Tesla assigned my Model 3 to some random person in Europe | Hacker News Reader

Tesla assigned my Model 3 to some random person in Europe

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44 pointsbrrrrrm20 comments

Similar thing was happening across all Volkswagen Group (VW, Audi, Škoda, Porsche) models some time ago. They had a bug in their enrollment code and it was possible to list all cars and then assign any (capable) car to your mobile app. It's fixed now but a lot of cars were stolen because of it - I personally know a guy who stole over 100 vehicles this way (his prison sentence has already ended), and I confirmed this story with a friend who works on 3rd line tech support for Škoda.

Do you have a source for this? I can't find anything about it myself, but you seem to be well-connected with customer support and people who apparently both know and make used of these supposed exploits.

I live near a major Škoda hub, I have multiple friends working there at different positions - SWEs, support etc (I've myself worked on a Škoda project for few months some years ago - but that was an externally done project so I met only the other consultants). All confirmed the story, but only the support guy encountered it himself directly.

The guy who stole the cars was just a former low-level gang member who got all this stuff prepared for him by others and was only supposed to open the car and drive to Germany. He said it was done by walking to the car with a tablet and pushing a button in an app once it became green. He said he got 1000 EUR for each car. I met him at a bar.

There was a big halo about stolen VW Group cars around here so I believe it fully. It was really unusual how much these cars were being stolen between 2013-2018.

I can't find any articles about this. It seems unlikely these thefts were ignored for so long that someone managed to track down over 100 cars and drive them all the way to Germany, and that it still wasn't reported anywhere in the papers or news.

Today over 2500 cars are stolen every year in our small state, and it was 10k in 2012 and 2013 and 8.5k in 2014, and suddenly decreased to 3k in 2017 (just around the time the guy from the bar went to prison)... Why is it so unlikely? They didn't do it at once - it was over years. There's a case such as this every few years - usually they just use brute force or key skimmers though, this one was unusually technical.

The guy from the bar said driving in Germany was the easiest part, since they paid off the border guards and the German highway police doesn't bother you too much if you don't do anything stupid. That's true from my experience too - even when I was driving 250 km/h all around the country they never stopped me. The local police here is doing random stops and checks much more.

> paid off the border guards

I am sorry. This doesn't pass the smell test for me.

You have too much faith in the underpaid workers - how do you think all the drugs are getting around?

Don't forget this is not a border checkpoint where they'd be stopping each car and checking visas, duty and taxes - this is inside Schengen, so there's a policeman or two if anything, and they won't ever stop you unless you look super-super-suspicious. I haven't seen anyone at all there for the past few months when I passed the border point several times, I go through at 100 km/h all the time (well there's a very short strip of 60 km/h to be exact).

Anyways, he might be lying about that, or his gang lied to him. He said nobody ever stopped him - and that's perfectly believable. It was a guy in a shirt/suit going to Germany in a nice car like thousands of others, no reason to stop him.

That was my point: there is no border guard to bribe.

If this is about the word (policeman/border guard/whatever) then remember we spoke in another language and I'm translating it all into a language I myself wasn't born with.

If you mean that nobody ever is there - that's not true. Ocassionaly they put up a guard, sometimes even a guard stopping each car, e.g. when the pope went to Poland there were nonstop guards stopping each car (yes I mean on the German border, and that was just around the time he stole the cars btw); when the "immigration" "crisis" was in full swing they were there nonstop too, etc.

The commenter said he heard this through a friend-- aka that is his source. Why are you asking him to further back up the story? He (or maybe she) is not your research assistant.

I literary put his sentence[1] into google with the addition "Hack" and that came out:

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/hacked-android-phones-unlock-m...

https://www.wired.com/2015/07/gadget-hacks-gm-cars-locate-un...

Please do at least minimal work to find the information you want an stop bothering others, since we have search engines we don't need to ask librarians for every small information anymore, i don't know if it's the right "hack" but since i wasted more then 3 minutes just for you, i think that is enough.

[1]possible to list all cars and then assign any (capable) car to your mobile app hack

I notice that you and "danielfoster" here in this thread post similar and very peculiar replies.

Because people who have then knowledge of humankind in front of their face but still ask stupid things (and consume other peoples time instead of investing their own) annoys us...maybe?

These Internet-connected cars are a real risk. Who knows what other things can be done remotely that us customers have no clue about?

Was a time, if you took out the SIM card, the problem mostly went away.

But now they have virtual SIM cards.

Meanwhile I can’t register my BMW on the BMW app because it was first registered in Japan and then exported to New Zealand.

Why do you need to register your car with an app? What would happen if you left it unregistered?

Could one remove the sim or antenna to fix such a problem on a Tesla?

I've been hanging on to my "dumb" 4k TV for the past 8 years.

I had no idea that I'd have to prepare for something similar with a car.

Makes me happy that my car has absolutely no internet-connected parts

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