Everything You Need to Know About Preventing Auto Theft Rings
Grand theft auto has seen a sudden surge in popularity. The latest heists have left victims and authorities flabbergasted at their sophistication. The use of novel technology and carefully crafted fake documents have made scams profitable on a surprisingly large scale.
Just in the last year, car crooks were busted for a long-running scheme in which home-stuck New York inhabitants’ parked cars were the primary targets. Using a host of high-tech tools, including forged electronic keys and car computer reprogramming rigs, they were able to make off with well over one hundred vehicles. Once stolen, the cars were altered to obscure their origins, and, with the help of phony documents, new registrations and titles were obtained from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.
Unfortunately, this is far from an isolated incident and the criminals’ ability to slip forged documents through state registration processes without tripping any alarms is even more worrying. Besides implementing better surveillance measures at dealerships and in residential areas, preventing auto theft rings comes down to securing purchase points and registration processes with powerful ID verification solutions.
What Is An Auto Theft Ring?
Car theft rings are organized groups of criminals involved in systematically stealing vehicles and then profiting from them in various ways. Whether stolen cars are dismembered in illegal chop shops to resell their parts or shipped overseas to sell as they are, once they have been taken, they can be difficult to recuperate.
These criminals are leveraging a combination of cutting-edge technology and fake documents to profit from their schemes, bringing forged or stolen identity documents directly to dealerships to secure auto loans they will never pay off.
All permutations of these types of criminal organizations spell bad news for dealerships with low or no scalable security solutions in place to fend them off.
The Threat of Technology
Auto theft is a huge threat to individuals and organizations alike. Simple tools such as key fobs are now being plucked from in-car cup-holders to facilitate even easier theft operations than those they were intended to prevent.
Thieves looking to sell their pilfered vehicles are later able to leverage an extremely strong position of relative anonymity. They can sell a stolen vehicle under a fake or stolen identity and slip away without a trace, leaving heist victims and buyers to sort out the messy details.
Unfortunately, the ramifications of such crimes reach further than one might readily assume. Insurance premiums have been impacted by such spikes in car criminality, leading to larger expenses for car owners everywhere.
Preventative Measures to be Taken
ID verification is one of the only ways that fraudulent auto transactions can be stopped. By validating a purchaser’s identity before a transaction is completed, you can keep both your business and customers safe. With that said, manual techniques are both time-consuming and error-prone. That’s why utilizing highly accurate, advanced technology to validate driver’s licenses is crucial. With the right partner, you can keep your sales process moving quickly and ensure you’re working with real customers. That’s where Intellicheck comes in.
With Intellicheck, you can take advantage of fast, reliable integration options designed to be up and running as quickly as you need them to. Our turnkey web portal provides full ID validation functionality you can access in an instant, while our deeper API integration options are able to mesh seamlessly with your branded IT architecture.
IDs validated with Intellicheck are not only optically scanned, but their security features are also parsed to ensure they are genuine. Results are returned in less than a second with 99.9% accuracy, giving your team the go-ahead to finalize each sale on the spot.
