BHOPAL: It has been more than a month since a high-end SUV of a furniture businessman worth Rs 38 lakh was stolen from outside his house in Piplani locality.
This was the first hi-tech theft case reported in the city in which three car-borne men using a laptoplike device disabled and hacked car’s electronic control module ECM, (the computer in the car), and stole it within 10 minutes.
The case remains unsolved till date, and cops are still finding clues.
The theft has left police in a tizzy; they suspect the involvement of a highly professional outside gang. Police said that hacking the ECM of such a high-end SUV needs high technical expertise and barely 4-5 car workshops of authorised companies have such a facility or technical equipment in Bhopal. Cops maintained that such gangs do not randomly lift vehicles but target high-end vehicles on basis of demand. They recce the spot and then execute the crime in a pre-planned manner.
Investigating officer in the SUV theft case, SI Vanshaj Shrivastava, said after the SUV theft, police recovered a CCTV footage from the spot in which three car-borne accused were seen reaching the spot in a white sedan at 4.30 am. One of the accused broke the rear window glass and manually opened the front door around 4.31am and at 4.36 am another accused approached the car with a laptop-like device in his hand and deactivates the SUV’s ECM within 3-4 minutes. The accused drove away the SUV around 4.40am.
SI said, that there was GPS device fitted in the SUV but it was not working due to some technical issue because of which cops could not track it. Police tried to make CCTVs trail of the exit route taken by the accused but got the last CCTV footage of the SUV in Vidisha and then the vehicle was taken further. The registration number of the car used by the accused was also forged. The accused copied the registration number of a same model car in Ujjain and used it on their car.
Shrivastava, however, said that police are working on some vital inputs received in the case and it will be solved soon.
SUV owner Arun Jain told TOI that the SIM card fitted in the GPS device of his SUV was blocked due to some KYC issue just 10 days before the incident even though the SIM card was paid up for five years. The company might have sent some text messages, which he could not see and it was blocked.
Speaking on the modus operandi used by the accused, ASP Ankit Jaiswal said that the accused hacked ECM of the SUV using a special device. ECM controls various functions of the SUV including immobilizing the engine, ignition, and various others. The accused generate a new code via an electronic device and ignited the engine. Once the features of the vehicle are unlocked, anyone can drive away with the stolen vehicle within minutes.
ASP said the device used by the accused to bypass the ECM of the vehicles costs anything between Rs 1.5 lakh and Rs 3 lakh. There are many such gangs caught in Delhi, Noida, Ghaziabad and Haryana; they lift high-end luxury cars and SUVs from various states and sell them in northeastern states.
These gangs lift the SUVs or luxury cars according to model and colour given by their clients in advance. The accused restamp the chassis and engine numbers on the stolen vehicles and replace the original with forged numbers, said the ASP.
