Stopping car theft: Data port covers, steering wheel locks and a use for your old music CDs

Would you tattoo your social insurance number across your forehead?

Car manufacturers do.

Look under the front left corner of any car windshield and you will see the 17-digit vehicle identification number (VIN) that tells you a great deal about your vehicle, including help on how to steal it. Heck, the newest cars have a QR code beside the digits - easy for a portable scanner to read.

Since my Toyota Highlander was stolen and later discovered in a shipping container bound for Dubai I have been on a journey into the murky world of car theft. One of my tour guides was Rhonda from Mississauga. She emailed me the morning we published a story on the theft of a Scarborough man's Honda CR-V.

You can add my car to your list of people with stolen cars," Rhonda (the Star agreed not to publish her full name) wrote in her email, attaching video of an early morning theft. This is my Lexus 350RX stolen from my driveway this morning in Mississauga."

Video captured from a camera at her home shows a thief wearing a hoodie arrive at 4:15 a.m., take out a device (possibly an iPhone or some type of scanner) and scan the VIN. Then, for 30 minutes, he works away on the vehicle, even getting help from another one of his crew. Then they drive off in Rhonda's SUV.

Police call these the runners." Paid as little as $200 per theft. Rhonda's car is an outlier. Normally it would have been on a shipping container headed overseas within a few days. One detective told me vehicles are in such demand in Africa and the Middle East (due to a shortage in the car supply chain brought on by the pandemic) that two SUVs with Ontario plates were discovered overseas - each driven by a local police official.

I've learned that there are many ways to steal a car these days.

The relay attack" is still popular with some thieves. That's when a thief uses a device to pick up the electronic signature of your smart key (fob), then copy that signature to a blank smart key. Police say that in malls like Sherway in Etobicoke or Yorkdale in north Toronto, thieves skulk in the parking lot and wait for a shopper to get out, walk a few feet away, then lock their door with a smart key. That's when the thief copies the signal," one detective said. You would not know it until you come back and find your car gone."

York Region police recently found Apple AirTags were being used by thieves to tag" a car in a parking lot on busy shopping days. Then, later, using an app, the thief can determine where those cars are parked for the night. Police are warning drivers to do a walk around their car to check - but the tags could easily be obscured by snow or slush. One was found inside a trailer hitch on an SUV.

The Star reported Wednesday that vehicles like Rhonda's Lexus are in high demand. Rhonda's is a 2018. Insurance data shows that she had a six in 100 chance of that car being stolen, even though it was three years old. Police detectives investigating car theft say the Lexus has a particular issue that makes it very easy for a thief to pop" the door open with a screwdriver. Then, with specific proprietary information provided by the VIN-code scan, her thief simply hooked up a diagnostic tool to a port" under the dashboard, programmed new key fobs, and drove away.

Most of the videos the Star has seen, the thief does all of this in a few minutes. Rhonda's thief was slow, crouching down from time to time when a car passed.

It may not be the most elegant fix, but to prevent a thief from scanning your VIN, slide a music CD you no longer need (thanks to digital music) between the windshield and dashboard (I chose a Bruce Springsteen CD). Police have confirmed it is not an offence to cover your VIN - that it's an offence is an apocryphal story that, for all we know, was started by thieves.

Detective Greg Shrivell's auto squad team in Peel's 11 Division (Toronto police do not have dedicated squads but Peel and York do) have had some success in breaking up theft rings. Along the way, he's learned quite a bit about the lower rungs of this organized crime - nobody seems to be able to touch the higher echelon. Here's what happened in their most recent undercover project.

Late last year, he and his team started Project Kryptonite." The name came from their original focus on a rash of Lexus thefts and they wanted a name that would reference the target and what could be done about it - Superman, Lex Luthor, Kryptonite" he explains. The same thieves were also going after Toyota Highlanders and Honda CRVs.

Shrivell said an organized crime group" from Montreal was sending four-man teams to Toronto. They tracked two of them, watching from a distance for 24 hours. They followed these squads of runners" through Mississauga and Etobicoke. Runners would break into a car, then hook up a diagnostic tool (one popular brand is the X-Tool used by mechanics) and leave it for 20 minutes to download data from the car. Then the thieves would come back, and use the downloaded information to reprogram a dummy" key fob (the smart key that has replaced physical keys in most new cars). The runners then drive the cars to a cooling down" spot, and leave them for 24 hours or more to make sure the owner does not have a secret GPS tracking device. Then the cars are moved to their next location, to get them ready for transport by train to the port in Halifax.

Undercover officers followed some cars stolen in Toronto and Mississauga right into a container shipping location, and made arrests.

Another arrest came as a fluke. A neighbour reported a Lexus SUV sitting on a side street for a day. Police checked. It was stolen. Detectives watched it and a few hours later a car with Quebec plates drove by. The Lexus lights flashed on, an indication that a thief in the car wanted to make sure his reprogrammed smart key worked. When one runner got out of their scout car to drive the stolen car away, that's when we took them down," Shrivell said.

All of the Kryptonite charges remain before court. Shrivell said none of them are talking to police, who were hoping to get information on who they were working for. And none remain in custody as they await trial.

GTA auto detectives say that due to the backlog in the courts caused by the pandemic, crown attorneys are looking for quick guilty pleas. With any of these car thieves, expect little or no jail time," one detective said.

It's not just high-end SUVs that are being stolen.

Lee Carpenter, a retired hydro worker who lives in Port Elgin, drove down to Pearson International Airport with his wife this summer in their Ford F150. They were headed to Calgary for a family reunion. The Carpenters left their car in long term parking. When they returned from Calgary it was gone. Police checked video and told Carpenter his truck was one of several stolen, all spirited away by thieves who arrived in stolen cars, wearing masks (police have told the Star that is one way the pandemic has helped thieves - it's not unusual these days to see someone wearing a mask).

They even paid my parking chit to get out of the lot," Carpenter said. When he checked his Ford app after to look for clues he saw there was a tire pressure warning while he was away. His pickup truck has low air pressure sensors on the tires and police told him thieves likely removed the tires (disconnecting the sensors and triggering the app), and put them in the truck's cargo bed - lowering his Ford so that another vehicle could sit on top in a cargo container.

After the insurance settlement, Carpenter ended up with another Ford. Every night he runs a long chain through his wheel rims on the car and padlocks it to a cement post in his driveway. My friends think I am crazy," Carpenter says, but points out that three of his colleagues from his Bruce Nuclear plant days also had vehicles recently stolen.

If you do not want to chain your car or truck up, police and insurance provide the following tips:

• Purchase a steering wheel lock, such as The Club.

• Get a port blocker" which is a lock that attaches to the on-board diagnostic port under the dashboard. If a mechanic needs to get access for legitimate reasons, you can just unlock it.

• Keep your smart key fobs in a Faraday pouch or even a metal tin, as long as it blocks the electronic signature of the key fob. To check that it works, tuck your key fob into a pouch or can, walk up to your car and see if the door will open - if it doesn't you have blocked the signal.

• Not everyone has a garage but if you do, clean it out and park inside overnight.

• And when you are doing your house cleaning and wondering what to do with those old music CDs, use one to cover your VIN on the dashboard.

None of these items or tips are provided as part of a new or used car purchase by dealerships, and in the Star's survey of dealers and car companies we were not able to find any of them that made these anti-theft suggestions to new car owners.

Det. Shrivell at Peel said that while nothing is foolproof, the port blocker and other suggestions are helpful.

It slows them down. It's like The Club. We've had video where they look in, see The Club, and move on."

Kevin Donovan can be reached at kdonovan@thestar.ca or 416-312-3503