We've heard repeatedly on the news how Toyota Hilux pickups are a favourite target of car thieves because of the high resale value they fetch in Guatemala.
But, last night, a pair of thieves got stopped in their tracks by an immobilisation chip.
The ordeal started around 7:00 in Hope Creek village when the home of an Agriculture officer was burglarized and his government issued Hilux was stolen. But this particular vehicle was equipped with a device from Traksolutions that allowed the company to immobilize the vehicle and give its coordinates to the police.
37-year-old Fred Roches was at home in Hope Creek when two men armed with a knife and a shotgun barged into his house and demanded the keys for the vehicle, which is valued at approximately $30,000. The burglars took the keys and a cellphone and drove off.
But because of the tracking device, it didn't take much to discover that the vehicle had been stashed on a feeder road through Canada Hill, approximately 7 miles off the Hummingbird Highway.
And Roches isn't the only one to recover their stolen vehicle using this device. Traksolutions has helped plenty of people, especially out in the west where carjackings had become frequent. Today the chief operations manager, Justin Bowman, spoke to us about how this service works and how they were able to locate this government issued vehicle.
Voice of: Justin Bowman, Chief Ops Mgr, TrakSolutions
"Once you are a customer of ours, we have one of our GPS devices installed that we are able to disable the vehicle wherever it is. Once a vehicle is stolen, we are notified, the customer can also do it from the app or the computer or they notify us and we disable it from our end."
"I'd say over the past couple of years we are done at least 10-25 of them already. We have started off, I don't know if you remember the Ministry of Health vehicles were being stolen every weekend, after installation we stop those and we recovered the ones that were in the process."
"This vehicle was already - look like the thieves already had the vehicle stashed. What we are seeing is a trend that they steal the vehicle and they stashed it somewhere, until they can clear up the checkpoint of the checkpoints would move and then they go back and they get the vehicle and they move it. We disabled the vehicle and even if you go back with the key you can't start it. The device is installed internally into the vehicle electrical system, so we were able to send a command and that cuts off the vehicle. The app either on your phone or any mobile device, you will be able to track it every 15 seconds, you can see when the ignition is on/off, if the vehicle left. They probably got an email that the vehicle left the compound. At this point when I was notified, the vehicle was already at the stop spot. I just disable it and I gave the coordinates to the police and they were able to find it."
Bowman said that the device has other uses besides anti-theft and is mainly used for tracking and fleet management.
