The new geography of stolen goods
Meanwhile police in Canada won't do anything about your stolen car even when you show them it's right there in a rail/shipping yard in your city.
- https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/stolen-truck-authorit...
- https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto-man-finds-stolen-truc...
> Andrew texted the officer a screenshot showing the precise location of the AirTag. As the officer approached the rail yard, Andrew's second AirTag started pinging at the same location, suggesting the Bluetooth signal emitted by the device had connected to the officer's smartphone. (The tracker relies on nearby GPS-enabled devices to determine its location.)
Clearance rates for violent crimes are below 60% in Canada… and even literal stabbing victims often go without any sort of closure, in pretty much every major city across Canada.
And it’s been like that for some number of years without any sort of fundamental reform, or enormous police/prosecutor budget increases, in sight.
From that perspective it’s amazing any car thefts gets solved at all…
And even if someone is caught, every day the headlines are like:
>Teen pleads guilty to role in deadly Etobicoke mass shooting, gets bail ahead of sentence
>Axe-wielding suspect out on bail within hours of Vancouver stranger attack
>Nearly half of 124 arrested by Ontario carjacking task force were on bail
Just to complete the picture, violent crime in Canada is at historic lows and falling.
Looking at homicide, which is the most unbiased indicator (not much under/over-reporting), it was at historic lows in 2013, when the homicide rate was 1.45. It has been growing nearly every year since. The latest data I can find is for 2022, which has a 2.273 homicide rate. For reference, that is a little more than 4x the homicide rate of Italy, which is at 0.545, and a little more than 2x Bulgaria's 1.088 rate.
Sources:
https://www.macrotrends.net/datasets/global-metrics/countrie...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
Unfortunately, covid is proving to be a huge outlier, so ending in 2022 isn't that useful. This is the US, but the reactions to covid caused huge crime spikes, which are now retreating fast: https://www.govexec.com/management/2025/08/fbi-us-crime-rate...
Percentage-wise or numbers-wise?
Also, some jurisdictions have been known to engage in a practice where criminals are charged with lesser crimes in order to make the violent crime numbers look good.
How much does theft coverage add to car insurance in Canada on average?
Are these numbers reliable? Or are people just not reporting them because police won’t do anything? Also, are you accounting for improvements in medical technology? E.g., as of 2013, the rates of murder + attempted murder were 50-60% higher than in 1962: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/crime-in-canada-falls-to...
>Are these numbers reliable?
For murders and serious violent crimes like stabbings and robber/assaults resulting in major injuries, or for serious thefts, in a country like Canada or the U.S. i'd believe the numbers are. Very few people in these countries, where perception of police as useful more or less exists, would fail to report such crimes.
On the other hand, just to showcase a counterpoint, in countries like the one I live in (Mexico) even violent crimes and major thefts often don't go reported simply because in many parts, police are considered so useless (or even sometimes collusive with criminals and thus counterporductive) that even for serious things, they're not contacted unless absolutely necessary.
Even with these tendencies however, you'd be surprised how often people do go through the formality of filing a report just in case it turns up a result, particularly for murders and kidnappings, where desperation obligates them.
How is this relevant?
e.g. Whether there are 1000 stabbing victims per year, or 5000, a low clearance rate means there are still many victims that can only pound sand, without even a remote prospect of seeing any action taken.
It's very relevant. Prevention is the best cure. One set of statistics might paint a grim picture, but a different set might be far more encouraging (of course these could have been fudged but i'm taking op at his word), if violent crime is falling people are safer even if the police are doing a worse job and that's much more important. This runs deeper then that. It's a common theme for people to complain how everything is worse now and the gradual failure of institutions. Any positive news should be highlighted and celebrated.
I'm not saying to ignore the problems, but it's important to get a better perspective.
It means that violent crime is less and less of a problem. I don’t even understand the question.
An 95% clearance rate with 100 crimes leaves the same number of unresolved cases as a 0% clearance rate with 5 crimes. If you have fewer crimes you don't have to spend as much money prosecuting them to get the same results.
As long it’s more than single digit cases per year per city not getting cleared, it seems practically irrelevant to car theft recovery what the number is beyond that. Since police forces have finite staffing and budgets.
Anyone proposing extra resources to be spent or diverted to car thefts would not be taken seriously, if it’s clearly insufficient to even clear most violent cases.
This assumes no feedback loops such as those found in the real world. Like "criminal who doesn't get caught does more crime"
So there aren't a lot of crimes, and the police still aren't able to solve them?
>Clearance rates for violent crimes are below 60% in Canada
Unfortunately the clearance rate is similar in the US as well. This source is a bit outdated violent crimes had a 45% clearance rate in 2019: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
When the police don’t act, it’s because they’re being _incentivized_ to not act. Likely via kickbacks from the criminals themselves.
There should be automatic punishments and career censures when cops fail to leap at opportunities like the one you quoted.
> Encrypted communications have enabled criminal gangs to operate and co-operate more freely than ever before, and establish global supply chains.
Is this the payload message of the article?
Many cars have GPS installed. Everybody has a smartphone, and even if it's offline, it's possible to see who went offline when the car was stolen. Customs offices have never ending databases of the containers that passed them.
How is it impossible to track down a thief? I guess, because there's just too much data to automatically track many cases. How on Earth will banning cryptograhpy and adding more data to the sea, help track the thieves?
From the article:
> Fourth, police forces largely remain in the dust. NaVCIS has enjoyed some success, intercepting 550 cars in the past year. But that is a small fraction of what gets through. Mr Gibson is one of three officers on the whole south coast. Britain’s police have yet to catch any high-ups in the business. European forces do not even have dedicated investigation teams. Across the rich world, police resources tend to be directed towards “higher harm” offences.
There's just very few people working on it because it's not a priority.
The state only cares about thieves insofar as the optics of their activity is bad for the state, illicit trade is lost revenue and every score criminals settle among themselves challenges the state's monopoly on violent dispute resolution, it doesn't really care about the peasants' property, it just looks like it cares a little when the interests align.
That's grossly untrue in democracies.
The people who vote in democracies care.
And therefore, the state also cares. You expect them to let pass by such a great opportunity to performatively score points with voters by being "tough on crime"?
The police can hunt down car thieves which they don't get much money from. Or police can hunt down low-level marijuana offenders which they can extract money from over and over and over.
Which one do you think is going to get voted for?
I think a prototypical amoral economist would "solve" the problem by having people pay the cops some kind of percentage fee if they get their car back. Or at least I think that would work, but it bothers me.
Or just change the incentive structure. Make the fines go to the general government operating fund, not directly to the police department. Assess performance based on solving the crimes you want solved, rather than pure # of offenses. It's not hard to come up with alternatives.
You’re suggesting we pay cops to steal cars and then recover them?
> their activity is bad for the state, illicit trade is lost revenue
I wonder. With a sufficiently sociopathic point of view, every high end car theft almost certainly represents a subsequent insurance claim and new car purchase. And every insurance claim results in upward pressure on insurance prices. If you just look at car theft and export through a "economic impact to the state" lens, there are without doubt a lot of industry and political people who see it as being new revenue and _good_ for the state.
If you really think it in non-standard ways. It does contribute to GDP. New cars sold, insurance claims. And I suppose on average the criminals are more likely to spend their gains in economy in general.
It contributes to GDP in the same way that someone fucking a whore instead of their wife does. Yeah there's a transaction there, but should there be? And at what cost? Ditto for the divorce.
This kind of stuff is textbook broken windows fallacy.
Exactly. As I said "With a sufficiently sociopathic point of view".
Your logic reminds me of when we see people on HN saying that it's "good" when old cars get totaled out over petty BS or have their operating costs artificially raised by the state because they statistically get replaced with safer, cleaner cars but at the end of the day the population has to bear those costs at some point. At the end of the day people are basically forced to surplus in a particular way. Viewed through a state lens of course the state wants this invested in highly regulated, fairly complex and integrated areas of the economy.
You don't even need to be a sociopath. You just need to be a single minded idiot who's rounding every hard to measure harm to zero in dishonest pursuit of your goal.
You see these thought patterns and flimsy justifications on all sorts of issues once you start looking.
> There's just very few people working on it because it's not a priority.
Right? The existence of organized crime is a policy choice by politicians. If they truly wanted to do something about it, the policies would change - both in terms of funding/staffing, as well as the incentivizing of officers to pursue leads.
> > Encrypted communications have enabled...
> Is this the payload message of the article?
No, this is:
> > Britain’s police solve only 5% of crimes
Britain's current government is heavily pro-censorship and pro-surveillance, and encourage any and all rhetoric that might help them to this end.
However, when the reality on the ground is that I can literally locate a stolen object myself and pass to the police evidence both of the object being mine and of its current location, and they simply cannot be bothered to do anything at all with that information... it is clear that the existence of encryption is not relevant to the problem.
Also in the article, they mention at the time of theft cell phones are wrapped in foil, and GPS jammers are installed on the car.
a GPS jammer should be trivially easy to track. plus that's a crime on its own so police could just investigate those without needing a stolen car to find.
but but... wasn't the UK been stuffed with survelliance cameras?
>How is it impossible to track down a thief?
It's not , but i've seen plenty of stories of people, in many countries, reporting that they know where their stolen laptop, bike etc is and the police being kinda useless.
Friend of a friend had almost all his gear arolen, found the theives and burned thr house down when the police couldn't get his gear back.
I understand the frustration.
> How is it impossible to track down a thief?
It's not. If an expensive supercar is stolen, the police forces somehow find it really quickly.
The problem is that police forces are there to protect the property of the aristocracy and oppress the plebeians. Any "protection" for the plebeians is purely incidental and accidental.
That expensive supercar is a lot more noticeable than a toyota corolla. People are also more likely to remember seeing a lime green lambo than a silver corolla.
> Is this the payload message of the article?
This makes it sound like a hit piece to sell mass surveillance laws like ChatControl. Even if encryption was illegal and everything scanned 24/7, all it takes is speaking in code to be uncatchable. It's what criminals have done for all of history.
This is just disgusting.
>This makes it sound like a hit piece to sell mass surveillance laws like ChatControl
Encrypted chat apps get mentioned in literally one sentence out of a ~1900 word article, and somehow that's "a hit piece to sell mass surveillance laws"? Get a grip.
It's not a sentence you say by accident, nor is it a sentence that makes sense to say unless you have an agenda to push.
I know this opinion is anathema on HN, but this is one reason I like Teslas.
Keyless unlock over Bluetooth keyed to the owner's phone is very difficult to spoof, making it hard to steal the car.
If you manage to steal the car somehow, it's wired to the gills, meaning it can tracked and bricked remotely (the apparent fate of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov's Cybertruck).
And if you do manage to take it offline and bring it to another country, the navigation won't work and you'll have a very hard time finding spares outside the official dealer network.
I have a Tesla. It is trivial to steal; you just get my phone and you have my car. It is tied to the car through Bluetooth that auto unlocks AND drives without any other security measures beyond just being close to it with the devise. You don't even have to unlock my phone. Getting my phone would be the harder part, but it just would take a lapse in paying attention (like left in on the table to get a drink refill).
The comforting part (unless you consider the immense privacy issues) is, as you mention, how tied the auto is to Tesla and my account. I could have the car disabled and tracked probably less than 10 minutes of discovering it was taken. I could also lock/erase my stolen phone remotely which would then disable driving the car again once it was put into park for the first time.
I saw a video of some alpine explorer who recorded a video of himself to be uploaded later. He was on some stupid long 500 mile trek through the mountains when the police texted him. They were paving the parking lot where he'd left his car and requesting that it be moved, so he was hiking towards better signal so that he could start the engine and someone local could move it a few feet.
You could steal it with a tow truck. Which would be an order of magnitude more difficult but serious car thieves have them. I imagine the mechanical components would be valuable. Definitely out of reach of the young,dumb criminal though
I prefer my French dumb car. If someone steals it, meh the insurance will pay out and I buy another one. Not that anyone is going to steal it. It’s just invisible.
And it’s more comfortable and after 6 years lifetime it cost less than half of just the depreciation on a model S including fuel.
> I prefer my French dumb car.
You are smart.
I have a 2001 Mazda 626 and a 2002 Ford F-150 7700 in the driveway, and there are days I forget to lock the doors. Which is an unwise thing to do in my neighbourhood. But even after half a decade living here I have yet to find any evidence they’ve been rifled through, much less attempted to be stolen.
Plus, I recently ran the numbers, and ignoring fuel and insurance, adding up purchase price + all repairs and maintenance - including brand-name tires! - has both vehicles together amortize under $1,000/year. And that is _BOTH, COMBINED._ I know some people in my own tax bracket who pay more than a $2,000 a month just for a single vehicle.
Now granted, AC is still dead on both, and will cost a pretty penny to resurrect (heavy corrosion in the lines). But for getting from point A to point B, those are some pretty cheap fucking rides.
You get everything described above in a used Tesla Model 3 that goes for $20k in the US.
The French dumb car cost me $4000
Sure, I'm just saying that you don't need to fork out $100k or whatever it costs for a Model S these days to get those features.
No CarPlay still? My $4000 french turd has it...
> There is also almost no deterrent: Britain’s police solve only 5% of crimes (and 2% of vehicle thefts)
Idk how this is acceptable at all. Is the UK literally the state of nature?
Crime statistics are difficult.
England & Wales (because policing is a devolved matter in the UK) have very robust crime recording rules. Consequently, the detection rates are low because you record and close crimes where there is literally no prospect of a conviction.
You compare this to, say, Japan, where an investigation only starts if it’s likely that the crime will be solved, and you have an explanation for why detections seem comparatively poor.
There is also the fact that, despite TVs assertion to the contrary, that solving crime is not easy and it is also true that being able to operate a fully encrypted communication system makes it harder as you rely on mistakes.
As we saw with Encro, criminal groups with Signal and modern iPhones can communicate with gay abandon if they maintain decent opsec.
> that solving crime is not easy
True. In a healthy society, policing is hard.
> and it is also true that being able to operate a fully encrypted communication system makes it harder as you rely on mistakes.
Yes. You are describing actual police work; it is how things have always been.
Because this was true before robust encryption, we know encryption doesn't change the equation and can be safely omitted from your assertion.
> As we saw with Encro, criminal groups with Signal and modern iPhones can communicate with gay abandon if they maintain decent opsec.
Governments have never had realtime access to our communications. Humans' communications have been private for as long as there has been language. Privacy is good for us and is better than all other alternatives.
Robust encryption is how we maintain that natural, neutral, healthy default.
Otherwise, we're talking about gifting new, unprecedented surveillance powers to officials, politicians and their powerful allies.
Massive power. Over us. At which point we are less safe.
> Yes. You are describing actual police work; it is how things have always been.
No, it hasn’t. Criminals haven’t always had access to literally uncrackable encryption, both messaging and voice, in a manner that is impossible to attribute to an individual handset or terminal.
Regardless of whether you’re for or against it, you have to admit that this is a boon for criminals as much as it is for everyone else.
Encro failed because the Dutch got all up in their servers (and the owners, who I suspect are now dead as a result, pretended it hadn’t happened) - e2e encryption bypasses that vulnerability.
>> Yes. You are describing actual police work; it is how things have always been.
> No, it hasn’t. Criminals haven’t always had access to literally uncrackable encryption,
As a preamble, police already have a vast array of new avenues of surveilling citizens. They have this now and it gives them massively more access to our private data/comms, than ever before. There is little that LEO/Govs/Corps don't have access to already.
Police have never had at-will access to any personal data and communications they desired.
Until very recently: To find info they wanted, police performed police work and commonly found some degree of what they were looking for. But often it was nothing. Under this, society thrived.
What police have right now is massively more than that. In the few spaces where some content might be denied them, they still have the associated metadata which is valuable on it's own (often more so than the contents).
Historically, you and I have always had options and methods of keeping our personal info and our private comms out of the reach of police, govs and other powerful actors. It was good for us and promoted a healthy society.
We have lost most of that. However, using robust encryption we can keep a minuscule portion of our total comms and data out of their trivial reach. What little it is - it is still good for us.
Historical privacy was what we had. Under that condition, societies were healthy and thriving.
Persistent, pervasive surveillance is what we're moving (rapidly) toward. It promotes other types of societies.
>Police have never had at-will access to any personal data and communications they desired.
Wiretaps, postal interference.
None of it was routine, but the tactic for dealing with serious criminality was still there.
>Historically, you and I have always had options and methods of keeping our personal info and our private comms out of the reach of police, govs and other powerful actors. It was good for us and promoted a healthy society.
No you haven't. It is only until very recently that iPhones (less so android devices) have been basically uncrackable (notwithstanding NSA/GCHQ level tactics that aren't going to be used for criminal investigations) and, coupled with end to end encryption, you have a communications system for which their is no practical method of compromise.
It is very good for the citizen, but you cannot argue for it without also acknowledging that it is incredibly advantageous for the criminal. It is without precedent in human history.
I'm not saying that the police should be able to backdoor everything useful, because that's nonsense. What I'm pointing out is that once you realise that your suspects understand how to use signal and how to use a VPN and how to maintain some sort of operational discipline (and this isn't a high threshold), then your crimes become incredibly hard to solve even with a perfectly executed investigation and this is reflected in the clear-up rate.
>No you haven't. It is only until very recently that iPhones (less so android devices) have been basically uncrackable (notwithstanding NSA/GCHQ level tactics that aren't going to be used for criminal investigations) and, coupled with end to end encryption, you have a communications system for which their is no practical method of compromise.
As the comment above clearly and repeatedly mentions, this has been the default for most of history. Previous to the modern digital age of endless location and habit tracking, people could move around without being easily detected except through tremednous, dedicated effort, and communications was easy to secure in simple ways. You're describing a completely new phenomenon that's very dangerous in many ways which go far beyond mere crime prevention, and apparently lamenting countermeasures against it as if they were what's creating a "terrifying" new state of criminals being able to move and communicate without easily being tracked.
No it hasn't.
Your post was easy to open, your phone easy to tap. The use of surveillance equipment was basically unregulated.
You may not have had transaction level monitoring but you certainly had no expectation of privacy at the bank.
Do you people not read? You're harking back to some bucolic, pastoral existence that never existed.
You're kidding right? Your phone was a stationary dumb object that only made and recieved calls if you were there to answer or use it. Your post was sent by paper and a million ways existed to avoid having it traced to your home or to you.
In no real way are these comparable to the deeply granular, deeply rooted 24/7 surveillance of movement, habits, contacts and nearly anything you like, that's today possible against any normally digitally connected person who doesn't take pretty extreme steps to avoid it (steps that by themselves make that person stand out as unusual enough to soon be flagged) I could go on and on with all the ways in which the tracking is pervasive and applied to most of the things we do today, and how none of that existed so autoamtically before the last 30-40 years or so.
Nobody with half a brain here is referring to some bucolic pastoral existence, simply to one in which the tools for tracking were just not like they are today, and if any government wanted to apply tracking of the kind that's pretty much turn-key constant now, it took unusual effort, staffing and specialized procedures.
You're either being deliberately obtuse or have no sense of perspective or idea of what you're saying
OK but given that only a tiny fraction of crime is solved, then why does the UK have huge prohibitions from carrying things to defend yourself, like even pepper spray?
You aren’t allowed to attack someone for trying to steal from you so I don’t see how this is relevant to a thread about theft.
> You aren’t allowed to attack someone for trying to steal from you
Please don't spout Daily Mail rubbish.
Not only is this a demonstrably false comment, it is an idiotic one.
You're the one whose being dishonest here, at least partly. From what I've read of self-defense laws in the UK, you can use "reasonable" force to defend yourself against attack (try measuring that precisely in the heat of a moment where you don't know your attacker's aims) but yes, you can actually be prosecuted for using force against someone trying to steal from you. Even something as shitty as a google search will show that your claim is demonstratable untrue.
How does insurance for stolen property work in Japan? Do the insurers not require evidence that the theft has been reported to the police, as they do here? Or do those reports not form part of the Japanese crime statistics, and if so, what would those look like if they did? Or is something else going on?
I simply don't believe this. Any one crime is hard to solve but the same criminals are doing most of the crime, so if policing were effective you'd still see closure rates.
>if they maintain decent opsec.
don't believe this either. no one has ever maintained decent opsec.
Nobody you've read about has ever maintained decent opsec. There's tons of people who started as petty criminals who made it to mid ranks, got old and got out before they got killed or got caught.
>Nobody you've read about has ever maintained decent opsec
Very good point. I do think the number rounds to zero, but yes there is a data bias here.
What is the rate for major and violent crime?
I imagine the 5% includes all kinds of petty crime, no?
2% is for grand theft auto is crazy
> Idk how this is acceptable at all.
Because the only society with a high clearance rate for crime is a police state that is very good at finding someone to blame, but not necessary the guy who did it.
A high Chechnya bureaucrat was several months ago stopped by Dagestan police for reckless driving that happened to be DUI. Before Chechen SWAT came to rescue the police had managed to check the car, and it happened to be stolen in Canada. That was one of the several high-end cars Kadyrov publicly gifted to his ministers.
How Kadyrov came into possesion of multiple Cybertrucks must be an interesting story, probably revealing entire supply chains of few crime organizations.
It is pretty strange that a country doesn't control what is going in and what is going out. In a small European country I'm most familiar with, everything is checked by customs officers. Dogs, x-rays, customs declarations, import taxes.
You can't inspect everything without creating a huge friction on trade. Australia is well known for it's tight borders - not just for security but for quarantine as well. It only inspects ~5% of containers and ~80% of interceptions are driven by intelligence.
The later is how you solve this. The stolen goods trade described in the article is likely centred around a few key networks that could be taken down with resourcing intelligence and law enforcement.
The article itself states that the UK has failed to arrest any top-level members. Cut the head off and you'll see the pull factor of street-level thefts removed, or at least disrupted.
The article covers this:
> Around the world, border agencies overwhelmingly focus on imports, hunting for people and drugs. In many countries, exports are hardly checked at all. Anyone can book a container.
The incentives just don't seem to be there. This boggled my mind:
> For each container Mr Gibson holds up and searches, the police must pay the port a fee of £200.
That caught my attention too.
A little malicious compliance is probably in order if I was the cops.
Congratulations: the port is now a crime scene, its gonna take hours or days to process this. I'm going to need you to remove all containers from this shipper from the stacks for further inspection. Please stop all movement of containers. I'll need to interview all longshoremen who came in contact with this container. Please begin filling out these 17 forms to recover your inspection fee.
You need to think of the containers that are stopped, inspected, and found to have nothing illegal. £200 would seem much less than the costs the police are causing by holding a container [0]. You're actually arguing for the government to cause even more damage, in retaliation for one small instance of the government having to partially compensate the victims of its actions. Frankly we should be moving in the exact opposite direction where the government correctly accounts for the harms it causes, instead of externalizing them in a reverse lottery.
[0] I welcome corrections on this, but I would think the commercial per-day storage fee is higher than £200
And then their boss gets mad at your boss's boss, then you find yourself doing the midnight shift in the area where police get shot at daily.
I was operating on the, perhaps faulty, assumption that the police higher ups are interested in stopping this sort of crime.
They are far less interested in stopping crime than they are in ensuring the wheels of the capitalist world-eating machine remain sufficiently greased.
The primary role of the police after all is to protect capital, not people.
Shutting down a port would cost the billionaires (who donate to the politicians who are in charge of the police) money, so its much preferable to the police and those in positions of power over them to let the crime run rampant so long as the ports keep operating so that the billionaires profits can flow unimpeded.
I assure you that the people having their supercars, million dollar farm equipment, and other goods stolen and shipped overseas are also capitalists, and consider their stolen assets to be capital as well.
> A little malicious compliance is probably in order if I was the cops.
Tell me you're American without telling me you're American.
Here, we prefer our police to be beholden to the public and obey the law; the spirit as well as the letter. It creates a trust that is clearly lacking with the (frankly thuggish) American police. To their clear detriment.
The ports are always corrupt. If we were serious about drugs we would just lock down the ports
The image seems to show him cutting the container open with an angle grinder. Do you want the police to be able to destructively enter any property without making the owner whole?
Yeah, in this case there was a stolen Porsche in it, but most of the time it's likely to be an innocent shipment.
They were cutting the tamper seal off. That is a disposable metal part that sells for a few cents. It is supposed to be removed destructively, and authorities do it all the time for inspection purposes, document the serial number of seal they removed, and tell the shipper what the new seal is. Sometimes its a lock, but most shippers don't do that since it is a hassle to get the keys to the receiver, and customs will cut your lock off. The act of sealing the container after inspection makes the owner whole.
While it is "destructive" in a very strict sense, it damages no property in any relevant way.
Any shipper anywhere on earth is well aware that their container can be opened by the authorities at any time.
That's a thing in the USA. The police bulldozed someone's house and didn't pay a dime. The family sued the police and lost, because the law says the police can just do that - bulldoze your home "to catch a criminal" - and they don't have to compensate you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPLvSYJvSkw
You don't want this. As long as the police are actually catching criminals, the fee shouldn't bother them. It's probably not that much compared to the rest of the cost of the operation.
Sibling comment says the seal is worth a few cents, but ignores the inconvenience of someone having to go to the port and replace the seal, plus the possible delay in getting it loaded. These containers and their contents are worth tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars each. A $200 fee to be able to mess with one is not unreasonable.
T̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶i̶g̶g̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶n̶t̶r̶y̶ The more shipments you have, the more officers you need. The more officers you have, the better the chance one of them is working for organized crime.
Although, your number of entry points should scale like your perimeter, while your population to pull agents from should scale like your area, so unless you have a very weird geometry this should get easier as you increase in size, right?
Airports not included.
The main factor is the quantity of goods which need to be inspected, and that tends to scale with the population which is buying the goods.
> your number of entry points should scale like your perimeter
Is that really true? An entry-point is generally something the people choose to create to satisfy the pre-existing need to transport goods, by building roads, rail, harbor-piers, etc.
Border-checkpoint facilities don't spontaneously generate in trackless wilderness or barren coastlines, like some fantasy-dungeon that the Adventurers' Guild must periodically raid in to avert a stampede of monsters.
> Is that really true?
Probably not true, but very intuitive!
Why should population scale with area? The top ten countries in area are:
Russia (#9 in population) Canada (#37) China (#2) USA (#3) Brazil (#7) Australia (#54) India (#1) Argentina (#33) Kazakhstan (#62) Algeria (#32)
There doesn't seem to be much relationship between the two?
If we believe that Claude pulled correct data: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d74a7c48-b5a1-4d86-acc2-e...
The scale and logistics of major ports like Barcelona, Hamburg, or Rotterdam are unimaginable.
Can anyone just put a container on a ship? I'm curious why the senders wouldn't be registered, and then extra scrutiny is given to newly registered senders, and senders are blacklisted and fined/jailed if it's found they're attempting to ship stolen goods under false manifests.
Indeed. If the UK can do something as wild as ChatControl, why not ShippingContainerControl?
It's even more strange than that when you consider that the UK hasn't been any sort of industrial manufacturer for many decades. What is it that is supposedly being shipped? Granted, some British auto manufacturers might be shipping those, but why should containers full of phones ever leave the UK? Every ship leaving their ports is leaving with stolen goods.
If anyone cared, this problem could be ended even without the cooperation of the destination countries. But no one hurt by this has enough political sway to do anything about it.
The UK exports a reasonable number of cars (I think less since Brexit now they make less sense going to Europe). Also machinery/technical equipment, pharmaceuticals, alcoholic drinks, clothing, furniture, etc
The crane that picks up the container to put it on the ship could work out the weight, anything that isn't empty gets inspected.
130,000 car thefts a year. That's over £1bn loss, probably closer to £4bn. In this context the total police budget of around £20bn seems remarkably low!
You'd have thought it'd be worth insurance companies paying people to track down the thieves!
Why bother tracking down thieves when you can just keep jacking up premiums? It's not like customers have a choice.
> Why bother tracking down thieves when you can just keep jacking up premiums? It's not like customers have a choice.
Insurance companies compete viciously with each other on price. Have you not seen their ads? If one could offer significantly cheaper insurance through some mechanism like that they definitely would.
They can choose to not pay for theft coverage. Different insurers compete but obviously trying to improve theft prevention would have to be a collaboration as it wouldn’t be able to lower only one insurer’s premiums.
>They can choose to not pay for theft coverage.
A mere six or seven figures spend on lobbying and/or wining and dining the legislature will plug that loophole.
The legislature will spew some grandiose bullshit about how in an effort to reduce the cost theft coverage is now one of the mandatory parts and half of the population will eat it up.
>would have to be a collaboration as it wouldn’t be able to lower only one
Which will never happen because reducing costs across the board is bad for insurers. Even if their margins are thin a thin margin on a big number gets you more money. They don't care how high costs go as long as they're uniformly distributed and/or predictable.
With all the technology that exists today, I'm surprised that we haven't invented something that would make it logistically and economically feasible to do a quick scan of e.g. all containers going into a port.
The volume of containers is unimaginably huge.
Take the Evergiven. It can fit ~20k containers. A “quick” check each going 2 minutes would add 40k minutes to loading, or 667 hours or 27 days. A month basically.
In a world where time is money no way they are checking all containers.
The hypothetical I'm imagining is that the trucks/trains going into a port go through something like a strip photography [0] x-ray machine, which doesn't need the vehicle to even stop at all. Some barcode/QR code on the side of the container connects to some manifest, and then a human (or AI?) can do a quick sanity check of "oh the manifest says this container is full of teddy bears but it sure looks like there's a car in there."
Obviously if it were that easy then somebody would have done it already, but I don't immediately see why that definitely wouldn't work. My guess is either a fast x-ray machine is implausible, and/or simply matching the contents to a manifest wouldn't be enough of a deterrent to criminals.
The real world disagrees with your conclusions. The US scans effectively all incoming containers, although they are not looking for stolen cars: https://www.dhs.gov/cargo-screening
the relevant text is near the bottom, under Results: Cargo screening As required by the 9/11 Act, 100 percent of all cargo transported on passenger aircraft departing U.S. airports is now screened commensurate with screening of passenger checked baggage. International inbound air cargo is more secure than it has ever been, with 100 percent of identified high risk cargo being screened. CBP now screens 100 percent of southbound rail shipments for illegal weapons, drugs, and cash, has expanded Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) coverage to the entire Southwest border and completed 651 miles of fencing. CBP has deployed Radiation Portal Monitors and other radiation detection technologies to seaports, land border ports, and mail facilities around the world. In 2003, these systems scanned only 68 percent of arriving trucks and passenger vehicles along the Northern border, no systems were deployed to the Southwest border, and only one was deployed to a seaport. Today, these systems scan 100 percent of all containerized cargo and personal vehicles arriving in the U.S. through land ports of entry, as well as over 99 percent of arriving sea containers.
But the goods going into the containers are coming from somewhere right. Why are they not checked at source or when they are due to be loaded?
If we wait until they are already in the containers, then yes, it is not feasible to check them all. Basically, the checks should be distributed, not concentrated at the port.
This would require a "container cop" at every loading point.
Containers get dropped off (empty) and loaded in all sorts of unexpected places. Not just big factories.
The big loading points would be easy to inspect, just require an independent property master or something. But you can load a container in your driveway and have it picked up for shipping to anywhere in the world.
You are assuming sequential processing, done by one checker.
We do have it. We just don't scan outgoing shipments. The US claims a > 99% scan rate for incoming containers, although they are not looking for stolen cars.
Spotting that a container has a car in it is not the same as a stolen car. You’d have to open up each container and run the plates.
The OP claims many stolen cars are exported under false manifests, so identifying a car and being able to compare that to the manifest helps. Once you can use manifests to identify cars (because you can spot containers trying to hide cars) you can put them through a different process – presumably this is part of the reason the manifests lie. Another thing is that I suspect most legitimate car exports go through a few companies so it may be that other shipping details can give big updates to your prior of whether it contains a stolen car.
Showing a completely legal electronics market in HQB in Shenzhen and claiming it's selling stolen phones is rather unfair - there is a building not far from that market that sells and recycles phones mostly by stripping them for parts and rebuilding them from scratch, but it's not that perfectly legal market that is so much fun to shop at
Sounds like a market opportunity for cheaper phones and cars globally.
A new aluminium iMac or MacBook Air, or MS surface for 200 dollars?
Those are the prices of stolen goods. A lot of people want a metal computer instead of a plastic one, but don't want to pay for it.
I was offered stolen goods at those prices and passed. A friend of mine took the bait as was super happy for a month or so until police took his new adquisition from him. Of course he received no compensation as it was stolen and they could prove it, so in the end it was expensive.
Expensive luxury cars are one big pain for society. Draining the economies and fuelling organized crime.
https://archive.is/T50Y3