If you are like most people, all of your keys are together in one place. Usually it is somewhere convenient, like a rack in the kitchen or perhaps a mud room, or maybe the front hallway. They are convenient places to keep the keys so that they don’t go missing.

I was speaking with a friend who is a car theft security specialist who helps car dealerships safeguard against car thieves and he told me about a disturbing trend. Brand new cars are going missing from driveways all over Toronto and the bad guys are defeating the modern immobilizer systems by using the owner’s key. How do they get the key? Simple really, they just scope out the houses in a neighborhood to see who has their keys hanging on a rack in the kitchen. Jimmy the sliding door and voila, off they go with the keys to your pride and joy! It’s that easy.

Can thieves see where your keys are?

When you’ve worked in the car industry for a long time, you often get the feeling that you’ve seen it all. Every now and then though, you stumble across something new that defines description. Imagine going to buy a new car and the dealer wants all the usual info from you and then asks for you to leave a thumb print! That’s exactly what happened to Lorna from Lornamatic. She refused. They refused to sell her the car!

Now every dealer is working hard these days to combat the theft of new cars, many even going so far as to have security consultants that specialize in auto theft on staff. But thumb prints? Come on!
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