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Thefts Of GPS Devices Spread As Prices Drop

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By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, The Associated Press

Published: September 19, 2007

Updated: 09/19/2007 12:33 am

BOSTON - When Austin Sweazy pulled into the parking lot of an auto-repair shop, his fiancee reminded him that even though their errand inside would last just a few minutes, it would be smart to lock the car doors.

After all, she said, 'you don't want anybody to steal your GPS.'

Sweazy heeded her advice, but it didn't matter. In the few minutes the couple were inside the store, a thief smashed the window of Sweazy's car, snatched his $600 TomTom portable navigation unit off the windshield and fled into the gathering dusk.

Valuable stuff has been swiped from cars forever, but the theft of portable satellite-navigation units is dramatically increasing in many places.

Crime analysts blame an alignment of economic and technological factors, while victims lament that the units, which cost several hundred dollars, are rarely recovered or replenished by insurance.

In Maryland's Montgomery County, outside Washington, D.C., 620 portable navigation devices were filched from cars through Aug. 31, blowing past the 189 taken in all of 2006. In downtown Philadelphia, GPS thefts jumped to 88 in the first eight months of the year from 33 in the same period of 2006.

Police say the perpetrators are getting more brazen, stealing units in busy places during the day.

Even people who take their GPS gadgets off their dashboards when they leave their cars are returning to find windows smashed, as thieves gamble that an empty plastic cradle suction-cupped to the windshield means a GPS unit has been hidden in the car.

Police say several things have come together to make this a lucrative crime - so lucrative, in fact, that victims often say GPS thieves ignored other valuable items in their cars.

The units, which gather real-time location information from global-positioning satellites and display that on digital maps, have come down in price enough to become relatively popular in higher-rent districts.

One leading maker alone, Garmin Ltd., will sell a few million this year.

Yet the devices still are not ubiquitous: Garmin also estimates that only 10 to 12 percent of North American drivers have portable or built-in GPS in their cars. That leaves a huge market of people to be enticed by cheaper-than-retail GPS units on sale in pawn shops or online, where thieves love to fence their finds.

Users should etch a marking into the devices and write down their serial numbers, then report those to police and the manufacturer if a theft occurs.

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