{"id":8807,"date":"2010-09-03T11:59:05","date_gmt":"2010-09-03T11:59:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/e-commerce\/how_the_internet_can_reduce_global_theft.html"},"modified":"2010-09-03T11:59:05","modified_gmt":"2010-09-03T11:59:05","slug":"how-the-internet-can-reduce-global-theft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/e-commerce\/how-the-internet-can-reduce-global-theft.html","title":{"rendered":"How The Internet Can Reduce Global Theft"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Thumbnail<\/a>A while back I left a GPS<\/span> unit in a rental car and when I returned it. I don’t want to be offensive to any particular company so I will refer to the GPS<\/span> company supplying my device as PomPom<\/span>. When I realized I wasn’t going to get it back I called the company because I remembered it was M2M-enabled<\/span> and as such I paid a $10\/month fee for Google search access and other online goodies.<\/p>\n

The first thing I did was cancel my account but the second was ask that it not be enabled again if someone who takes the unit calls PomPom<\/span> to start the service.<\/p>\n

The call center agent for PomPom<\/span> informed me that they couldn’t honor my request as the situation would be the same as a GPS<\/span> unit being stolen from an electronics store. It’s been many months<\/span> and I am still not sure what that comment means and to be honest it still bothers me that I paid for something which I lost and someone else can find the unit, call the GPS<\/span> company and they both benefit.<\/p>\n

But a much bigger concern is the new and growing channel for stolen goods, the Internet and I have thought for a long time that there are ways we can reduce the immeasurable amount of theft in the world with simple technology.<\/p>\n

It isn’t just the theft which costs us though, consider the precautions people take by purchasing insurance and alarm systems for additional billions of dollars a year. Moreover when leaving items of value in a parked car or home, many people spend time hiding them or taking them out of the car\/home and dragging them along to avoid theft.<\/p>\n

We have to admit, there is a tremendous inconvenience and annoyance factor associated with protecting valuable items even if they are never stolen.<\/p>\n

Since many valuable items have unique serial numbers on them, why do we \"bar-code.jpg\"<\/a>not have a universal online registry of stolen products which would be checked before purchasing? For items which don’t have these numbers such as jewelry, they can be etched in via laser.<\/p>\n

If such a system were implemented then the value of a stolen GPS<\/span> unit would be low and we may even see a person who finds a lost device returning it to collect a reward. Interestingly, I lost a wallet and a checkbook in the past decades and both times they were returned to me via the mail. I think the wallet had its cash removed but still, at least I got it back with all the cards and other important information in it.<\/p>\n

So here is where I give an emotional thanks to all of you – one of you in fact may have been the person who returned the wallet lost in Boston or the checkbook lost in Norwalk, CT.<\/p>\n

But really, if we want to improve global productivity and reduce the amount of police reports filed why would we not implement such a simple system? eBay in fact should be championing the idea as it is a publicly<\/span> traded company and at some point you have to assume the bad press from them being the world’s largest pawn shop will catch up with them.<\/p>\n

I should also mention the rental car company – we’ll call them Pertz<\/span> located in a popular Miami hotel was as far from helpful as they could be in giving me back my GPS<\/span> unit. Having said that the company’s Miami Airport location has been helpful in the past returning a Nokia<\/span> phone charger to me – a Nokia<\/span> charger? You can imagine how long ago that was. Probably around 1998.<\/p>\n

What are your thoughts on the matter? Do you think we can drastically reduce theft with the intelligent utilization of identification numbers, databases and technology?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while back I left a GPS unit in a rental car and when I returned it. I don’t want to be offensive to any particular company so I will refer to the GPS company supplying my device as PomPom. When I realized I wasn’t going to get it back I called the company because<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166,158,168,170,171,181,172,1,161,160,162,196,187,188,189,206,118,177,174,190,191,175],"tags":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8807"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8807\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}