When Matt Graham lugged his suitcases out to his car to pack it up for a family vacation, he was shocked to discover it had been stolen from outside his home in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood.
“It sucked,” he said of the October 2020 theft. “The last thing you think is you’re going to go out to get your car and your car’s not there.”
So when Graham got a replacement vehicle — the 2020 model of his never recovered 2019 Honda CR-V — he decided to better protect it by equipping it with a tracking system.
That made it easier for police to locate when, not 10 months later, one or more thieves made off with his replacement car, too — ahead of yet another family vacation.
“We couldn’t even believe it,” Graham said. “This is not possible that our car is stolen twice within the same year. Like, you think once in a lifetime is enough.”
Graham is part of a growing list of Montrealers who have lost their cars to thieves in recent years.
Theft is easier than ever
…These days, thieves can break into a car, hack into the on-board diagnostics (OBD) port and reprogram a smart key.
A device can also be used to capture the signal of a car key fob that is inside a house and then amplify the signal to open car doors.
“We’ve gotten rid of the conventional key, but the car makers didn’t really replace it with something equivalent,” said George Iny, executive director of the Automobile Protection Association (APA).
“So you had in the older cars a physical, mechanical and an electronic protection… Now you’re relying entirely on electronics.”
To prevent thieves from amplifying signals from your fobs, Iny suggests placing your smart keys in a metal box, away from your front door, “so that it’s not trying to communicate continually with the car when the car is parked.”
Another suggestion is to buy a small metal cap, which protects the OBD port to stop thieves from being able to plug in and reprogram smart keys.