[gervu]

That sort of implies that there was some river of theft intent that they were keeping dammed up.

Which, could be the case, or it could be that announcing the policy change was the equivalent of announcing your upcoming month-long backpacking tour on Facebook after posting your address and photos of most of your valuables.

(It might be less declaring open season on theft, than a perceived increase in vulnerability triggering a surge in attempts to exploit it, more of which succeed than usual due to some actual increase in the odds of successful theft, complicated by the additional security risk posed by the confusion associated with a major policy change.)

You'd really need to dig into the surrounding data to find out which model is valid and in what proportions.

[tim333]

There are probably discussion sites not dissimilar to this one where people who are into stolen credit cards and the like hang out to swap notes. It would only really take one person to post - hey check out this new thing - for a few to try it. I was a victim of a vaguely similar thing - having a squatter in my flat in Spain which went from something that didn't really happen to loads of them all of a sudden because someone put up a how to guide on the internet.

[Spooky23]

It’s probably a little of both. Remember Nextel? For a long time push to talk wasn’t interceptable by the police.

Nextel didn’t seek out street drug dealing networks as a customer base. But the cops figured out that they weren’t traceable and had great loud speaker phones, started buying them, word got out and suddenly you have a market.

[close04]

> about 20 people who went on to orchestrate the Mercedes thefts set up some 80 phony accounts in Chicago, using fake or stolen credit cards as their payment methods.

It's not as much the background checks preventing the thefts as the basic identity checks. Even people with some criminal background would find themselves disincentivized to steal/vandalize the car knowing their identity is linked to it. But someone who goes out of their way to create a fake identity and become untraceable, known criminal or not, has no such disincentive.