Rainy weather dampens vehicle hijacking efforts

IN THE battle against everincreasing vehicle hijacking in the trucking industry, summer rains have become one of the unlikely enemies for tracker and recovery teams. “One of our biggest assets in locating and recovering stolen vehicles is the helicopter,” explains Joel Stransky, sales and marketing director for Altech Netstar. Hijacking syndicates are alert to this and are more active in rainy weather because they know the helicopter won’t be airborne. The company’s stolen vehicle recovery (SVR) unit has an average recovery time of 47minutes – after an hour, there is very little chance of recovering a vehicle. “You can drive a vehicle a long way in an hour,” says Stransky. Syndicates will often hijack for the load, and then re-rig this to their own horse down the road. Even asset monitoring units hidden in cargo or containers are soon discovered and dismantled. To combat this, radio transponders are used, and triggered when the main unit is discovered. Radio is harder to find and jam. But this is not the answer. “Life has become so cheap,” says Stransky. “It’s like there has been a whole shift to what has become socially acceptable, and I don’t think it’s for the better.” This can be seen in the lawless approach to just about everything, from running amber robots and road rage to side-walk murders for a cell phone. “We are just one of the tools for treating the symptoms. It is unfortunate that jobs and companies like this exist, but until we can all work to reducing poverty, security is going to be one of the busiest industries in South Africa.”