location of a thief.
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They'll also need to wait for a warrant.
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There are dumb criminals... (Score:2)
... and then there are criminals like these.
I guarantee FARK is having a field day with this one, assuming they're aware of it.