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MASTER Anti-Theft Program in the UK Is Really Working

With 26,000 motorcycles stolen in the UK each year, it’s easy to understand that bike owners and insurers are having nightmare when it comes to paying for stolen goods, and the Police is definitely not happy to spend money, time and people looking for traces of these stolen vehicles. However, in March 2013, we reported about MASTER, an anti-theft program implemented by the Datatag with the help of local authorities and dealers. Well, it looks like MASTER works, as recent data surfaced my masmoto indicate that theft of Datatag-registered bikes went down, while recovery went up.
Gunpoint bike thief 1 photo
Datatag’s MASTER acronym stands for Motorcycle and Scooter Tagged Equipment Register, a common database to which the owners and the police have 24/7 real-time access. The database contains information on each bike, such as make, model, year of manufacture, VIN, owner and previous owners, color, color changes over time and more. Each of the registered bikes receive a set of safety elements which make identifying a bike or part of the bike really easy.

RFID transponders, stealth etching and microscopic info dots are placed all over the bike and its parts, making even dismantled bikes traceable. Warning, tamper-proof stickers warn the potential thieves about the fact that the bike is registered in the MASTER system, thus getting rid of it will be difficult and even when torn apart, almost all of its main parts will provide enough ID data to make backtracking easy.

Reportedly, only 403 of the 52,687 bikes registered with MASTER in the past 18 months have been stolen, a number 4 times smaller than that of non-registered motorcycles. This makes for around 0.76% of the total of MASTER-registered bikes. Even more, 37% of these bikes have been traced and recovered, with the thieves found and sent to prison. Datatag apparently said that thieves will most likely start to avoid bikes with MASTER stickers as the word spreads out about the decreasing chances of getting away with them. However, this will most likely put extra pressure on bikes outside the system.

So far a service reserved for UK riders, MASTER can be implemented in all older bikes, as well, for a price around €115 ($155). Hopefully this goes EU-wide. Follow the link for more on the Datatag MASTER program.
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