Helmet-cam captures terrifying moment thief stole motorcyclist's bike at gunpoint before an undercover cop shot him

Wow, what a waste....
A rider on his motorbike was caught a very scary moment when he was suddenly held at gunpoint while a thief attempted to steal his ride. What he probably didn't expect, was a nearby undercover policeman who almost immediately shot him before he could get away.

The incident happened at an unknown location in Brazil and was caught on the biker's helmet cam which is available for you to watch in full.

The biker was casually arriving at a junction when another motorbike appeared out of nowhere with the passenger on the back already pointing a gun in the victims face. He naturally hands over his motorbike before the undercover cop arrives on the scene.

Source;
http://www.worldcarfans.com/113101464419/biker-jacked-at-gunpoint-before-thief-shot-by-cop---caught

How Google accidentally uncovered a Chinese ring of car thieves

by Russell Brandom of www.theverge.com

AdWords is the core of the business of Google, delivering billions of data-targeted ads to browsers every year. Most of the ads are legitimate, but not all of them, and it’s Google’s job to tell which is which. Last year, that meant kicking 224 million ads off the network. The majority were run-of-the-mill web fraud: counterfeit handbags, thinly veiled phishing schemes, the kind of thing any decent spam filter would take out. But in 2010, in the midst of reworking the ad-filtering model, something strange happened. The new model was flagging a lot of otherwise innocuous ads for used cars. Most of the bad products were counterfeit goods, and, as AdWords engineering director David Baker says, "We'd never heard of a counterfeit car." Had they trained AdWords into anti-car prejudice? Was the model simply broken?

Had they trained AdWords into anti-car prejudice?

The answer turned out to be even stranger. They were real cars, but they weren't really for sale. Scammers were taking pictures of cars on the street, and when a hapless customer showed up a few days later offering money, they'd steal the car and hand it over. By the time the mark realized he had purchased stolen goods, the sellers were long gone, taking his money with them. It's a lucrative scam, and in China, a well-known one — but to anyone looking at the ads, it just looks like one more crop of used-car ads.

For those who study fraud in China, on the other hand, this is far from surprising. "These people are very professional," says Dahui Li, an information systems expert at the University of Minnesota who specializes in Chinese online fraud. In the case of the car scam, he says the offline component is the most important part, as a way to assure skeptical customers that the sale is legit. "Chinese people want to see the product before they pay for it," Li says. "They have to see the car." So the criminal element developed a scheme that could show it to them.

"They have to see the car."

According to Li, the larger problem is the Chinese financial system, which requires every bank-to-bank transaction to be routed through the central government’s banking authority. As a result, anti-fraud measures are usually slower than criminals. Stopping a payment could take as long as three days, by which time the money is usually unrecoverable. Since customers can't trust the banks to stop fraud, they're left to fend for themselves. On Taobao, the Chinese equivalent of eBay, Li sees this effect driving customers to have longer conversations before they trust a seller, testing out every offer to make sure it's legitimate. In other markets, it boils down to common-sense habits like holding the product in your hands before you buy it. And as the sales move offline, so does the fraud. Li describes scams that create fake websites, designed to fool users into thinking they’re on Taobao or another moderated e-commerce site. Even when police are able to follow the credit card trail, criminals are able to stay a few steps ahead. "Until the payment model is fixed, you’re always going to see these scams," Li says.

"Until the payment model is fixed, you're always going to see these scams."

The surprising thing is how much this supposedly offline fraud caught the attention of Google’s AdWords cops. The team is only looking for fraudulent offers made on the AdWords network, but scams like the car-swapping trick blur the lines between the crimes that happen on the network and the crimes that take place after the fact. More importantly, AdWords’ crime-spotting tools don’t distinguish between online and offline scams. They’re just looking for suspicious behavior. Like many Google products, AdWords' quality control is managed by a massive machine-learning algorithm, similar to the PageRank function that powers Google Search. "There’s no one thing or even a handful of things," says Baker. "It’s thousands of pieces of information in aggregate." That includes IP address, account age, and links to past accounts. After millions of iterations, it’s hard to trace the red flags back to any group of factors, which makes it even harder for bad guys to game the system.

Cultural differences could fool the humans, but they couldn't fool the machine

More importantly, it doesn’t take human prejudice into account. Baker and his team weren’t looking for cars or car thieves. But the algorithm saw a pattern of quick buys from new accounts, tied together with larger and more subtle patterns, and deduced something was up. It’s not an airtight system: more than a few valid accounts have had their orders delayed while the team checked them out. But in this case, it was able to reach across continents to suss out a scheme its engineers had never even imagined. Cultural differences could fool the humans, but they couldn’t fool the machine.

At the same time, once Google found the scammers, they couldn’t do any more than kick them off AdWords. Baker and his team will occasionally forward ads on to law enforcement, particularly if drugs are involved, but the relationship between Google and China is so complex that scams like this car theft ring usually slip through the cracks. It makes sense; Google isn’t in the crime-fighting business. But as they try to keep scams from spilling onto their network, they’re getting awfully close.

Source (via www.autoblog.com);

http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/24/4549124/how-google-uncovered-a-chinese-ring-of-car-thieves

Catalytic Converter Theft Warning Issued for Honda Element Owners (Atlanta)

Wow, who knew....

Rash of vehicle break-ins hit East Atlanta Patch neighborhoods.

By Péralte Paul

These last couple of years, catalytic converters have been a popular target of motor vehicle vandals.
In many of those cases the thieves have stuck to vehicles made in the USA.

But now they're focused on Hondas, the Element specifically and they're hitting Grant Park, Ormewood Park, Reynoldstown and other neighborhoods in Southeast Atlanta.

It's so bad that Atlata Police Department officials have said it's one of the biggest crime trends hitting the city right now.

Just last week, some 19 vehicles where hit for their catalytic converters, which are part of a vehicle's exhaust system that help convert pollutants to less toxic emissions.

"They are mainly being targeted in the Grant Park area due to a lot of on-street parking," APD Sgt. Gregory Lyon told East Atlanta Patch Wednesday.

"The vehicles in Zone 6 being targeted are almost exclusively Honda Elements."

It's no wonder.

These converters are stolen for the platinum they contain internally, he said.

Like copper thefts from homes and businesses, thieves can sell the platinum for a couple hundred dollars.

Indeed, the platinum thefts are more lucrative than copper because the metal is so much more valuable.
The raw commodity closed Wednesday at $1,472.20 per troy ounce on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

In comparison, copper closed at $3.24 per pound.

Honda Elements and other SUVs are magnets because they sit higher off the ground, making it possible to steal catalytic converters in two minutes or less.

Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. offers these preventative measures:

• Always park in well-lighted areas
• At shopping centers and other similar parking lots, park close to the entrance of the building or near the access road where there's a lot of traffic
• If you own or work at a business or factory, park within a fenced area that's busy during the day and secured at night
• Engrave your license plate number on the converter to make it traceable
• Purchase a vehicle security system and make sure it’s set to trigger with just the slightest motion
• Visit a local muffler shop and have the converter secured to the vehicle’s frame with a couple of pieces of hardened steel welded to the frame
• Check out the different types of catalytic converter theft deterrent systems at your local auto parts store or online

Source;
http://eastatlanta.patch.com/articles/catalytic-converter-theft-warning-issued-for-honda-element-owners