Thieves Steal Keys, Titles,
and $120,000 in Cars
When Thieves Target More Than Just Cars
A car dealership in Mapunapuna, Hawaii got a rude awakening this week when staff arrived to find their lot had been ransacked overnight. But this wasn’t your typical smash-and-grab.
At City Auto Sales, burglars cut through the gate lock, broke into the office and safe, and walked away with keys to nearly all 80 vehicles on the lot, the titles for almost every car, and six of the dealership’s priciest vehicles. Manager Tianqi Li estimated the stolen cars at around $120,000, with another $20,000 needed just to replace keys for the entire inventory.
Operational Chaos That Could Take Months to Untangle
The real gut-punch, though, wasn’t the cars — it was the paperwork. Li said the loss of the titles was the biggest blow, since some vehicles weren’t even registered in the company’s name yet, meaning a slow, painstaking process to sort out the paperwork all over again. The thieves didn’t stop there: they also cut the security camera lines and took the computer hard drives, leaving no surveillance footage behind.
Dealerships handle a unique kind of risk. Unlike a home or a warehouse, their entire inventory is mobile by design — which makes GPS tracking one of the most cost-effective tools available for loss prevention. A hidden GPS and Track tracker installed in each vehicle would have let City Auto Sales pinpoint the stolen cars within minutes of the theft, rather than waiting on police to spot them or for they to turn up elsewhere. Our real-time satellite trackers can also send a geofence alert the moment a vehicle leaves the lot outside business hours. Staff could have known something was wrong before they ever opened up Monday morning.
Want to try it out?
See our platform and trackers in action by checking out our live demo below.