GPS Tracking Truth Is Often Stranger Than Fiction
I often watch scenes in movies where law enforcement uses fantastic, fake capabilities to track suspects via their cell phones or some other supposed GPS-enabled device. Frankly, these scenes are often good for a laugh be doesn’t quite work the way Hollywood thinks it does.
However, even without the glitz and over-wrought claims, GPS Tracking could prevent an aweful lot of crime if businesses only paid attention to loss prevention.
Owners, I have news for you. It’s very likely you are being robbed. I know, seems like a rash statement, and who am I, and outsider to pass judgement?
Well, I’m a guy who has installed thousands of units on government and commercial vehicles and done analysises with hundreds of business owners … and I haven’t seen it all, but I’ve seen plenty.
Just afew days ago I watched a segment of the Fox Crime network Masterminds’ show. Tis particular story was about a fellow who worked as an airfreight delivery driver in Toronto and was personally responsible for stealing over $30 million in prperty over about 11 years.
The police and the insurance companies involved knew approximately where the goods were disappearing from but they never could find out where they were being taken.
The criminal’s operation was quite complex … after all, he was classed as a mastermind … but he had one achilles heel similar to many of these ‘product diversion’ type schemes that could have been found in a "new York minute" and would have saved, conservatively, 10,000 times the amount of loss that eventually occurred. 10,000 times? Oh yes, for sure.
As with most of these schemes the perpetrator set up several clandestine locations where he could store the stolen merchandise. he would stop, almost each and every day at one or more of his hidden warehouses and take product off his truck for later clandestine sales. A simple, $300 or so "post mission" (zero cost per month) recorder on the freight company’s trucks would have found the unauthorized stops in the first week they happened. Bingo. Crime averted, loss prevented. A $300 unit to save the loss of $30,000,000.
In most of the world’s countries inurance companies already don’t allow losses to mount up as they do in the US and Canada. You have to have GPS tracking on a truck to register the vehicle in brazil, for example. In Suth Africa you cna’t get theft insurance on a vehicle withourt a tracker. This saves the insurance company money, saves the owner money, and saves a fortune in tax money that would be spent by police tracking stolen vehicles. Do North American insurance companies enjoy losisses? You’d almost get the idea they do, when the means to save are so cost effective.
But your own business ought to be smart and save costs without even bringing you insurance carrier into the picture. fter all, you cna’t insuire profits, you have to make them on your own.