#CarCrime

Once in a while we see a story about a young person with a muscle-car terrorizing local residents in a major city. Today, we have another -- this one involves a 20-year-old who appears wealthy, a Dodge Challenger Hellcat, and social media. The usual ingredients.

While car crime has been up generally in recent years, some North American cities have seen staggering increases in automotive theft. Toronto estimates that it has endured a nearly 150-percent in automotive crime over the past six years and local authorities are rolling out a new tactic to cope with the situation — police have advised the public to just let thieves take their vehicle.

Catalytic converter theft has become a popular pastime for criminals looking to make a quick buck in the United States. Instances of stolen units have absolutely exploded in recent years, reaching a point where some law enforcement departments have gone out of their way to specifically target organized groups bent on stealing the devices.

State Farm is reporting that the situation is finally getting better in America. While technically true, theft rates remain staggeringly high across the country.

The United States doesn't have a monopoly on shady car dealerships.

Looking at the news, it’d be easy to think that catalytic converter theft is carried out by a wily group of bandits under cover of night, but that’s not always the case. A Philadelphia-based towing company is in hot water after almost a dozen people ran a theft ring that racked up millions in stolen catalytic converters. 

We know catalytic converter theft is a problem and that thefts have risen since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

A report out of Los Angeles shows just how much of a pain it can be to have your converter swiped, especially if you drive a Toyota Prius.

Volvo has reportedly filed a new patent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that would add digital protections designed to prevent modern car thieves from doing what they do. While the golden age of car thievery typically involved criminals skulking around in the dark to find an isolated model they could jimmy open and then hot-wire, today’s thieves tend to linger in crowded parking areas our outside homes with computers that scan and capture the codes being transmitted remotely from the key fob to the car.

Here's a story involving shady behavior and dealerships that is a flip of what we've covered lately. In this case, it's a would-be customer screwing the dealership.

Five people in Texas, two of whom work for UPS, have been charged with trafficking cocaine via shipping packages.

We all know the scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off where Ferris and Cameron tried to roll back the mileage on Cameron's dad's prized Ferrari -- an attempt that ended with the car shooting out of the garage and into a ravine.

Car thieves broke into a car dealership in Queens, New York over the weekend, snatched the keys to 26 vehicles, and took them home.

Columbus, Ohio City Attorney Zach Klein said earlier this week that he intends to file a lawsuit against Hyundai and Kia.

A Wichita car dealership has been banned from selling cars in the state of Kansas.

As if living through a pandemic and endless speculation that the United States is sliding away from democracy weren’t bad enough, some people decided that 2020 and 2021 were great times to start stealing catalytic converters at a record pace. The issue has been bad enough to make national news several times, but the Department of Justice just announced a major bust that could at least slow things down for a while.

With catalytic converter theft having risen by 300 percent across the United States through the summer of 2021, regions of the country that have seen crime rates dwarfing the already brutal national average have started to introduce laws designed to prevent the issue from getting any worse.