According to Malaysia’s Petaling Jaya Deputy Chief Superintendent Abdul Rahman Ibrahim (mouthful), Malaysian thieves are getting smarter. For the past seven months this year, they have used an unknown gadget to track down and break into 255 cars that have laptops hidden in them.
“The thieves operate in pairs. They smash car windows and break into car boots. Most of these cases occur from Mondays to Fridays between noon and 3pm, and 5pm and 7pm. They wait for their victims to park their cars and go for their meals before striking,” he said.
It totally escapes me as to how the thieves could possibly detect laptops that are not even switched on. Perhaps the thieves were just too lucky.
August 25th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
I was told by a police officer in Montreal, Quebec that thieves use Lithium detectors to detect batteries in variour electronics. My father’s laptop was hidden in his van with tinted windows, yet it was busted into and the laptop was stolen.
August 25th, 2006 at 8:29 pm
[Comment ID #6789 Will Be Quoted Here]
It seems like the Malaysian and Canadian Police are at the forefront of fighting hight tech criminals.
August 25th, 2006 at 9:30 pm
My best guess to this ingenious act would be the thieves had somehow manage to utilize a type of device capable of tracking a signal being transmitted from the notebook. Normally, if the user had only just close the lid of the notebook and if the function is being set to ‘do nothing’ the thives could just capture that signal and just locate the position of the notebook whereabouts.
August 25th, 2006 at 11:42 pm
i’d never leave my laptop in the car. NEVER.
August 27th, 2006 at 5:20 am
This happened to a collegue of mine in London only last week. Loads of other cars were in the car-park… none of them were broken into. His laptop was DEFINATELY off!! The laptop was not bluetooth-equipped.
I don’t think it’s related to lithium… perhaps the wi-fi antenna in the laptop’s lid is always a certain length, and can be made to react to a specific radio frequency?? Or maybe the magnets in the hard-disk can react to VERY sensitive magnetic equipment (but surely the car’s chassis would block most RF/Magnetic signals due to it’s metallic construction, like a faraday cage?)
Steve
August 29th, 2006 at 9:20 pm
I am not a techie type but the lithium theory sounds very interesting