We were contacted early in the morning by a customer who reported their 1 Ton Terex Mini Dumper and a Kubota Mini Excavator stolen overnight. A CanTrack Investigator travelled to the area and quickly located the Dumper to the back of a locked Transit van. The van was cheekily parked about 20 meters away from the theft site on suspected false plates.
Local police officers were called for attendance to allow us access to the van. On arrival at the scene, the police discovered that the van was indeed stolen and granted us access to the machine whereby the dumper was revealed. While the police recovered the digger for forensic examinations, our Investigator met up with another member of our in-house Investigations Unit to find the second machine, the mini-excavator.
With the sun fading, our Investigations Unit headed towards the location of the excavator and immediately found a long wheelbase van parked up, emitting the CanTrack Protect homing beacon signal. The number plates did not have the usual postcode and printers mark so it was assumed the van was also stolen and on false plates. I quick look revealed that the thieves had searched extensively for tracking units on the van. The owner of the van was contacted via the police who attended and provided spare keys to gain access. As expected, the excavator was found in the rear It seems as if thieves follow our social channels as only last week we revealed that we recovered a machine that was hidden in a “lowered” commercial vehicle.
You don’t see too many commercial vans with lowered suspension 👇
Maybe there’s something inside 👀https://t.co/EzXkDsLoZd pic.twitter.com/IDJZ7MGIZb
— CanTrack Global Ltd (@CanTrackGlobal) November 20, 2019
To avoid this costly mistake, thieves placed blocks of wood in the suspension to hide the fact that the excavator was inside… cute.
Note to thieves: Visual identification is only a tiny part (normally the last bit) of how we find our machines. Our technology and our Investigations Uni is how we trace stolen items so we’ll always be one step ahead.
