Saturday, December 05, 2009

Cash Machines, trackers and tin foil

Today's mad thought

Yesterday morning's news included a now familiar and recurring story of a cash machine being ripped out of a wall and stolen with the help of a mechanical digger.

Strikes me that while it may be impossible to stop gangs physically stealing cash machines, there might be some deterrent value in fitting ATMs with satellite trackers. The casing of a cash machine is pretty rugged and well armoured and wouldn't be the easiest object in the world to get a radio signal out of. But surely it's not beyond the ability of engineers to find a way of fitting a tracker antennae into the hinges or the handle on the back to give it a better chance of revealing its position when it's violently moved.

And for all those smart thieves who figure out that they could overcome the tracker by wrapping up their massive ATM swag in tinfoil to block the radio signal before driving away from the scene of the crime, I suggest that supermarkets are banned from selling more than 7m of tinfoil at to any one customer ... a bit like the way packets of parecetemol are controlled.

Ends.

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