You get what you pay for.

Hudson Hongo reports at Gizmodo,

Last week, a suspected thief’s getaway vehicle turned into his jail cell when BMW employees managed to track and remotely lock a stolen car in Seattle, according to police.

Authorities say the suspect was prowling cars early last Sunday when he found an unlocked BMW 550i with the key inside and sped away. The owner—who had gotten married the day before and loaned her car to a friend—realized the car was missing at around 5 a.m. and reported it stolen to police.

After contacting BMW corporate, officers were given the current location of the vehicle by an employee. Police say they found the car idling in an alley with the suspect asleep inside. From the SPD Blotter:

BMW employees were able to remotely lock the car’s doors, trapping the suspect inside, presumably while hissing something terrifying like “I’m not locked in here with you, you‘re locked in here with me” into the car’s sound system.

Officers roused the suspect, who quickly, but unsuccessfully, tried to drive away.
Police say they then booked the suspect for auto theft and drug possession.

While the city police blotter did not specify how employees locked the vehicle, BMW offers a service that allows call center staff to “remotely lock or open the doors to your vehicle as needed” through the company’s SIM card-based ConnectedDrive system.

In 2015, BMW announced that it was increasing security on ConnectedDrive after the German Automobile Association found it could wirelessly send any command through the system, which apparently used no encryption. And in July, a security researcher discovered that BMW’s own ConnectedDrive web portal appeared to have vulnerabilities that allowed attackers to hack vehicles through a browser.

Read more here

h/t Stephen Green

Creative thievery

Matthew Grimson reports for NBC News,

A suspected car thief made a bizarre (albeit original) attempt at evading police Wednesday — by driving his SUV straight into the ocean.

The two-hour police chase in Perth, Australia, appeared to be coming to an end when the suspect found himself on the beach with nowhere to go.

But as police closed in, the man appeared to make a last-ditch bid for freedom by accelerating straight into breaking waves.

As the vehicle was swamped, the suspect climbed out of the driver's-side window and onto the roof of the car.

Concerned for his safety, two officers followed him into the water — on foot — but found themselves at the mercy of the heavy surf, which was tossing around the four-wheel drive.

"Looking back now, it was probably a bit risky, but at the time we were just concerned about his welfare," said officer Matthew Bruse, according to NBC News' Australian partner Channel 7.

"We had tried to coax him into shore but he refused to do that and was taking items out of the car and tossing them around, so we decided to go in," Bruse said. "Fortunately as we reached him a wave broke, which freed his grip on the car and took him closer to shore and then he came with us willingly.