This Boomerang will come Back !
A new device on the market sends a signal over cellphone networks lead cops to your stolen car. (But we won’t show it looks like)
The Globe And Mail
Len Coates
9/6/99
Suddenly, it’s getting a lot tougher for car thieves to make a dishonest living.
Just when they had it all figured out -learned to bypass the auto industry ’s antitheft devices, learned to crack steering-wheel locks like the Club, and learned that nobody listens to screeching car alarms – along comes the Boomerang.
The Boomerang is a vehicle-tracking system developed by Rankin Corp. of Montreal. The heart of it is a transmitter that can be hidden anywhere in an automobile’s electrical system, such as in the taillight wiring or in the interior overhead light, and sends a signal over a cellular phone network.
Rankin employees can pinpoint the signal and lead police to the stolen vehicle, as they did recently to help nab a gang of sophisicated car thieves in Toronto. A Boomerang installed in a stolen Mercedes-Benz led police to a warehouse where they recovered the $120,000 Mercedes and discovered 15 other hot, high-end vehicles worth more than $1-million. “That was a big bust,” chuckles Ken Helferty, Rankin’s vice president of sales and operations. “It’s great when we can help the police nab the bad guys.”
Hot cars are big business, Last year, there were 165,797 vehicle thefts in Canada, one every three minutes. That’s down form the peak of 180,123 boosted in 1996, but today’s professional thieves are far more sophisticated than the joy-riders and casual crooks who inflated car-thefts stastistics in the past.
Chances are the vehicle is headed for a chop shop, where a $30,000 car can be turned into $90,000 worth of components – three times its original price. Or, it’s heading overseas where there’s a ready market for luxury vehicles and a more laissez-faire approach to vehicle registration. In the Toronto caper, the bad guys were literally stealing to order, scouting post districts for luxury cars that they knew they could sell overseas. “It’s a big problem for upper-class neighbourhoods like Forest Hill, Leaside or North Toronto,” says Detective Sergeant Bill Seldon of the Metro Toronto Police.

He says the Toronto gang was “ re VINning” the stolen cars – popping out the windshields, then stripping the cars of their aVehichle Identification Numbers, or VINs, and replacing them with new serial numbers. He said trucks had been rented to transport the stolen vehicles on the first leg of their trip abroad.
Rankin was started five years ago in Montreal by Paul-André Savoie and André Boulay who invented the device. Boomerang is marketed through automotive and electronic retail stores throughout Quebec and Ontario and in a few locations in B.C.(www.vehicletracking.com). It has 8,100 customers who paid about $500 to install the Boomerang and pay $9.95 a month for the monitoring service. Helferty estimates that Boomerang has helped recover about 400 vehicles.
Rankin boasts that the system uses the cellular network accurately enough so that a stolen vehicle with a Boomerang in it can be recovered in any of 900 cities across North America. It doesn’t rely on satellite (Global Positioning System) technology, so it can’t be thwarted if the car is hidden in an indoor garage, underground parking lot or metal freight containers, all of which render GPS ineffective. “GPS is line-of-sight technology,” says Helferty. “The car’s ariel has to be able to see the satellite,” he says. “If they put the car in a shipping container or disable the antenna, it doesn’t work.”
Rankin says the Boomerang transmitter is virtually undetectable. And it includes a backup battery, so even if the thief unplugs the car battery, it will continue to operate for several days. Helferty declined to provide a picture of the Boomerang, which is about the size of a TV remote control, to deter thieves from finding it in any of the hundreds places he says they can be hidden. The company doesn’t tell owners where the devices are installed in their cars, in case owners have insurance fraud on their minds.
The Boomerang is going head to head with stolen-vehicle-tracking systems, a growth area in the auto industry, In August, Centraxx Location Technologies of Missisauga, Ont. – whose system uses a land-based radio-frequency network – announced that it was accelerating its expansion plans through key U.S. markets in addition to corporate-owned networks in Ontario, South Florida and South California, after one year on the market.
Auto makers like General Motors, which uses the OnStar system, have started to put such systems – using GPS technology and often offering a host of other services – in some luxury cars.
OnStar, which mates cellular phones with GPS, was launched in September 1996, and was slow to catch on with a small 75,000 subscriber base; however, in August, OnStar announced that its services will be included in one million GM cars and trucks within the next 18 months.
ATX Technologies Inc., of San Antonio, makes On-Guard, which combines GPS with radio-frequency signals and cellular technology to find vehicles, respond to emergencies and provide directional assistance from its 24-hour, seven-day-a-week On-Guard Response Center. It records conversations taking place inside the vehicle.
ATX says ON-Guard systems led to the arrest of 141 people for auto theft in 1998, 98 of them through a program in which 42 law-enforcement agencies in 15 states used “bait cars” to apprehend car thieves.
And recently, the original television Bat-Mobile designed by George Barris, who says the caped crimefighter’s ride is worth $1-million (U.S.), has been outfitted with a LoJack vehicle tracker made by LoJack Corp. of Dedham, Mass. (The LoJack system, which has been around since 1986, was developed and manufactured by Motorola, and is marketed to law-enforcement personnel in 17 states.) Barris, known as the Kustom Kar King, says “Ever since one of my prized possessions – James Dean’s 1955 Porsche Spider – was stolen in 1960 and never found, I’ve been concerned for the safety of my collection.”
Boomerang® is a registered trademark of Boomerang Tracking Inc. It's headquarters are located in Montreal, Quebec. Boomerang products are sold and distributed in the provinces of Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia and in the Dominican Republic. Boomerang Tracking Inc. shares are traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE) under the trading symbol "BMG".