FOLLOWING a report titled “On crime and cars” in Witness Wheels, which quotes the tracking companies’ reassurance that signal-blockers don’t work, Pieter Brits, a manager at a national bread-delivery company, has cautioned that the company has seen one of its trucks “literally disappear off the screen as we were watching”.
He said that because the company operates a cash-sale business, the company suffers on average two truck hijackings a week.
“As we followed the route of [the] stolen truck, it’s signal disappeared off the screen. It did not take the thieves 10 minutes to block the signal.”
Brits said that while the thieves may have been a step ahead of the satellite tracker, they were behind on their intelligence, as they had stolen a truck that delivered bread to large retailers that do not pay by cash but use electronic transfers.
“The trucks did not even have a load of loaves. It had only bread crumbs,” Brits said.
He said it was the first such incident, as the company normally recovers a stolen truck within an hour using Matrix’s systems.
Witness, Supplement A: Download Article