Thieves Steal GPS Tracking Devices, Get Caught Almost Immediately Rastrac Team | Jul 7, 2017 4:19:17 PM

Criminals steal all kinds of crazy things in the hope of turning a profit. However, one group of would-be master criminals found out the hard way that crime doesn’t pay—especially if you’re stealing $18,000 worth of GPS tracking devices.

In a master criminal act fit for the pages of America’s Dumbest Criminals, a group of thieves in Santa Clara, California reportedly broke into the offices of a Silicon Valley tech startup. According to reports featured on NBC4i.com, “police say high-tech thieves were caught stealing thousands of dollars worth of GPS tracking devices… these devices kind of look like cell phone chargers, so they probably thought they had some kind of street value.”

As soon as the company realized that the criminals had made off with an entire box of GPS tracking devices, they activated the devices’ recovery mode, then “notified the police and equipped them to track the devices.”

Once the police had been notified of the heist, and given the means to track the GPS devices, it only took about six hours for them to apprehend the thieves. To add some icing to the criminal justice cake, the thieves broke into the company’s fridge during the heist, with one of the thieves cutting themselves—leaving blood and fingerprint evidence to further tie the crooks to the crime.

Stolen GPS Devices Help Uncover Other Thefts

However, the story doesn’t end with the arrest of the criminals for stealing the GPS devices. In the few hours that they had the GPS trackers, the thieves deposited a majority of the devices at their stash.

As NBC reports, the police “were able to pinpoint the location of these trackers to a warehouse in Union City … The storage locker was found to contain drugs and other stolen property… including a photo album that had irreplaceable images from World War II that was taken in a recent burglary in Saratoga.”

In one fell swoop, these stolen GPS devices helped police:

1. Apprehend three thieves and put a halt to an ongoing crime spree.
2. Recover the stolen property of several other Californian citizens.
3. Take some drugs off the streets.

If nothing else, this criminal escapade from California’s silicon valley highlights just how effective GPS tracking can be as an antitheft technology!