How Apple AirTags are being used by criminals

good afternoon everyone marco ricciardi from 22 division toronto police i'm here with my partner tom balaga we're here to talk about a new uh product or fairly new product it's been about a year in uh in the market and uh it's about the apple air tanks and these little things here are being used to mark a vehicle and what the thieves are doing is that they're walking around they're shopping outside in the parking lot here and what they're doing is that when they find a car that they like they stick these to the car or place them on the car somehow and they're magnetic so as you can see uh it'll stick to metal so it could be hidden behind a license plate it could be hitting in the trailer hitch receiver or even in a gas tank uh cap area and once you go home they just track their device uh to your driveway and then when you're sleeping comfortably they come and steal your car or truck so what we want to let you know is some of the things to do to prevent this from happening so i'm going to start with iphone users if you get a notification saying that there's an air tag near you what you can do is that you can use the location service of your phone to pinpoint the proximity of the air tag and then once you have that air tag you can disable it if there's one of these on your vehicle i recommend that you call your local police department and the officers will come seize it this little shiny part here and this little plastic part we could possibly get fingerprints off it and know who's been putting this on your car you can also deactivate it by just twisting it and pulling the battery out the only thing that's in here is a simple watch battery the battery on these last anywhere from six months up to one year of trackability so to help other people that are using non-apple phones apple created an android version of an app called tracker detect and what it does is if an apple air tag is around you for more than 20 minutes you can download this app and you can scan the area that you're in to see if one of these has been dropped into your pocket into your purse stuck to your car and after that 20 minute period has elapsed the app will pick up because of the bluetooth frequency that it uses and then you can zone in on the tag and locate it what you can also do is you can purchase your own tags and put them inside your property so that you can track it back also there's many other things that we can do to prevent your vehicle from uh being stolen along with lights and cameras and everything else get something visible get a visible return to either get a steering wheel lock that either blocks your steering wheel from side to side or something that goes over your dash so you can't actually turn the steering wheel get an obd2 port blocker which is the onboard diagnostic port that's used to connect to your car get a blocker for that or you can actually relocate it in your dash somewhere else get a professional to do that if you can't if you don't know what it how to do it yourself and then lastly uh start covering your vin at night while your vehicle is parked in the driveway not all thefts or all vehicles require that but if you're not sure cover it anyways just make sure you can remove that yourself when asked let's say by a police officer if you ever stopped you could remove that or even if you come to the mall just cover your vin so then that way it makes it harder for thieves to steal your car so what i would suggest if there's a lot of information here do a search online regarding apple air tags samsung smart tags and gps tracking devices to see how you can use that for your benefit you can also learn how people are using it for their benefit and i want to say thank you thank you for following us thanks for watching and have yourself a great day you

Channel: TPS 22Div

Views: 5,853,839

Keywords: crime, crime prevention, toronto, toronto police, police, tips, announcement, gps, tracker, gps tracker, apple, apple airtags, samsung, samsung smart tag, theft, car theft

Id: OfXyRUwvQ8Q

Length: 4min 2sec (242 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 23 2022