Hidden Devices Tripping Up Car Thieves

Call them Trojan horses in the war against car thieves.

Last month a remote transmitter hidden in a high-end Honda led detectives from the Consolidated Effort to Combat Auto Theft--a multi-agency unit composed of Los Angeles police, California Highway Patrol and Department of Motor Vehicles investigators--to a gated rental house in North Hollywood.

Inside they found a newly stripped car and evidence of a $3-million chop shop, one of the largest ever discovered in the San Fernando Valley.

Law enforcement officials say vehicle-tracking devices, like those made by LoJack Inc. and Teletrac Corp., are turning the tide against one of Southern California’s most common crimes.

The devices, designed to protect individual cars, have led police to dozens of car-stripping operations throughout Los Angeles, potentially saving an untold number of other cars from being snatched.

“So far we’ve had about 70 cases this year involving LoJack cars,” said CECAT Officer Rick Marshall. “They work great. They’ve helped solve some huge cases.”

Two years ago in Long Beach, a tracking device led Long Beach police and U.S. Customs agents to a port where six stolen four-wheel vehicles were awaiting a slow boat to Guatemala. That find, valued at $200,000, was then the city’s largest.

Formed in 1978, Dedham, Mass.-based LoJack Inc. manufactured its millionth unit this year, and says it has outfitted more than 250,000 cars in Southern California alone. With total assets of $40 million, the company is by far the largest in the nascent auto-tracking industry.

When a LoJack car is reported stolen, the remote transmitter hidden in the vehicle sends out signals which police trace with directional finders installed in some patrol cars at LoJack’s expense. The suggested cost to equip an auto with the system is $595, said Joe Abely, LoJack’s president.

Teletrac, LoJack’s chief competitor, has concentrated on commercial clients since it was acquired by a group of investors from the Airtouch company in 1996. Speaking from the firm’s Kansas City headquarters, vice president Randy Field said 65,000 of its 75,000 units sold in the United States were owned by businesses.

Teletrac, which costs $600 to $900, uses cellular phone technology tied into a standard car alarm. When the alarm goes off, the car then reports to a Teletrac control board that something is wrong. Teletrac employees call the car owner to check on false alarms, then contact police, providing them with updates on the car’s whereabouts by tracking it on a plotting board, using readings from cell-phone towers.

Both companies closely guard the secret of what their transmitters look like. “If people know what it looks like, they might be able to remove it,” Abely said.

Technicians are trained to secrete the devices in hard-to-reach places in the car so thieves won’t notice or deactivate them.

Some car thieves have, however, developed a defense.

“What these crooks do now is steal a car and then let it sit for a while on a street somewhere for a couple of days,” Officer Marshall said. “And when no one acts on it then they’ll take it and chop it up.” The Lojack- and Teletrac-equipped cars, tracked down by their signals, would be recovered if left on the street.

Sometimes police will stake out a transmitter-equipped stolen car in hopes that the thieves will return and lead them to a chop shop.

But it’s rare that officers have the time and manpower to do that, Marshall said.