Southampton theft of TomToms :(

[NickG]

Hi,

On the 19th of May my TomTom One was stolen from my car in Southampton (breaking two windows) . I live in the Aldermoor/Lords Hill area of Southampton. At least one other vehicle was broken into on my road as well and there have been at least 4 other breakins on my road in the last few months alone (that I know of).

While looking for a stolen sat-nav register, I came across this article about sat-navs getting stolen in Southampton on BBC News:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/4685992.stm

It seems that somebody is still operating in this area and is making frequent break-ins in this area. I'm posting this because I've noticed a lot of users of the forums (including some PGPSW staff like Dave) live in the Southampton area.

I stupidly left the mount on the windscreen for JUST ONE night when I usually put it out of sight in the glove box. If you have a sat-nav device,
NEVER leave the mount in the windscreen and clean off the "ring" it makes on the glass as the Soton police were saying that some of these guys can differentiate between a phone mount and a sat-nav mount by just looking at the "fingerprint" the mount leaves on the windscreen.

I wish you could somehow "lock" a TomTom device so that it needs to "phone home" every month or so (via GPRS or USB) in order to work if you do not enter a valid PIN number (or enter it wrong 3 times). This way, stolen devices would quickly become useless. Of course this would only work if it was impossible to disable this functionality once it's been enabled (even by flashing new firmware).

The stolen sat-nav register on this site seriously needs to be improved. A forum post doesnt work very well and people are posting information in many different threads. It's difficult to search or update your entry if your device is found or you made a mistake, and doesn't moderate what users enter (eg entering product codes instead of serial numbers). It's not really a "database" at all. I am happy to implement this functionality if someone wants me to (I'm a pro-web developer of database driven websites).

Nick...

[xda]

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