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Comment by Sir_Substance | Hacker News Reader

>If it's stolen you look up its GPS location and the police help you get it back.

Do your police do that?

Or to make theft as unappealing as possible, do an “Apple” on them, and require proximity of a “recognized” device for them to turn on, and require a long password, unique to each scooter, to reset the pairing.

They’ll still get stolen, but after apple implemented its current “find my iPhone” scheme, thefts of those devices has plummeted compared to what it was before.

Even if they do, who has a day to waste chasing thieves? I'd just lock up the scooter and save myself the potential hassle, especially since the GPS isn't a deterrent (the scooter doesn't look obviously theft-resistant so thieves won't notice until after they've stolen it).

I want to know the answer to to this. Must be a nice place to live.

In the Netherlands the police definitely will not. Vanmoof has their own team to track down bikes and retrieve, but so far this seems more like a marketing stunt than actual service (they have a youtube channel “Van Moof Bike Hunters”).

They do in a lot of cases in Aus.

Not in Adelaide they don't. Never in 25 years of living there have I ever heard a case of the police recovering stolen property. Heard several cases of people find it themselves and recovering it on their own, but not once of the police helping.

My own personal experience was that they noted my report, duly filed some paperwork in their write-only document storage system, and then went back to issuing traffic fines.

Even if they recover your property later, like during a big arrest, you won't get it back. It will sit in evidence, for years, then it will be destroyed because nobody picked it up. Chances are, you were never informed; even if you filed police reports with serial numbers.

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