Man accused of placing GPS device on victim’s car before burglarizing her home

arstechnica.com

19 points·darxius··7 comments

Is tracking someone's car a crime? It comes off as a newer form of stalking, in the casual if not legal sense of the term.

I'm surprised these sorts of crimes don't happen more often. They probably do, but we just don't hear about them as much.

Trackers are cheap these days and even Mission Impossible style devices/bugs can be had that are just a little bigger than a car remote. Or if you're the DIY type, there are circuit and project boards with built in GPS chips or add-on modules available and you can buy plastic cases in standard sizes.

I think that once you reach a certain level of sophistication, you become able to make more money with less risk by working within the system. Just about anyone on this site could come up with really smart burglary plans, but even ignoring the morality of it, why bother? There are easier ways to make money with they sort of brainpower.

It doesn't take much brain power to walk into RadioShack.

And the money to be made in crime is way more than developer salaries. The new frontier for crime is bitcoin fraud.

"The new frontier for crime is bitcoin fraud."

I don't know much about bitcoin but I'm intrigued. Could you please elaborate?

They're cheap and ubiquitous, no one is looking for them, and the data can be fed from an anonymous prepaid SIM to a virtual number (Google voice, for example).

Not surprised that this happened, surprised that the burglar was sophisticated enough to plan this but not sophisticated enough to recover it as well.

Of course the FBI wanted to do the same thing without warrants.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/02/25/fbi-turns-off-thousan...

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