Truck hi-jacking still infects the transport industry but vehicle tracking systems and sharp stolen vehicle recovery teams have brought the numbers down and it is seldom a truck tractor is not recovered. For this reason, our crafty criminals have shifted their revenue stream away from the vehicle and onto the load.
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Vehicles,
cargo,
people - Deon Bayley explains the ever-widening sphere of
duties for tracking systems |
Truck trailers very often carry goods that are worth more on the black market than the vehicle itself and now, when a vehicle is hijacked, it is abandoned and its on-board 'black box' is left intact with the tracking boys none the wiser. The trailer, however, is not fitted with a monitoring device and is speedily attached to another truck tractor and pulled into a warehouse where the cargo is off-loaded and made ready for distribution. The challenge now for transporters is how to track their valuable merchandise.
Hiding the box
There's a smart bunch of people in Norway who have made a totally wireless black box with its own built-in battery. According to Deon Bayley, MD, Electronic Tracking Systems (ETS), the local agents for the product, "the unit has a patented algorithm which manages how the unit uses its battery. The transport operators using our system are getting between 8 to 12 months life out of the battery without having to recharge it."
The fact that the box has no wires attached to it whatsoever makes it easy to hide in a palette of cargo, says Hayden. "It works off radio frequency (RF) so no GPS is necessary which means it can be tracked in buildings and underground. It's about the size of a 30-pack of cigarettes. Our latest success involved a hijacked trailer. Our unit was hidden in the load and not only led us to the cargo but to the warehouse where the criminals were based."
Stealth for security
The system - called M-Track - has been in South Africa for two years but the company has a sizeable client base in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and the UK. "ETS has just received its SAIA (South African Insurance Association) accreditation and we have tracking stations in Cape Town and Pretoria. While most of our customers use M-Track to monitor their loads, the unit is excellent for vehicles as well because you don't need to embed it, which is costly and impractical. For this reason, we're also attracting customers from vehicle dealerships who want to track their demo vehicles - as well as banks who want to track cash in transit," he says.
