Anti-theft devices.

TacoTown · Nov 8, 2008

Within the last year my brothers Silverado, my friends Silverado and as of yesterday my friends F-150 has been stolen.

What kind of security devices are you using on your Taco?

Anything actually worth my while?

Tacoma02TRD · Nov 8, 2008

Lo jack seems to have a pretty solid record with this sort of thing. That's what I would recommend for solving this problem.

Packman73 · Nov 8, 2008

I have a Viper alarm and a pistol. If I hear the alarm, I grab my pistol.

shook0002 · Nov 8, 2008

Well since our trucks have a transponder key, If they want it they gotta tow it. If they gotta tow it theres nothing u can do. I can vouch for lojack though, when you get the hit and follow the arrows every cop around gets in on it, and your car gets recovered. The only thing better than Lojack is OnStar, they call it in in real time down to the exact address, lojack has to be followed by arrows and signal strength.

WilsonTheDog · Nov 8, 2008

I would start with an alarm made by the DEI family (Viper is one). Lo Jack is also a great idea. Like anything else, redundancy is best.

Other than that, can you park in a garage?

TicTacOma · Nov 8, 2008

LoJack and OnStar are good for RECOVERY. You need to prevent. If you're sleeping or at work and your truck gets jacked,It could be hours before you know it's gone. LoJack can help to get the body back.

Marioso · Nov 8, 2008

i hear onstar can keep ur car from turning on

TicTacOma · Nov 8, 2008

Just like a coded key?

Marioso · Nov 8, 2008

i saw it in the die hard movie the latest one they try to hot wire the car and the onstar came on and the kid was like oh my uncles dying and i left my keys at home some shit and then the lady turned on the car...maybe it was just the movie

4x4Runner · Nov 8, 2008

shook0002 said: ↑

Well since our trucks have a transponder key, If they want it they gotta tow it. If they gotta tow it theres nothing u can do. I can vouch for lojack though, when you get the hit and follow the arrows every cop around gets in on it, and your car gets recovered. The only thing better than Lojack is OnStar, they call it in in real time down to the exact address, lojack has to be followed by arrows and signal strength.
Click to expand...

That isn't entirely foolproof.

This is an article from Wired about the false sense of security with these keys.

Pinch My Ride

Ignition keys equipped with signal-emitting chips were supposed to put car thieves out of business. No such luck – but try telling that to your insurance company.
By Brad Stone

Last summer Emad Wassef walked out of a Target store in Orange County, California, to find a big space where his 2003 Lincoln Navigator had been. The 38-year-old truck driver and former reserve Los Angeles police officer did what anyone would do: He reported the theft to the cops and called his insurance company.
Two weeks later, the black SUV turned up near the Mexico border, minus its stereo, airbags, DVD player, and door panels. Wassef assumed he had a straightforward claim for around $25,000. His insurer, Chicago-based Unitrin Direct, disagreed.
Wassef’s Navigator, like half of all late-model domestic cars on the road today, is equipped with a transponder antitheft system: The ignition key is embedded with a tiny computer chip that sends a unique radio signal to the vehicle’s onboard computer. Without the signal, the car won’t start. And Wassef still had both of his keys.
The insurance company sent a forensic examiner to check out the disemboweled SUV in an impound lot. The ignition lock, mounted on the steering column, had been forcibly rotated, probably with a screwdriver. The locking lug on the steering wheel, which keeps it from being turned when the truck is not in gear, had also been damaged. But the transponder system was intact. The car could have been shifted and steered, the investigator concluded, but the engine couldn’t have been turned on. “Since you reportedly can account for all the vehicle keys, the forensic information suggests that the loss did not occur as reported,” the company wrote to Wassef, denying his claim. The barely hidden subtext: Wassef was lying.
“I got shafted, basically,” Wassef says. He’s not the only one. US carmakers and auto-mobile insurers are unshakably certain that vehicles protected by “transponder immobil-izers” can’t be driven without the proper keys – or, at least, that circumventing those transponder systems takes more sweat and money than most auto thieves are willing to expend. So car companies advertise their security systems as unbreakable, insurers and consumers believe these assertions, and then folks like Wassef find themselves engaged in all-out war when their cars vanish.
The insurance companies have good reason to be suspicious. They lose $14 billion to auto fraud every year in the US; by some measures, 20 percent of all stolen-car reports are trumped up. But when it comes to transponders, their faith is misplaced. Auto antitheft systems are usually secure for only a few years, until thieves crack the system. “The carmakers are calling these passive antitheft systems, but they’re not,” says Rob Painter, a Milwaukee-based forensic locksmith who has testified in dozens of auto insurance court cases, for both sides. “They are just theft deterrents. Tell me a car can’t be stolen and I’ll show you how to do it.”
Two years ago, my white 2003 Honda Civic – which my wife and I had affectionately named Honky – disappeared from the street in front of our San Francisco home. It has a transponder, and all three of our keys were accounted for (including the spare valet key). Police were polite but not much help; they speculated that thieves had towed the car away or hoisted it onto a flatbed truck and broken it down for parts.
But Honky materialized two weeks later on a side street near the ocean. It was out of gas and littered with cigarette butts and pirated Pantera CDs, but otherwise undamaged. The ignition cylinder was intact, and our keys still worked. The car was a living, gas-sipping rebuke of modern antitheft technology.
Mystified, I wrote up my experience for Newsweek’s Web site in early 2004. I figured that would be the end of the story, but I got hundreds of emails from people with similar tales. I’m still getting them – type “stolen car” into Google and my article is in the top 20.
The most stirring notes were from those who got spurned by their insurance companies. John Hutton, an architect from Fairfax, Virginia, lost his Acura RSX last fall and was reimbursed only after six months of aggressive wrangling with Geico. “The inspector treated me like I was a liar and a criminal,” Hutton says. “It all kept going back to the transponder system and their belief that ‘You can’t steal it! You can’t steal it!’” Sally Nguyen’s Acura TL went AWOL last New Year’s Eve and was later found gutted and submerged in the Sacramento River. When an investigator from her insurance company, Esurance, dropped by her house, he left a business card on which he’d scrawled, “Regarding your ‘stolen’ Acura.” Six months later, Esurance denied the claim, citing her car’s security system. Esurance wouldn’t talk to me about her case. Mohammad Awan lost his 2002 Ford Explorer last year; his son wrote to tell me that his insurer, Progressive, felt the existence of a transponder system – plus other “red flags,” like Awan’s outstanding debt – amounted to enough evidence to deny the claim. “Your vehicle is equipped with an immobilizing trans-ponder system which will not allow it to start without the use of a proper transponder key,” read the denial-of-claim letter.
Perhaps no story was worse than Wassef’s as he tried to deal with his stripped Navigator. Unitrin subjected him to a day-long deposition process called an “examination under oath.” Investigators asked about his collapsing marriage and demanded financial documents and telephone records. Wassef complied, believing he had nothing to hide. By June, with no reimbursement in sight, he filed a breach of contract suit. Meanwhile, he’s still paying $825.39 a month for an undrivable car. Unitrin did not return multiple calls regarding Wassef’s case.
Compared to Wassef, I got off easy – a couple hundred dollars for a detail job to eliminate the cigarette smell. But I found myself wrestling with a high tech quandary: What really happened to Honky? In other words, how do you steal the unstealable car?
The 1986 Corvette had the first electronic antitheft system, the Pass Key I. General Motors embedded a small pellet in the base of each key blade; when the key was inserted in the ignition slot, the car’s computer detected the electrical resistance of the pellet. There were just 15 assigned values, but Pass Key still revolutionized automobile security. For the first time, a crucial piece of a vehicle’s antitheft system existed outside the car.
The high lasted only a few years. People started complaining about not being able to replace lost keys easily, so GM opened a back door. Dealers and locksmiths got permission to stock key blanks, and by the early ’90s police were arresting car thieves who had rings of all 15 GM keys.
Of course, no security system is impreg-nable. Even the toughest wall safe is rated in terms of how long it would take a sufficiently motivated crook to bust it open with tools or a torch. As thieves gain experience, they can crack the safe faster and faster. Every security system goes through the same natural history. When new, it’s nearly unbeatable. But then users ask for more convenience and the keepers of the system relax the rules, or smart attackers study the system long enough to breach it. The system begins to fail, creating an evolutionary pressure that ultimately results in the development of a new model – and the cycle starts all over again.
That’s what happened a decade ago, when the rise of eastern European black markets sent auto theft rates skyrocketing in Europe. German insurance companies asked for new security precautions, and in 1995 BMW debuted a sophisticated antitheft system based on radio frequency identification chips. US and Japanese manufacturers quickly embraced the technology in their high-end models. Most of these new transponder-immobilizing systems – including the one in my Civic – use a “fixed” code. Insert the key into the ignition and a transceiver in the steering column pings a microchip in the key’s thick black plastic handle. The chip radios back an alphanumeric identifier of up to 32 characters, one of billions of possible combinations. The signal is only strong enough to travel about 7 inches, but when the car’s computer gets the right code, it activates the other onboard electronics. More expensive cars, like some Mercedes and Lexus models, use sophisticated “rolling” codes, generated anew after each start, passed to the key, and fed back for authorization during the next ignition cycle.
Like the Pass Key, the new RFID technology was extremely effective for a few years. Thefts of the 1997 Ford Mustang, one of the first US cars with a transponder, dropped 70 percent from 1995 levels. (The rest were attributed to tow-aways and stolen keys.) Insurance firms were elated. “There was -pretty much a God-given belief that if a car with a transponder was stolen, the owner was sunk,” says Larry Burzynski, a senior special agent with the National Insurance Crime Bureau. “The perception was that the theft had to be owner involvement.” Insurers pressed auto-makers to deploy the technology, and even now the most frequently stolen cars in the US were built before the transponder era – like the ’95 Civic and the ’89 Camry. Newer models make the list only when manu-facturers forgo transponders.
TO car thieves, smart keys became little more than the latest challenge. By 2000, forensic locksmiths like Painter were demonstrating for juries how crooks were getting past the transponders in Fords: Pop the hood and pull a certain fuse from the power relay center in the upper left corner. Zap, you’re in.
Meanwhile, transponder-equipped cars were being resold to new owners, and keys were disappearing behind couch cushions. Auto-repair supply and locksmithing companies started selling devices like the Code-Seeker and the T-Code, which allow anyone to create a new set of keys for a fixed-code transponder-equipped car. The Jet Smart Clone (catchphrase: “Clone the uncloneable!”) duplicates any fixed-code RFID chip by reading its code and imprinting it onto the blank chip of a new key with the same mechanical cut.
In the fall of 2005, Bay Area Mercedes dealerships were targeted by a regional theft ring with a clever, seemingly primitive tactic. A thief posing as a customer would express interest in a top-of-the line model and go for a test-drive. Afterward, when the salesperson went for the paperwork, the thief would replace the car’s keyless starter transponder with an identical-looking mock-up from his own pocket. Then he’d leave and return later to nick the car.
That’s what happened in mid-November at a Bay Area Mercedes lot in Pleasanton. A $78,000 black S430 disappeared overnight; police traced the car’s GPS unit to the parking lot of a Fry’s Electronics, but when they arrived at the store, they found not the missing Pleasanton car but another S430 stolen from a Monterey car lot earlier that year. They also found its driver, a 25-year-old San Jose man named Naheed Hamed. He took off in the car, leading a freeway chase that reached 100 miles per hour and ended when he took an off-ramp too fast and rammed into a tree.
A few days later, police found the Pleasanton S430 near Hamed’s home and towed it back to the dealership. Inside the car, mechanics discovered a technological treasure trove: an original Mercedes electronic ignition system and custom Mercedes fuses, all wired with alligator clips to the dashboard and to the fuse box underneath the driver’s seat. The car also held a Pelican PDA carrying case and a wireless RFID-signal-sniffing antenna. Investigators suspect that Hamed spliced in his own ignition system and power source, then used the PDA to upload pirated software to the car’s computer to disable the transponder and swap the two cars’ GPS tracking numbers. Of course, he also believed he could beat the cops in a car chase. “Yeah, the guy’s an idiot,” says auto security expert Mike Bender, a consultant on the case. “But you have to be a brainiac to understand the stuff that this guy had.”
That kind of technology is too expensive and too complicated for your basic chop-shop crew, but they usually don’t need it anyway. For the past few years, Bay Area cops have pursued a ring of thieves that break into Hondas and Acuras with “jiggle” keys – keys with the teeth shaved down so they can turn the tumblers inside any car’s door lock. After the thieves gain access, they shuffle through the glove compartment and snatch the manual, where dealers – unbeknownst to many car owners – often leave an extra valet key.
Ivan Blackman, the manager of the Vehicle Information and Identification Program for the NICB, says that insiders are gradually getting over their dogmatic belief in the invincibility of transponder systems. “Companies are slowly realizing that the cars can be stolen,” Blackman says. Maybe he’s right – though things aren’t changing fast enough for Emad Wassef and Sally Nguyen.
I still didn’t know what happened to Honky. Maybe someone at the dealership or a valet had cloned my key with a device like a Jet Smart Clone, then showed up later to take the car. It was also conceivable that someone grabbed the vehicle identification number off the dash, went to the dealership, pretended to be me, and had an extra key produced. Still, either scenario seemed like it would require an awful lot of footwork for a Pantera- and nicotine-fueled joyride.
Then I heard about another possibility. Earl Hyser, the superintendant of State Farm Insurance’s Vehicle Research Facility, told me that some transponder-equipped cars came with a secret “cheat” code designed to allow people who lose their keys to drive back to the shop. I asked the SFPD about it and was referred to Ken Montes, famous in Bay Area street racing circles for a souped-up 1992 Honda Civic he built as part of a tuner team called the Benen Brothers. The SFPD told me the team called the car Spanky, which instantly made me feel a certain kinship.
I went to see Montes at his custom motor-cycle shop about a half hour south of San Francisco and asked him how someone could have stolen my car. He just laughed. “If I want to take your Civic, I’ll do it in 10 seconds,” he said. Then he confirmed Hyser’s story. The mythical Honda override exists: It’s a series of presses and pulls of the emergency brake. Each car, it seems, has a unique override code, which correlates to the VIN.
“You want to get yours?” Montes asked.
Sure, I said.
He called an acquaintance who worked at a Honda dealership. I listened, awestruck, as Montes fed the guy a barely credible story about a cousin who had dropped his keys down a sewer. The dealership employee was at home but evidently could access the Honda database online. I gave Honky’s VIN to Montes, who passed it along to his friend. We soon had the prescribed sequence of pulls, which I scribbled down in my notebook.
I walked outside and approached Honky. The door lock would have been easy – a thief would have used a jiggle key, and a stranded motorist would have had a locksmith cut a fresh one. I just wrapped the grip of my key in tinfoil to jam the transponder. The key still fit, but it no longer started the car.
Then I grabbed the emergency brake handle between the front seats and performed the specific series of pumps, interspersed with rotations of the ignition between the On and Start positions. After my second attempt, Honky’s hybrid engine awoke with its customary whisper.
I had just jacked my own car.
Click to expand...

LonghornTaco · Nov 8, 2008

TicTacOma said: ↑

LoJack and OnStar are good for RECOVERY. You need to prevent. If you're sleeping or at work and your truck gets jacked,It could be hours before you know it's gone. LoJack can help to get the body back.
Click to expand...

LOL! I would imagine that you don't need to "start" the vehicle to part it out... Make a shit load more money that way (or so I've heard )

shook0002 · Nov 8, 2008

Most of the cars stolen in Philly now are taken with tow trucks, and haven't run in years. They aren't being parted out they're being scrapped. When you can get over $500 for the car in scrap, plus the core value of the cats and aluminum wheels, thats not bad money if you do only 3 a week.

311offroad · Nov 8, 2008

sorry, had to do it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQI4MZc1FL8

Taco's for All · Nov 8, 2008

In regards to LoJack, just realize that it's a relatively old technology and not all police departments are equipped with the technology anymore. Many police departments have found the equipment bulky and difficult to install and maintain. Not only do you yourself have to pay for LoJack, but the Police Departments have to pay for the technology as well. I know of half a dozen large police departments in NJ that have ditched their LoJack systems in the past 4-5 years. If looking into it, you may want to check with your local and surrounding PD's to see if they have the technology.

Evil Monkey · Nov 8, 2008

I have Lo Jack with Early Warning. There's a key fob that has to go with the truck when it moves or I get notified that my truck is moving. They take up to 5 contacts (Cell, email, home phone, etc).

Kropper · Nov 8, 2008

I'm not sure where Tacos for all got his info (not saying that it's completely incorrect), but the agency that I work for in NJ (and every neighboring agency that I know) all use LoJack. We don't need to maintain the units (LoJack does that for us) and a few years ago they upgraded all of our units to much smaller, and easier to use ones (as seen on Jacked). LoJack isn't perfect, but it gives piece of mind. My wife has it in her CRV, and luckily we haven't needed it. For my Taco I opt for a big dog and a bigger gun.

riktor · Dec 16, 2008

PackerfanXD said: ↑

I have a Viper alarm and a pistol. If I hear the alarm, I grab my pistol.
Click to expand...

ha i got the same thing taco viper n gun, a very good combo down here in texas

RCBS · Dec 16, 2008

eordonez · Dec 16, 2008

for me theres no point on having a sophisticated alarm system, if they want my truck they will point a gun in my head and take it, and i will hand them the keys with no problem.... thats why i got insurance....

packrobottom · Mar 25, 2010

for me theres no point on having a sophisticated alarm system, if they want my truck they will point a gun in my head and take it, and i will hand them the keys with no problem.... thats why i got insurance...
Click to expand...

that's not how most cars are stolen though. An alarm system is a deterrent. Car Thief's don't try to steal a vehicle when someone is in it (more complicated) so I really don't understand your point. Also you are generally out money after you file your claim with your insurance company. It's not like they give you a blank check to go buy a new car when your vehicle is stolen. Not having your car stolen is definitely preferable.

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Anti-theft devices.

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Kropper Tacos are more gooder!!

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Welcome to Tacoma World!

Anti-theft devices.

#1 TacoTown [OP] Active Member

#2 Tacoma02TRD Well-Known Member

#3 Packman73 ^^^^ 3%er ^^^^

#4 shook0002 "The Fuzz"

#5 WilsonTheDog Kylie's dad

#6 TicTacOma UnderWater Monopoly Champion

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#12 shook0002 "The Fuzz"

#13 311offroad Stock Taco For Now

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#15 Evil Monkey There's an evil monkey in my truck

#16 Kropper Tacos are more gooder!!

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#19 eordonez Living vicariously through mjp2

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#1
TacoTown [OP] Active Member

#2
Tacoma02TRD Well-Known Member

#3
Packman73 ^^^^ 3%er ^^^^

#4
shook0002 "The Fuzz"

#5
WilsonTheDog Kylie's dad

#6
TicTacOma UnderWater Monopoly Champion

#7
Marioso Risueno

#8
TicTacOma UnderWater Monopoly Champion

#9
Marioso Risueno

#10
4x4Runner Sam’s gone, man. Moderator

#11
LonghornTaco Can you pass the bailout please?

#12
shook0002 "The Fuzz"

#13
311offroad Stock Taco For Now

#14
Taco's for All Well-Known Member

#15
Evil Monkey There's an evil monkey in my truck

#16
Kropper Tacos are more gooder!!

#17
riktor New Member

#18
RCBS How long you willing to tolerate this crap??

#19
eordonez Living vicariously through mjp2

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packrobottom Well-Known Member

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