Ontario man finds GPS Tracker on his truck.

GPS sucks for tracking. Put the car in an underground parking lot and theres a chance it could lose the signal. With RF you don't get these problems. Same thing if you put the car into a shipping container. Chances are the GPS signal will be lost. Who put it on his car is anybodies guess, but I don't really see it being a huge issue. The company who wouldn't tell him who the device is registered to is just following their confidentiality policy. I guess his next step would be get the police involved and ask them to get a warrant for the company to disclose the information as it infringes his human rights or some such thing..

reply to post by Anishnaabe
Could be something as simple as this: www.rmtracking.com...

Originally posted by charlyv

Originally posted by I.C. Weiner
reply to post by Anishnaabe

 

I am an IT guy, and you are correct on both points. It would be possible to find the frequency that it is transmitting on, intercept packets, then be able to tell where the packets are being sent. Or plug in the card and get the info from there.

Not so easy. The frequency here is irrelevant. It would not be transmitting on a discreet radio band since there would be no effective range. In order to be effective, this thing either logs locally and is designed to be retrieved later, or it will use the cellular network, GSM/GPRS, most like a 3g or 4g connection which means it is encrypted and subscribed. There will be links to the subscription, but the other end may be anonymous and hard to identify. It would take a government query to trace the subscription to the ultimate user, unless the user was sophisticated to the point where they have left no tracks back to themselves. This is tough to back engineer.

You can buy a simple little arduino device today, attach a GSM module and a GPS module, all for under $50.
If you are really stealthy and technically competent, you can hack this device into the cellular grid by many methods.
This kind of thing will become a big issue soon, if not already.

edit on 23-2-2012 by charlyv because: spelling , where caught

Thanks for the tech savy, this explains much. I guess a car repossesor would want to know where a car is, not where it went. I suppose the sim card makes this one a real time talker. Why worry about what is stuck on your car when you are carrying a cellphone anyway. It is one too. The car one is just a backup.

reply to post by Anishnaabe


Honestly, his wife could have put it there to see where he's heading. It might be a rudimentary device without live viewing that you need to remove and plug into a computer before you can see the data.

They are cheap and easy to find, these days.

But... then again... it was probably TPTB.

reply to post by Anishnaabe


This device might have been discovered and then removed from someone elses car and then attached to his truck just to get rid of it or to send the monitoring authorities on a wild goose chase. That is what I might do if I found one on my car. If you simply de-activate the thing by throwing it into a river or something like that they will figure another way to track you. This was is ingenious. They think they are tracking you.

reply to post by Cyprex


Pop that sim card in a phone and start making as many long distance calls as possible. Tether it to a PC and download the internet. Call the FBI and threaten to harm the POTUS.

Could also insert his own (the OP if he had a sim card) and see what number it dials out.

Originally posted by ANNED
I would never have told anyone.
Take it to the nearest railroad yard and put it on a cargo container going back to china
Or go to the local truck stop and put in on a long haul truck.

Or even put it on a police car and let the owner explain it to the cops.

I was thinking the same thing. If it was me I would strap it to a cow in a pasture somewhere and set up some game trail cams and wait to see who showed up to clame it. Surely they would need to investigate if the tracker started going around in circles in field somewhere.

Yeah if I were him and seen that SIM card I would have laughed. I would have had to have it read and traced before I did anything like contact the police.

Maybe it used a SIM card that would not fit in his phone or anyone else but that doesn't mean it cant be read. It probably used both GPS and the cell network to track it for times when the cell is out of range as GPS will get lost in many places.

Clone a few extra sim cards.
Put them in cell phones and give them to the homeless.
What the people that were tracking him would see would be a number of new targets pop up and they would have to track them down.

It would be fun to see some PI try to pry the cell phone out of the hands of some smelly homeless psycho hands.

Do you guys think this was done by an individual or a government entity?

Wonder what his crime was, selling raw milk?

At-least they didnt try to charge him for it:

Caught Spying on Student, FBI Demands GPS Tracker Back

reply to post by Goldcurrent


I actually got to know a PI who specialized in Workman's Compensation Fraud. That's all he does and he contracts with two States. I don't know if the problems are the same in Canada or not?

He had found that nearly 75% of Workers Comp claims were fraud. He had no shortage of business and was doing really well. People look at stealing money in this way as not stealing, even though it of course. He showed me his equipment, which was primarily camera gear and he had I'm guessing lenses that were in the $30,000 range after pricing them. He simply parked a quarter of a mile away and waited until they were in their yard doing physical labor they were not supposed to be able to do.

I approved completely of what he was doing. These fakers and liars are responsible for driving the costs through the roof here for employers. I don't know if it's the same in Canada or if the State covers these costs?

reply to post by Blaine91555


This is a problem here as well. Worker's compensation premiums are paid by the employers. As any insurance claims, the more claims the higher the premiums paid. I agree this is stealing, and the deadbeats who do this need to be caught.

I never knew that 75% of claimants are proved to be fraud but I wouldn't be surprised at all. There were a few guys at my former place of employment who I am sure were milking it.

Originally posted by bjrichardson
reply to post by Anishnaabe

 

Could be something as simple as this: www.rmtracking.com...

This is exactly what I was inferring to in an earlier post. There are no regulations here, and there are ways to hack this stuff so that there are just no ways to trace it back unless there is government involvement, and then again, the technical savvy of the ultimate user, if good enough, can make this a dead end quite easily. As I said, this is going to become another major bug policy issue driven by the public. You will be able to tell how much the PTB respond to it, by the response to it. My guess, not very much, since the govies have been doing it since inception, and do not want to lose the capability..

I do love me a conspiracy