Ot­to Car­ring­ton

Se­nior Re­porter

ot­to.car­ring­ton@cnc3.co.tt

A dump­ing ground for a ve­hi­cle theft ring has been un­cov­ered in Va­len­cia, putting law en­force­ment and pri­vate se­cu­ri­ty on high alert.

The site, lo­cat­ed along Cumaca Road in Va­len­cia, was dis­cov­ered a month ago af­ter sur­veil­lance by Es­tate Po­lice Of­fi­cers and Air Sup­port Tac­ti­cal Se­cu­ri­ty Lim­it­ed.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia, Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer Dirk Barnes said the thieves were tak­ing the cars to ar­eas with­out GPS cov­er­age for dis­man­tling. 

He said, “In the past, we’ve had quite a few stolen ve­hi­cles end up on this side. Typ­i­cal­ly, the car thieves would steal a ve­hi­cle around two o’clock in the morn­ing, bring it to this lo­ca­tion, strip the cars, and at­tempt to de­ac­ti­vate the GPS track­ing de­vices and the car is ba­si­cal­ly lost.”

“They could spend two to three hours at this lo­ca­tion tak­ing a car apart and then, as you can see, dis­pos­ing of the con­tents of the ve­hi­cle.”

At the site, Guardian Me­dia ob­served rem­nants of per­son­al ef­fects such as in­sur­ance poli­cies, car steer­ing wheel cov­ers, and var­i­ous gen­er­al items from cars.

Barnes said this was one of many lo­ca­tions, adding, “We have lo­ca­tions in Cunu­pia, Tamana and Biche, and in rur­al ar­eas where cell sites are fur­ther apart and car thieves tend to op­er­ate more fre­quent­ly. They find com­fort op­er­at­ing in the East-West Cor­ri­dor, where they are more fa­mil­iar and com­fort­able.

Due to the lack of cov­er­age, Barnes said, his com­pa­ny is now forced to up­grade its tech­nol­o­gy.

“These in­tel­li­gence-led op­er­a­tions have re­vealed the types of tech­nol­o­gy car thieves are us­ing. We’ve en­coun­tered jam­mers and seen videos where they’re us­ing lap­tops to re­mote­ly start cars. We know they’re us­ing man-in-the-mid­dle at­tacks, so we have de­cid­ed to up­grade our tech­nol­o­gy,”  he said.

“Our GPS track­ing de­vices have be­come small­er and now con­tain more mi­cro­pro­cess­ing pow­er. They are now more like mini­com­put­ers than just GPS track­ers. This en­hance­ment al­lows us to track ve­hi­cles be­yond the GPS sig­nal, so if the GPS sig­nal is jammed, we can still track our ve­hi­cles. We re­cent­ly in­tro­duced this ad­vanced tech­nol­o­gy and are one of the first com­pa­nies to of­fer such a cut­ting-edge so­lu­tion.”

Barnes said they no­ticed car thieves were op­er­at­ing very ef­fi­cient­ly and bold­ly, steal­ing two or three cars a night.

“At that point, we de­cid­ed to work with the TTPS to gath­er more in­for­ma­tion on them, he said.

“What we can say is that they were not on TTPS’s radar—no one knew they ex­ist­ed, and there were no pri­or records of their ac­tiv­i­ties. How­ev­er, dur­ing an op­er­a­tion led by our com­pa­ny in this area a few months ago, we cor­nered one of the car thieves who chose to wait us out. We man­aged to re­cov­er our cus­tomer’s ve­hi­cle and, in the process, iden­ti­fied the thief.”

Since the dis­cov­ery, the East­ern Di­vi­sion of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice has in­creased pa­trols in the area.