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Tom Cobb · Site Admin

Thefts of GPS Devices Soar

By Brian Bergstein
Associated Press

BOSTON - Valuable stuff has been swiped from vehicles forever, but the theft of portable satellite-navigation units is dramatically increasing in many places. Crime analysts blame an alignment of economic and technological factors, while victims lament that the units, which cost several hundred dollars, are rarely recovered or replenished by insurance.

In Maryland's Montgomery County, outside Washington, D.C., 620 portable navigation devices were filched from cars through Aug. 31, blowing past the 189 taken in all of 2006. In downtown Philadelphia, GPS thefts jumped to 88 in the first eight months of the year from 33 in the same period of 2006.

Police say the perpetrators are getting more brazen, stealing units in busy places during the day.

Even people who take their GPS gadgets off their dashboards when they leave their vehicles are returning to find windows smashed, as thieves gamble that an empty plastic cradle suction-cupped to the windshield means a GPS unit has been hidden somewhere in the car.

It gets worse. Taking the plastic cradle off the windshield might not be enough if the suction cup leaves a ring of film on the glass. That marking alone can signal a thief.

That's why police in Montgomery County, Md., handed out 1,200 microfiber cloths at a fair last month and told motorists to clear suction-cup rings. Cops in Alexandria, Va., advise using moist towelettes.

Unless the mark is wiped away, a thief is going to bet the GPS unit is in the car, said Cpl. Jimmy Robinson, a spokesman for Montgomery County police.

Police say several issues have come together to make this a lucrative crime.

The units - which gather real-time location information from global positioning satellites and display that on digital maps - have come down in price enough to become relatively popular in higher-rent districts.

Yet the devices are still not ubiquitous. There is a huge market of people to be enticed by cheaper-than-retail GPS units on sale in pawn shops or online, where thieves love to fence their finds.

No monthly subscriptions are required to keep the devices running. Plus, there's the somewhat ironic twist that, even though these units are in touch with satellites all the time, they're just receivers, so their location can't be tracked for easy recovery.

Some GPS makers have given police free units for use in sting operations, but they say there's little else they can do, other than advise users to take precautions.

Users should etch a marking into the devices and write down their serial numbers, then report those to police and the manufacturer if a theft happens.

GPS owners also can activate a password mode, in which a four-digit personal identification number is required to run the unit outside a designated "safe location," such as the customer's home. Yet the manufacturers say that protection is used by a tiny percentage of customers. At best, it could just give a victim the satisfaction of knowing the device was rendered useless to anyone else.

(But that's not even necessarily true. Most devices allow unlimited attempts to get the PIN right; a patient thief could guess all 10,000 combinations and unlock his treasure.)

No wonder, then, that most GPS victims just plunge right back in for a new one.

Compounding the frustration is the fact that auto insurance generally doesn't cover portable, personal possessions in cars. Homeowners or rental insurance might, but rarely is the gadget's value much beyond the policy's deductible limit.

There could be some hope if you bought your unit with a credit card that will cover theft of the product in the first 60 days or so, said John Townsend II, a manager of public and government affairs for the American Automobile Association's mid-Atlantic district.