It's quick and quiet: A car thief in the East Bay is not leaving any smashed windows behind. Instead, he’s found a way to hack a locking system that doesn’t need any keys.
The burglaries have prompted residents in Concord to think twice about the technology in their cars. Many of them use their key fobs to lock and unlock their vehicles, but they now fear that car thieves have figured out their own high-tech way to get into keyless cars.
"I've been thrilled with the keyless entry system until now,” said Dr. Graham Hamilton, who loves the ease of getting into his keyless Infiniti sports car, but apparently a bad guy loves it too.
Surveillance video taken from Hamilton’s Concord driveway early Monday shows a man using some sort of a device to get into his locked car.
“It appears he used some sort of electrical device to disengage the locking mechanism,” Hamilton said. “He then proceeded to enter the car and take whatever was inside.”
According to Hamilton, the burglar made off with a iPod and items of clothing that were in the car and in the trunk — Hamilton's surveillance system captured it all.
"The actual burglary was very quick — it was a couple of minutes, they were in and out in what I thought was a locked vehicle," he said. "They unlocked it somehow.."
At least four other cars in the neighborhood were also burglarized that same morning, some of them keyless as well.
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Concord police say they haven't been able to verify if a device was used, but say car burglaries are definitely on the rise in the city.
I've never seen it in my life and obviously technology is a wonderful thing until something like this happens but it is scary,” Hamilton said.
