Legal Marketing & PR

Misuse of technology

By Edward Poll, J.D., M.B.A., CMC

Here’s a story sent to me by a friend. The moral is that we need to be more careful in how we use our "toys."

A car was broken into while the family was at a football match. The car was parked on the green which was adjacent to the football stadium and specially allotted to football fans. A garage door remote control, some money and a GPS which had been prominently mounted on the dashboard were among the items stolen from the car.

When the victims got home, they found that their house had been ransacked and just about everything worth anything had been stolen.

The thieves had used the GPS to guide them to the house. They then used the garage remote control to open the garage door and gain entry to the house. The thieves knew the owners were at the football game, they knew what time the game was scheduled to finish and so they knew how  much time they had to clean out the house.  It would appear that they had brought a truck to empty the house of its contents.

Mobile Phone:

I never thought of this ... A woman has now changed how she lists the names on her mobile phone after her handbag was stolen. Her handbag contained her cell phone, credit card, wallet, etc. ... Twenty minutes after her bag was stolen, she called her hubby from a pay phone telling him what had happened. Hubby replied: 'I received your text asking about our Pin number and I've replied a little while ago.' When they rushed down to the bank, the bank staff told them all the money was already withdrawn. The thief had actually used the stolen cell phone to text 'hubby' in the contact list and got hold of the pin number. Within the time it took the woman to call her hubby, 20 minutes, the thief had withdrawn all the money from the couple's bank account.
 

Full post as published by Law Biz Blog on January 21, 2009 (boomark / email).