CHENNAI: When his bike was stolen from outside his room early one morning, C Sakthivel, a 26-year-old from Urapakkam, was not hopeful of getting it back. But as luck would have it, he found it in a week, thanks to an accident and the State police’s smartphone app.
He returned from office at around 4 am and parked his bike in front of his room. It went missing within just four hours, following which he lodged a complaint with the Guduvanchery police station.
“Anxious to get an update on the case, I decided to register a complaint online and checked the option ‘Vehicle Status’ in the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network Systems (CCTNS) using the app. There, I
found that my bike was involved in an accident at the Meenambakkam signal the very next day,” Saktivel told Express.
It was found that the bike was stolen by a youth from Chidambaram, which has been kept at St Thomas Mount police station since the accident.
This, however, was one such case where luck played a bigger role than anything else. In a majority of the cases, lost vehicles are rarely heard about again. And the number of these missing bikes are increasing eachpassing day.
Speaking to Express, a senior police officer attributed the rise in two-wheeler theft to increase in population of bikes, and giving importance to looks more than safety. “ These days, the same model bike can be opened with another one’s key or a duplicate one,” the officer added.
There are CCTV cameras almost on all treets which help police crack more number of two-wheeler thefts these days, but the theft cases are only increasing, admitted the officer.
The spike in theft is despite the police managing to crack more number of cases with the CCTV cameras that are present almost on all streets. “These are not confined only to the night time. It happens in broad
daylight as well, mostly from public places including beaches, parking spaces in local railway station and shopping malls,” the officer added.
Once a bike is stolen, it is quick work before it is sold again with fake registration number, chassis number and documents - mostly online. “They easily prepare fake documents and change the numbers, or dismantle the bike to sell the parts,” he said.
For the ‘professionals’, opening the side lock is child’s play, said Kritish Shenoy, an automobile engineer. In most cases, they hotwire the circuit - connecting two wires that connect to the starter. This is different for every bike model. “A little pressure on the handle bar, in a slanting position, will open the lock. Once they steal the bike, they punch new chassis numbers which hardly take 15 minutes for an expert. Then they prepare fake documents and sell it,” added Shenoy.