Photo: virtuul.com
Thieves are getting on with the times: as more car-share companies are expanding their fleet of vehicles, thieves have started using their services to have hard-to-track-down getaway cars. Why bring your own car to work when you can rent it, right?
The latest incident of the kind occurred on Memorial Day weekend in Renton, Washington. Police here and the PD from nearby Bellevue confirm for Kiro7 that the number of car-share vehicles used for crime is on the rise.
The reason for that is simple – and easily understandable: rented cars are harder to tell apart from one another and, if you’re careful enough about thepaper electronic trail, you’re harder to track down. As is the case with whoever went through people’s mailboxes in Renton, stealing mail and packages.
In this case, the car used was one of the hundreds LimePods Fiat 500 available in the area. Motion-triggered surveillance cameras picked up the exact moment the car went back and forth on the street, stopping at people’s mailboxes long enough for the driver to leave them empty.
Police are still looking for whoever was behind the wheel, even though, in theory at least, they should be easily tracked down. To unlock a car, you have to have a driver’s license and credit card details on file with Lime, and the car is fitted with GPS. Only afterwards – and after paying the fee – you can unlock the car and drive off with it.
For whatever reason, police are still trying to track down the suspects in the latest string of incidents, including one in Bellevue. But in this area at least, it looks like thieves are making the most of car-share services.
“Suspects have been renting Lime Cars to facilitate porch thefts and burglaries in the Northtown area. Several thefts have occurred in the past week,” the Bellevue Police Blotter reads, as cited by the media outlet.
The reason for that is simple – and easily understandable: rented cars are harder to tell apart from one another and, if you’re careful enough about the
In this case, the car used was one of the hundreds LimePods Fiat 500 available in the area. Motion-triggered surveillance cameras picked up the exact moment the car went back and forth on the street, stopping at people’s mailboxes long enough for the driver to leave them empty.
Police are still looking for whoever was behind the wheel, even though, in theory at least, they should be easily tracked down. To unlock a car, you have to have a driver’s license and credit card details on file with Lime, and the car is fitted with GPS. Only afterwards – and after paying the fee – you can unlock the car and drive off with it.
For whatever reason, police are still trying to track down the suspects in the latest string of incidents, including one in Bellevue. But in this area at least, it looks like thieves are making the most of car-share services.
“Suspects have been renting Lime Cars to facilitate porch thefts and burglaries in the Northtown area. Several thefts have occurred in the past week,” the Bellevue Police Blotter reads, as cited by the media outlet.
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