Big blow for car thieves

Car hijackers and thieves are in for harder times from September when all new vehicles in SA will be micro-dotted.

All vehicles, whether built in SA or fully imported will be sprayed underneath and in the engine compartment with thousands of tiny microdots, which, under magnification, reveal the vehicle’s VIN number.

The dots will enable police to find missing vehicles and to identify parts that have been mixed and matched in a “chop shop”.

The technology has been available for eight years. That is how long it has taken for Business Against Crime to persuade authorities and the motor companies to have microdots adopted as a legal requirement.

BAC CEO Graham Wright said, even so, SA was one of the first countries in the world to legislate microdots.

The number of cars stolen and hijacked has slowly declined but is still around the 84 000 mark. If they are worth an average of R50 000 each, their value is some R4.2bn.

Microdot enlarged

Microdotting is just the latest of several landmark crime-fighting achievements for Business Against Crime in the past decade.

Through improved cash management practices in business, in collaboration with SAPS, it has made huge strides in combating all kinds of cash theft, including heists.

An important breakthrough was helping the cellphone companies and the SAPS to effectively blacklist and render useless all stolen cellphones.

Wright says this did have an impact on cellphone theft and use of stolen phones by criminals. Disappointingly, however, other countries are not part of the blacklisting arrangement, so cellphones are still stolen in their thousands and exported to jurisdictions where SA blacklisting is not in force. Mostly these are in Africa and attempts are being made to involve other jurisdictions in the battle.

Another big BAC initiative has been to improve IT capacity in the police. BAC also helped to streamline white collar prosecutions through the establishment of commercial crime courts in six SA cities.

Microdot

Source: Moneyweb

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