I was in my early twenties when my second apartment got broken into. My insurance career was in its infancy, and my meager, post-college earnings meant a limited allowance for household and leisure purchases. I imagine my thief was sorely disappointed to discover an old-ish television with somebody else’s social security number engraved on it (remember when the SSN was used for so many different forms of identification?) which I had purchased from a pawn shop, a dusty, three-tray CD player, and pretty much nothing worth the trouble of breaking into my little efficiency and risking getting caught. There wasn’t even any half-decent alcohol. Aside from not being able to watch TV or listen to music that night, the absolute worst thing about it was feeling like my own personal space and belongings had been violated. There wouldn’t have been enough sage in the entire city to purify the funk of that experience, for weeks afterward.
Just over one week ago, I was a victim of a phishing scheme on social media. I’m sharing the details here in the hope that I may save someone else the trouble. I’ll beat some commenters to the punch who may tell me my actions were ill-advised, as I came to that conclusion right away. Some mistakes need to be made only once, so you’re welcome. Basically, I had received a message from a contact’s account, someone I liked and trusted, asking me for my phone number. She (or I had thought it was her) had written that she had gotten a new phone and she needed my help with being able to log back onto her social media account. She and I hadn’t seen each other since she had moved out of state a few years ago, so I figured I’d help out to show her I was still her friend.
I sent her my number, and she then had a code sent back to me, asking me to click on it for verification, which would enable her to access her social media account from her new device. I asked her if it was really her, and joked that I hoped I wasn’t allowing someone to hack into her account. The ironic response was an “LOL” with some other things that sounded like my friend. My contact’s hacker had even attempted to text using language like hers, likely obtained by scanning her old messages.
What I ended up doing by clicking on that link was authenticating that I had given some unknown person permission to access my account, where said person promptly changed the e-mail address associated with my account to a newly-minted e-mail address which wasn’t mine. They then deleted my old e-mail address and phone number from my profile so I could no longer retrieve or access my page using the normal retrieval methods. This all happened within only a few, short minutes, though I realized almost instantly what had happened.
I had lost complete control of my account, and the hacker went through my contact list and apparently had started messaging my contacts with the same ploy. There was a happy ending of sorts, where I was able to work with the platform to verify my identity (a process I had to go through twice, because my hacker was both clever and quick), regain control, and very quickly disable any access the hacker had to my account. This was not before damage was done. The hacker had already tricked at least one of my contacts, using my identity, and then hijacked that person’s account at a most unfortunate time for her. (I’ll concede that there is probably never a good time for something like this to happen.)
These two forms of theft, residential and cyber, also made me think of car theft, and of this Jaguar from around the turn of the millennium that I had spotted in an abandoned lot almost ten years ago. At its introduction in 1999 as a 2000 model, the S-Type was the entry-level Jaguar for just one year before the smaller X-Type arrived for 2001. The S-Type was based on the same Ford DEW98 platform that underpinned the Lincoln LS and reborn Thunderbird. From the taillamps and rear fascia, this example was from its original iteration before the slight restyle that arrived for ’04.
The “3.0” badge on the trunk indicates it was powered by the 241-horsepower V6 that was the base engine in the U.S. (A 2.5L V6 with 194 horses was standard in other markets.) A 281-hp V8 displacing 4.0 liters was also available. A five-speed automatic transmission was standard on the S-Type, though the related Lincoln LS could be had with a Getrag five-speed manual from 2000 through ’02 (which had a very low take rate of just over 2,300 cars). Just over 291,000 S-Types were produced over nine model years. I couldn’t help but feel pathos when looking at this example. Here was this imported luxury sedan, once cherished and now stolen, sitting stripped of its wheels, one block away from a major General Motors factory that stands next to a busy expressway.
General Motors Flint Assembly truck plant, across the street from the unfortunate Jaguar.
As with both incidents involving my social media account and my second apartment, the thing I struggled with the most immediately afterward was that both spaces seemed really unclean, as if there was nothing that could really bring back their innocence or the sense that I was safe there. Things take time, and I did eventually feel safe again in my apartment before eventually moving within the span of a year. As far as this Jaguar, it was almost a decade old by the time I found this dead cat sitting abandoned in the parking lot of a long-demolished lounge. By its otherwise nice condition both inside and out, it looked like it had been well cared for as what might have been somebody’s regular ride. Curbside readers, please take this as my public service announcement to review your own cyber security. Do it this week. If you’re like me and tend to want to help people, a little extra measure of healthy skepticism will probably be understood by those who really matter. Don’t get hacked into like me or this sad Jaguar.
Flint, Michigan.
Friday, February 15, 2013.
As it isn’t spelled out in the piece (and why would it be, this isn’t cybersecurity blog), I may as well enumerate a few good practices:
– Never reuse passwords or use a password schema that allows someone to guess a password
– Use a password manager like Bitwarden or 1Password
– Use 2FA anywhere it’s available and ONLY use SMS (text messaging) if it’s the only option. Otherwise use an app or token.
– NEVER give your 2FA code to anyone for any reason
Good cybersecurity starts with understanding that the vast majority of attacks come from password reuse and that just having unique passwords and using 2FA where available will be enough, but remember that if you’re targeted it will come by some uninvited contact asking you for authentication details. If you’re ever asked for such and you didn’t initiate the contact, you are being attacked.
Stay safe out there.
Anthony, thank you so much for this.
What a great post and hopefully you moved to Novi or Farmington Hills.
Thanks, Phil. My break-in didn’t happen in Flint, or even in Michigan. I just happened to be back the weekend of these pictures.
Ok. But Flint, it’s in the realm of possibilities.
Ouch!
Your shot looking across the street has a Magritte/Late For the Sky cover feel – daylight sky and night landscape in the same frame. It gives an unsettling effect, which fits the story. Sorry for both troubles; I thought myself immune to such things until I got suckered a few months ago into buying counterfeit goods. Fortunately I was able to convince my CC company to reverse the charge.
S Type (and X-Type) Jags were, I think, unloved by most Jag purists at the time, but in hindsight they seem better appreciated. This one seems to have been stripped of its wheels and just left to rot. A shame.
Wow – thank you. One cool thing about Flint is that it often seems to have an abundance of clouds that has made for some great opportunities with my camera.
I’m still a fan of the S-Type and thought the early ones (like this one) looked best, nicer to my eyes than the ’04 restyle.
When I first saw the pictures up top, I thought this would be about Jim Klein’s latest purchase. 🙂
I have been pretty fortunate in this way. I have believe I have avoided any real hacks (so far, at least). Didn’t they tell us that the internet was going to be such a wonderful place? I guess they forgot to take human nature into account.
My only real experience as a crime victim was within about 3 months after buying my first new car, the 85 GTI. My apartment building (which was not in the greatest neighborhood) had an open garage. Someone smashed the driver’s window and tried to rip the factory radio/cassette unit out of the dash. They didn’t get the radio but tore up the dash in the attempt. The feelings you describe are exactly what I experienced.
Wow. To have that happen to a three month old GTI would have made me a mixture of things, but mostly furious. I sometimes see nice cars parked on the streets of my neighborhood, and while I love my mixed-income neighborhood so much, I have to cross my fingers for some of the owners of these cars.
I had an ’86 rather than an ’85 GTi, which fortunately never was broken into, but the ’78 Scirocco I owned right before it was….broken front window. I still consider the A1 Scirocco to be the best looking car I ever owned, and was upset not only because it happened to me, but that it happened to a Scirocco. Fortunately, they didn’t take my toolbox (only tools I owned at that point, a gift from my Father in ’79, which I still own today).
The A1 Scirocco had a notorious susceptability to be broken into; apparently criminals would remove the rear window (it was easy to remove the mounting moulding) and lay the rear window underneath the car.. At least no one ever did that to mine. Probably still my favorite car, but more of a sentimental favorite, it was good I owned it in my 20’s as my current Golf seems too low to me now in my 60’s ..and of course the Scirocco was lower still, but great fun when I was still a scrambler.
Sorry your account got hacked…unfortunately common these days..I keep telling my mother to try to avoid the shysters and she pretty much is no longer online, but they also go at it by phone, and she gets flustered and forgets what I tell her about such calls. Before I retired, I used to be embarassed about how my dear departed Father used to deal with callers, but now that I’m home much of the time I’m beginning to be just like him…the phone system has become something like 1 relevant call to 99 trash calls…the shysters have sadly abused the phone system so much that it is almost all noise, and hardly any relevant or desired signal. (yeah, I even did work for Bell system before it got divested, and am sad for the state of the phone system nowdays).
Joe, that really stinks about both types of theft. Both erode trust tremendously.
A number of years ago we had a garage sale while living in Hannibal. At the end of the day, this lady shows up asking if we had received any counterfeit $20 bills. She said she had also had a garage sale and someone passed her a fake bill. Examining ours, sure enough, there was a phony $20 in the pile. That prompted an hour or two at the police station. The upshot is Hannibal is small enough the officers knew the perpetrator based upon our description; they had released her that morning.
On a lighter note, there was also a rash of car stereos being stolen around the same time. One morning I walked outside to my ’87 Dodge pickup and the door was wide open (I never locked it; there was no point). The thief had struck, but I had the last laugh…that old Dodge had a radio delete plate, so those thieves were SOL with me!
Jason, I like that you left the doors in your old Dodge unlocked. I can’t remember the exact context, but I have been around other owners of older cars who operated under the same philosophy. Leave it unlocked, lest you be out the cost of window glass should thieves actually want something out of an older vehicle.
And I liked that the Hannibal police actually were familiar with your perpetrator. I don’t think I’ve ever lived in but one place that had that small of a population.
Joseph, sorry you had to have these 2 experiences. What a shame!
When I was a young teenager growing up in Brooklyn NY, I had discovered a horrible incident. I had opened our front door to stick my hand in the mail box, and while I was doing this, I had looked over my shoulder and noticed that our next door neighbors front door (our houses were attached and our front doors were about 2 feet apart) was ajar. I though this was odd, as I didn’t see the wife’s car parked on the street, and I knew the husband was at work because he and my dad commuted together.
Being a bit dumb, I pushed the door open and stepped into the house. When I did that, I must of startled the intruder, cause I heard the back sliding glass door open and someone running out of the house.
The house was a mess! Every closet cabinet door was open and their contents thrown all around the house. It was a horrible site.
I didn’t know what to do, and this was before cell phones. The wife’s mom lived a few blocks away, so I ran over to her house and sure enough my neighbor was there. I told her what I discovered and we immediately hopped in her car and went to the police station.
This was a horrible experience, and even though it wasn’t our house, the though that it was our neighbors house made me feel so unsafe to be there for a very long time. The next day, both our houses had alarm systems installed.
That would have been truly horrifying – to actually walk in on a theft actively taking place. Reading your description of that house being in total disarray following the break-in reminded me of that aspect. At my apartment, I didn’t have an overabundance of stuff to be strewn around. I do remember, though, when my parents’ house has been broken into when I was a kid. Seeing things strewn all over seemed so sinister. Like, people had put their hands on them. It was the worst.
Years ago, my near-new mildly-posh car had all the windows smashed in my driveway, in what the glass-replacement guy told me was clearly a violent manner. With nothing stolen, local coppers were almost scornfully uninterested, despite my patiently trying to tell them that the nature of my work almost certainly meant that the destruction was not random.
I understand quite acutely your unsettled feelings lasting afterwards. It’s not nice.
As for the cyber attack, that’s horrible and dispiriting, and somehow even worse. It has the effect that some one has invaded your mind, which in a metaphorical way, they have.
I’m like some seatbelt avoider back in the day: I don’t go on dodgy sites, so no problem here. But as Anthony P kindly points out above, it’s the not wearing of the seatbelt (of password protection) that bypasses any good behaviour I might think I’m doing, and bang, they’ve got me. Shudder. I’m an open target of lazy passwords as I write this.
As for that poor old chubby-retro Jag, it was ever just a Ford in a flash suit, to my mind always headed to some ignominious end. Not terribly attractive, and not especially good (or, I concede, especially bad). It wheels have probably been worth more than it for some time now.
Thank you for your community service on this issue, Mr D. It’s a timely reminder. I hope the nasty taste fades away for you soon.
Can’t go wrong with “password1”. Timeless classic since 1992.
Justy, I can always count on you to make me laugh, though I will say that senseless destruction of property without even a theft seems like the worst. I actually quite liked the S-Type, then and now. I remember friends calling it a “Ford-uar”, but that didn’t bother me. I liked the modernity of the Lincoln LS and the retro-modern looks of the S-Type almost equally (with my final nod going to the Jaguar, because I’ma retro guy).
Aside from the stupid scam calls that I get just about every day, asking for me to press and talk to some idiot pretending to be a government official, I get the occasional email with suspicious links. One came in the other day that had all appearances of the bank I use. It asked me to click a link to open an important message. Undoubtedly it would have taken me to a screen to type in my password, and then, I imagine boom would have gone my funds.
Cases have been in the news about how people have forked over tens of thousands of dollars in phone cards to free up a loved one who has been jailed and needs bail money.
I was once hacked for airline loyalty points to the tune of $750. The loyalty people called me and asked if I had made a redemption in a city 2,000 miles away, and subsequently stopped the transaction. To this day I don’t know how they did it, but it followed your same pattern. Changing a password, changing an email address, etc.
My concern remains over banking over our mobile phones. If one ever loses that damn thing, I cannot even imagine the havoc that would follow.
Thank goodness for fraud monitoring services, and for folks like at the airline who alerted you to the loss of your points.
About the loss of a phone, I did have that thought earlier this year (unrelated to this). Ultimately, using two-factor authentication (2FA, as referenced above) can eliminate a lot of those worries.
It happens to the best and most cautious of us…. I was duped into buying a used iPhone that was activation locked and useless, in person, even though I knew to check for this and was carrying instructions with me (I simply forgot, having checked about four other things but not that; it’s not like I buy used phones all that often). I should have been tipped off when the place we met up was a store and not something that could be traced to him (I did ask to see his name on an ID, he showed me a credit card that I’m guessing was stolen; he claimed he didn’t drive so had no license). I was in a hurry; don’t’ do these things in a hurry. (Many legit sellers don’t want to meet up with a stranger in their home which is understandable – if so have them show up unlocking their front door and opening it, or ask to meet up in their workplace). Here’s a reasonably good guide to buying a used iPhone: https://www.howtogeek.com/774408/what-to-check-when-buying-a-used-iphone . I’d also insert your SIM card in it and make a test call before buying, and check the full model number and verify it’s designed to work on your mobile carrier).
I’ve never been hacked in a major way (though someone got hold of a longtime email address and it’s in the hands of spammers now). I’ve had plenty of attempts though. Usually these are done by bots, but there was a real person in a (now-defunct) home improvement/decorating/renovation forum I once frequented who claimed to be a 60-something woman who would occasionally start threads like “Show us your front entrance – looking for front door ideas” or same with mailboxes – either would show a street address. Other of her threads would more subtly try to get other things (like birthdays) that gave away personal info, none sufficient by themselves but when combined could be used to create fake identification. I’m quite sure this person was an ID thief.
I’ve had plenty of calamities affect my home (last two places prone to flooding) but thusfar no thieves breaking in. Likewise my car, although I’m often aware of trying to prevent theft of the car or its contents. I also have both a Tile and Apple AirTag hidden in it to help track it down, good for “where did I park my car?” too. The tires on my ’07 VW are nearly worn, and there’s a paucity of high-quality 15″ tires nowadays so I’ve been looking around for a set of VW or Audi 16″ wheels on craigslist and such so I’ll be able to get better tires (some recently-introduced tires start at 17″ now – arrrgh). I almost bought a nice set of alloys from a 2011 Jetta for $100 including the TPMS sensors but didn’t. I’m actually thinking I’d prefer steelies with wheel covers (like I have now) because they’d assumedly be less likely to be stolen, as were someone’s wheels around the block from me a few weeks ago. I’ve learned that the supposed weight savings from alloys doesn’t hold unless you buy expensive lightweight wheels, or less-expensive lightweight wheels that get bent too easily. At least for 21st century VWs, the weights of factory alloy and steel wheels are similar, and I have no problem with the looks of nicer wheel covers. Not that steel wheels are theftproof – my brother had a steel wheel stolen from his car then parked at a repair shop (the shop’s insurance doesn’t cover this? evidently not). The hubcap and two lug nuts had been removed from a second wheel – I wonder if they thought someone saw them and they ran away before they could steal it.
Wow – that person from the home improvement forum was clever.
Joe, I’m so sorry to hear that this happened to you, and thanks for the reminders here. ID theft is something that’ll likely target everyone at some point.
Just a few amusing anecdotes here:
1. The first time I fell victim to a computer virus was in the late ‘90s when I was in my mid 20s. I received an email at work titled “I Love You” – with a link to click on. The “sender” was a woman who was in her 70s who was a client of ours. Yes, I was really dumb enough to click on the link, which of course was a virus that infected my computer (Did I really believe that I found true love in a random email from a woman 50 years my senior??). Of course, then I had to bear the humiliation of telling my boss when I’d done, since my computer needed to be replaced. I took a lot of jokes over that one, but I learned a lesson that stays with me to this day to be very careful about clicking on links.
2. Wow, I remember etching social security numbers on stuff in your house. My dad etched his SSN on just about everything at one point, I’m pretty sure including things like the toaster oven.
3. One when I moved apartments when I was in my 20s, I hired movers, and my stuff had to be stored for a few weeks. Unfortunately, my stuff was broken into, but the thieves must have been as disappointed in my stuff as they were with your apartment belongings. I had a vacuum cleaner, a painting, and my kitchen chairs stolen. They weren’t interested in my ancient TV or stereo. There’s some satisfaction in thwarting thieves by being totally uncool.
4. I used to see stolen cars stripped down like this Jaguar quite a bit in Philadelphia in the 1990s. Occasionally, I’d take a quick picture as I drove by, but sadly (I guess) none of those pictures survive. I haven’t seen this kind of scene in quite a while.
Well, thanks again for the PSA, and good luck getting stuff back in order.
Eric, thank you – and I enjoyed reading this. It makes wonder if there are any things with my own SSN still engraved on them. That was a different time!
And there was also a part of me that besides being upset, was snickering a little bit when I wondered how disappointed my thief / thieves might have been when they realized how little they were about to score.
I was actually pretty fortunate. I do all the fraud monitoring stuff, and I was actually able to get control of my social media account the same day – though I was holding my breath. Others might not have been so fortunate. My one friend had to start a completely different and new account, and I felt horrible about that.
Well, that’s unfortunate on all accounts. I think Jim Klein already got better tires for his Jag so he is clearly not the perp in this case.
Sometimes these things are surprisingly not fake. As I type I’m on hold with the Canada Revenue Agency, they audited my 2020 tax return and emailed for more information back in September. I thought “No way, that’s a scam for sure” and promptly forgot about it. Now they think I owe them $7k, I need to straighten this out before I can do my 2021 taxes. 🙂
Doug, I hope all went well with the CRA! Like you, I see things that arrive in the mail, and normally assume they’re spam or garbage before scrutinizing them a bit more. I might have done the same thing as you. One unpleasant task that I find mildly irritating: shredding unwanted solicitation mail with my personal identifiable information on it. Dang it, I want that three minutes back at the end of a workday.
I won’t enter into the details recommended for avoiding ID theft, as there have been plenty above, all of them good. But Í’ll tell you something; after 25+ years in information security, I have seen lots of people who have had their accounts hacked in one way or other, even though they were supposed to know better. That says much more about how the human mind works and how we trust some messages, than about our professional knowledge. And yes, I have been hacked and otherwise scammed in this way, and some of my professional duties include training people on how to avoid being scammed. So, to everybody, don’t feel dumb if you fall. It’s how our mind work.
Thanks, Rafael. I did eventually cut myself a little slack for what happened, but the lesson has been properly learned!
That sucks that this happened to you, Joseph, but thanks for the warning. The worst theft I experienced was getting pickpocketed in Naples (Italy, not Florida). Although they mercifully didn’t get my passport or any of my cash, they did get my drivers license, residence card, and all my credit cards. The thieves were luckily dumb enough to try to make big purchases right away on the credit cards, so they were blocked outright. As for the ID cards, I’m sure there are some grifters roving around Europe using fake ID cards that have my picture on them.
Love your photos here. I always thought the S-type was a nice design.
When I visited southern England back in 2009, we were warned that we would get pickpocketed if we weren’t careful, so I wore a fanny pack for the first and only time in my life. No problems, other than that I looked like a dork. 🙂
Sorry this happened to you, Joe. Yuck.
Thanks, Corey – and that sounds like a nightmare. I was so afraid to have money and identification stolen when I traveled abroad five years ago that I went to extreme measures to try to make sure those things were secure.
Right now, there are these commercials that run at prime time here in the U.S. on some retro TV stations that advertise for fraud indemnification services, and I’m always surprised that thieves try to buy such big-ticket items, even vehicles sometimes.
I guess I’ll just never understand the complete absence of fear of getting in trouble. Or the actual consequences of just being a bad person.
Avoid clicking on those posts you see on websites like Facebook where you do a quick survey to find out if a celeb likes the same colour as you or who you were in a previous life or some other superficial quick gratification nonsense. They always, always want you to sign in to that website again WITH YOUR FACEBOOK USER NAME AND PASSWORD WHILE YOU ARE ON FACEBOOK ALREADY to see the results or share them with your friends. Even if you click on them and don’t complete them, you just gave the hacker someone to focus on because you clicked on it!
I have friends who do those, they’re always complaining about being hacked.
The only theft I’ve experienced was when my home was broken into and some cheap crap stolen and a few years later when someone in Henderson, NV tried to use my card numbers at a wal-mart there. I never use my debit card unless I’m withdrawing cash at my bank’s ATM. I use my credit card for everything else because I’m protected if it gets stolen.
This is great advice. I remember there being a lot of “quizzes” and things on some social media platforms some years back, including some in questionnaire form that asked a whole bunch of things and required a separate sign-on.
I’ll get the random duplicate connection request (seemingly) from somebody I’m already connected to, and I’ve long since learned to ignore them.
WhatsApp is the worst when it comes to people who absolutely do not know you reaching out with some bs. Some people actually need WhatsApp to contact people in countries other than where they live. I always hope these scammers get the absolute worst of what’s coming to them.
Thanks to everyone for their security tips. A mate in his seventies got ripped off to the tune of some seventy thousand dollars (OK, only Aussie dollars, but still…) when scammers hacked into his account. It happened much the same way as Joe describes. I get a lot of hack attempts on FB, mostly from total strangers; few folk have my phone number to get at me that way.
As to passwords: How about the chassis number or engine number or VIN of the first car you wrenched on. You had to quote it often enough at the parts counter, right? Throw in a few exclamation marks in place of ones, and @s in place of zeroes. Should be pretty secure, and completely unguessable.
Wow. Peter, I hope your friend was able to recover some of that money. People work hard, save, and stuff like that happens… Sorry I sound salty – it was a long day at work today. And that’s a great password idea.
Over the years our house in Toronto was broken into a couple of times. We were fortunate in that there was no random damage. Once they broke the door, which was surprisingly expensive to repair. We did lose some inherited gold jewelry which had some sentimental value, but I would never use.
One thing I lost that continues to annoy me was the owner’s manual for my Citroen 2CV. I was surprised but pleased when the manual came with the car when I bought it. Because 2CVs are known to be less than watertight I decided to keep it in the house to avoid damage and it happened to be sitting on the top of my dresser. There was a break in and they just swept almost everything off the top of dresser, which included the owner’s manual. Those were pre-internet days, so I expect they just pitched it when they saw what it was. What a waste! What made it even more strange was that there was over $100 on the corner of the dresser sitting under a bill and they missed it.
The destruction or theft of things that have sentimental value to us that others just wouldn’t get is the kind of loss that stings the most. I get it.
Thanks, everyone. My situation ended up fine (to the best of my knowledge), and I appreciate the concern. Honestly, and like I said, I just wanted to put a reminder out there to others about cyber security because I had thought of myself as being reasonably savvy when it came to these things.
To Rafael’s point above, though, sometimes a “human” decision to do something or break a principle we otherwise wouldn’t can sometimes be our Achilles’ heel.
It’s not unintentional that I sometimes interweave details of my life with the cars I choose to write about. It’s always in the back of my head that I want to write from a place of authenticity, but I sometimes change or withhold details that I feel either are irrelevant to what I want to say, or could jeopardize myself or others I reference. I think I’ve done a pretty good job of that. There have been a few instances when one of my old essays resurfaced as a rerun and I had to quickly delete or amend some part of the text, but for the most part, I feel pretty good about what I’ve written here. I had no idea when I started contributing to CC years ago that I’d still be doing it now.
Another good thread .
The car looks like the theft – recoveries I used to buy and re hab for sale, many were in good shape just missing tires, battery and stereo .
Sad about the up tick in thefts, I have dogs yet I’ve been broken into and stuff stolen .
My old 1982 VW Rabbit Convertible never had a stereo when I owned it, I also left brightly colored wires hanging out of the open dashboard radio hole and the door unlocked, this didn’t stop some jerks in North Holloywood from slicing the three week old $1,500.00 Harrtz top on it the night they stole stereos from a bunch of cars in a fenced in parking lot…
-Nate
Strangely, I don’t remember any of my cars ever being broken into. Your ’82 Rabbit convertible story would have made my blood boil. Years after my ’88 Mustang was taken in trade for my ’94 Probe, my parents received notification that “my” Mustang had been found / recovered after being stolen, which I found both sad and funny. Nobody was going anywhere fast in that car (a 2.3L-equipped LX), so I figured it must have been some young, inexperienced joyriders who had finally brought that car to its final fate.
You guys tell a fascinating story that somehow, someway includes the Jaguar S/X series. Well, for similarly strange reasons, an old friend and I decided to take one stage rally racing through the woods at over 100mph. Find us on yt or fb @DirtyJaguarRacing and let us know if this is a good idea, lol
Ha! I figured a few sentences about the actual car were in order. 🙂
I also got ripped off during actual home improvement. One of the first things I did after this house was bought was to replace every incandescent light bulb with LEDs to save on electric bills (they use about 1/8 the electricity and give off nearly identical light). As the renovator’s subcontractors were working on the house before we moved in, I started noticing more and more LED bulbs (this was 2014-ish, when they were still expensive) were quietly being replaced with incandescents, evidently hoping nobody would notice the difference. Several bulbs and fixtures were broken by the renovation crew – they said to expect that in a basement being finished. Should have been an omen; they did a crap job and some of it will need to be redone after only 8 years.
In a similar fashion, someone from my university auto shop class was replacing the Snap-On sockets with cheap generic stuff from China, but the instructor noticed the difference and told the class they were on to the theft.
oops this was meant as a reply to Joseph from an earlier post
I noticed the plates were taken off the Jag….couldn’t the VIN be traced?
Years ago the wife and kid came home one afternoon as someone was rifling through our bedroom looking for jewelry and other sundry items. Thankfully for us all, the intruder heard the garage door opening and scrammed out the (unlocked) backdoor that is normally deadbolted. Thank God for that.
A few years ago it was road-trip eve, where the kid and I were driving halfway across the country to visit my family. I get an alert from my CC company that they have frozen my account due to fraudulent activity (and I’ll give props to them – they’ve always looking at unusual spending patterns and reaching out to clear a concern). Unfortunately, I only have one active CC that I pay off monthly, and here we were about to embark across country.
The fraud took place on the West Coast at a Target store – 3 fraudulent $4,000 charges had gone through before the 4th charge finally triggered the alert and shut it down. I had numerous questions for the CC folks – if I can’t buy a $300 meal on the East Coast without a flag raising because of the amount, how did 3 charges get through? Meanwhile, the account was frozen until they could investigate and conclude, which would take some time.. To start our trip I had to reactivate an old CC.
I’m a pretty non-violent person, but I’d love to meet these scammers….