Volkswagen refuses to help police find kidnapped 2 year old, citing lapsed Car-Net subscription.

[rcmaehl]

Summary
An Illinois mother was assaulted and carjacked, with the vehicle containing their 2 year old. VW states incident was a "serious process breach."
 

Quotes

Quote

A sheriff's office in Illinois... was initially thwarted from tracking a stolen car with a 2-year-old boy inside when Volkswagen... refused to provide access to the tracking system because the car's subscription had expired. "While searching for the stolen vehicle and endangered child, sheriff's detectives immediately called Volkswagen Car-Net, in an attempt to track the vehicle," "Unfortunately, there was a delay, as Volkswagen Car-Net would not track the vehicle with the abducted child until they received payment to reactivate the tracking device in the stolen Volkswagen." "the Car-Net trial period had ended, and a representative wanted $150 to restart the service and locate the SUV." The representative didn't budge, saying it was company policy, sheriff's office Deputy Chief Christopher Covelli said. By the time officers say they paid the $150 and got the location of the vehicle, it had already been located by other means. Volkswagen said there was a "serious breach" of its process for working with law enforcement in the Lake County incident. The company uses a third-party vendor to provide the Car-Net service. The car with a toddler inside was stolen just after his mother returned to their home in Libertyville in her 2021 Volkswagen Atlas. The woman went to a hospital "and was in serious, but stable condition," the sheriff's office said. 

 

My thoughts

I swear some(?) most(?) sales people honestly have no soul no matter what the industry is. I'm glad that the kid was found safe but something someone or something is seriously messed up since this was even able to occur in the first place.

 

Sources

Ars Technica (quote source)

Chicago Sun Times

Lake County Sherriff's statement

[Fasauceome]

9 minutes ago, rcmaehl said:

I swear some(?) most(?) sales people honestly have no soul no matter what the industry is

To be fair, I think that's a job requirement

[manikyath]

this is a double-edged sword sort of deal...

 

on the one side, it's absolute serious BS that they dont aid in finding what essentially amounts to an abducted child.

 

on the flip side.. if they would blindly provide tracking data, even if the owner of the car didnt pay for that feature to be active, when the police calls.. you'd be here writing an outraged article about that.

 

there's no in between option between those two. HOWEVER.. saying "pay us and you'll get the data" is about the most cold hearted response to a police request i've ever heard.

 

or in other words.. more reasons not to buy a volkswagen (?)

[Murasaki]

Congratulations VW you got your 150$ hope it was worth it.

Spoiler

 

[LAwLz]

I wonder how many people will stop reading after the headline and not look more into the situation.

 

I see at least one person in this thread who already did. 

 

Because why provide nuance and understanding when you can write a headline that gets people mad.

[Eigenvektor]

21 minutes ago, manikyath said:

on the flip side.. if they would blindly provide tracking data, even if the owner of the car didnt pay for that feature to be active, when the police calls.. you'd be here writing an outraged article about that.

Except that is exactly what should've happened. The third party provider simply didn't follow the procedure that is already in place to cooperate with law enforcement.

 

From the Ars article:

Quote

Volkswagen has a procedure in place with a third-party provider for Car-Net Support Services involving emergency requests from law enforcement. They have executed this process successfully in previous incidents. Unfortunately, in this instance, there was a serious breach of the process. We are addressing the situation with the parties involved," the company said in a statement provided to Ars and other media outlets.

(emphasis mine)

[Senzelian]

1 hour ago, manikyath said:

on the flip side.. if they would blindly provide tracking data, even if the owner of the car didnt pay for that feature to be active, when the police calls.. you'd be here writing an outraged article about that.

But are they doing it blindly if its a requested by the police? They obviously know who is requesting the data. 

 

Edit: Apparently they didn't know, since the police only called them without being able to provide proof of who was calling them.

[manikyath]

2 minutes ago, Senzelian said:

But are they doing it blindly if its a requested by the police? They obviously know who is requesting the data. 

i mean.. there's a privacy argument here. it's not the scope of the thread to delve deep into that, so i'll just leave it at that.

[LAwLz]

Here is my take on the story. 

 

The sheriff called VW (or rather, a call center that VW hired to handle their calls) and the service representative didn't activate an expired service just because someone called in and claimed to be a sheriff. It's not like there was a long call with evidence provided either. The call was apparently 30 minutes long because the sheriff couldn't find a credit card. 

 

For all we know, the conversation might just have been a couple of minutes. 

Not sure about you, but I think it seems pretty safe and sound that representatives doesn't hand out access to the service within minutes just because someone claims to be a sheriff over the phone. 

Besides, the car had already been found within those 30 minutes.

 

 

Judging by some of the comments I've seen it seems like people think VW refused access because of greed or whatever, even though they knew someone was in danger. 

The reality is probably more along the lines of a teenager not blindly trusting someone claiming to be law enforcement within minutes of picking the phone up, and not knowing about the protocol VW claims to have in these situations. 

 

I think it's a completely understandable situation. 

[Senzelian]

2 minutes ago, manikyath said:

there's a privacy argument here

There's always a privacy argument when it comes to a police investigation. I mean, if I shot someone, and the police raided my house, they could potentially see my huge porn collection.  But yes, let's leave it at that 

[Belgarathian]

54 minutes ago, rcmaehl said:

 

 

My thoughts

I swear some(?) most(?) sales people honestly have no soul no matter what the industry is. I'm glad that the kid was found safe but something someone or something is seriously messed up since this was even able to occur in the first place.

Yeah, that's not sales. That's customer service following a script with no discretion or desire to escalate the issue. 

[Sauron]

57 minutes ago, manikyath said:

on the flip side.. if they would blindly provide tracking data, even if the owner of the car didnt pay for that feature to be active, when the police calls.. you'd be here writing an outraged article about that.

Uh... why does the user paying for it make a difference? Also this is a registered car on public roads, WV can clearly already access its location at will, it's not something that would be reasonably considered sensitive information that should be withheld from police officers with a warrant...

32 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

The reality is probably more along the lines of a teenager not blindly trusting someone claiming to be law enforcement within minutes of picking the phone up, and not knowing about the protocol VW claims to have in these situations. 

28 minutes ago, Belgarathian said:

Yeah, that's not sales. That's customer service following a script with no discretion or desire to escalate the issue. 

Regardless of whatever personal failing the "teenager" may or may not have had it's clear something went seriously wrong on WV's end because they claim they have a specific pipeline set up for law enforcement requests (which makes perfect sense) that had already been of use in the past. So either the guy on the phone was supposed to pass the call on to another guy whose job it is to handle this stuff or he WAS the guy and either way he failed to do his job in a way that could have cost a child his life. If that's the result of a lack of proper training then hopefully the person responsible for that training gets appropriate repercussions. And if WV is lying about having protocols in place for this... then it's still their fault, is it not?

39 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

The call was apparently 30 minutes long because the sheriff couldn't find a credit card.

The call was probably already 15 minutes long due to the sheriff having to explain the situation, then 5 minutes of trying to convince the guy to budge and 10 more minutes to get a hold of a credit card, doesn't sound unreasonable to me... it didn't make much of a difference because they found the car quickly anyway but in a situation like this 15 minutes of unnecessary delay could mean life or death for the victim.

[manikyath]

3 minutes ago, Sauron said:

. why does the user paying for it make a difference?

because a user might choose to not have their car in a 24/7 tracking system.

4 minutes ago, Sauron said:

it's not something that would be reasonably considered sensitive information that should be withheld from police officers with a warrant

then please carry this GPS so that the government can find you at all times.

 

i'm not *that* much of a tinfoil hat, but i feel very touchy about warantlessly accessing location data.

[tkitch]

No, it was done correctly.

 

Companies should not provide data to the police without a court-issued warrant.  

 

This is how things go very wrong, if the police can just get whatever they ask for.  

 

Yes, it sucks, but in situations like this a court order can be very expedited, and would get signed quickly.

[LAwLz]

10 minutes ago, Sauron said:

The call was probably already 15 minutes long due to the sheriff having to explain the situation, then 5 minutes of trying to convince the guy to budge and 10 more minutes to get a hold of a credit card, doesn't sound unreasonable to me... it didn't make much of a difference because they found the car quickly anyway but in a situation like this 15 minutes of unnecessary delay could mean life or death for the victim.

Yes, but at the same time you can't just blindly trust someone who claims to be law enforcement over the phone.

We are not talking about hours, we are talking about minutes. Yes, 15 minutes might be a big delay during a kidnapping but at the same time, instantly giving access as soon as someone says they are law enforcement might not be a good thing either. In this particular case the person who called was a sheriff, but what if it was someone who lied about it?

 

It's easy to point out issues with a system when it doesn't work, but a lot of times the "fix" just introduces more issues.

You have to judge the situation from a bigger picture. It's easy to go "wow, VW refused an officer access to a car with a kidnapped 2 year old in it", but if they just gave access to anyone who called in we would probably get news stories saying "VW gives out access to anyone claiming to be law enforcement over the phone". News organisations can spin it however they want to get clicks regardless of what VW does.

 

 

  

3 minutes ago, tkitch said:

Yes, it sucks, but in situations like this a court order can be very expedited, and would get signed quickly.

In this case, they gained access to the GPS tracking within 30 minutes so I doubt an expedited court order would have helped.

 

Yes, 30 minutes is the total delay this news story is about. Honestly, getting access to a GPS tracking system should probably take more than 30 minutes even if it was just handed over to law enforcement. I'd assume verifying that the person calling is actually who they are claiming to be and then handing access over would take more than 30 minutes.

[manikyath]

6 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

but what if it was someone who lied about it?

i'm assuming that there's methods in place for this, but it's more like.. "what if the officer is using his power for bad intentions".

 

warrants can go fast if the requirements are low, but the process of a warrant means that every time the data is accessed, it is registered and signed off on by multiple people.

[Sauron]

9 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Yes, but at the same time you can't just blindly trust someone who claims to be law enforcement over the phone.

We are not talking about hours, we are talking about minutes. Yes, 15 minutes might be a big delay during a kidnapping but at the same time, instantly giving access as soon as someone says they are law enforcement might not be a good thing either. In this particular case the person who called was a sheriff, but what if it was someone who lied about it?

I'm sure the actual policy is that it doesn't matter, if someone says they're law enforcement you give them what they want and ask questions later, it's not worth risking an incident like this both in terms of potentially endangering someone and more simply just because it's very bad publicity. Is VW really going to care if one guy gets away with not paying 150$ one time by pretending to be the sheriff only to be sued by VW later? We're talking about licensed vehicles they know the position of at all times, you think they wouldn't immediately find out if you tricked them?

13 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

It's easy to point out issues with a system when it doesn't work, but a lot of times the "fix" just introduces more issues.

You have to judge the situation from a bigger picture. It's easy to go "wow, VW refused an officer access to a car with a kidnapped 2 year old in it", but if they just gave access to anyone who called in we would probably get news stories saying "VW gives out access to anyone claiming to be law enforcement over the phone". News organisations can spin it however they want to get clicks regardless of what VW does.

It's a car, it has a plate, you can find out its location in so many ways it's not even funny. The police did find it within half an hour even without this information after all. At most it might be reasonable to ask the officer for their badge number (which could be verified very quickly if they actually do have a procedure in place for this) but that's it. It's not at all the same as, say, a phone manufacturer giving the police access to someone's phone while they're in custody and pose no immediate danger.

21 minutes ago, tkitch said:

No, it was done correctly.

 

Companies should not provide data to the police without a court-issued warrant.  

 

This is how things go very wrong, if the police can just get whatever they ask for.  

 

Yes, it sucks, but in situations like this a court order can be very expedited, and would get signed quickly.

13 minutes ago, manikyath said:

i'm assuming that there's methods in place for this, but it's more like.. "what if the officer is using his power for bad intentions".

 

warrants can go fast if the requirements are low, but the process of a warrant means that every time the data is accessed, it is registered and signed off on by multiple people.

As opposed to... "just" volkswagen having unrestricted access to your car's location at all times? Do you trust them? What if the guy who answered the sheriff had bad intentions?

24 minutes ago, manikyath said:

because a user might choose to not have their car in a 24/7 tracking system.

The car still has it regardless of whether you get to access it and, again, it's a registered vehicle, your expectations of it not being trackable should be 0.

26 minutes ago, manikyath said:

then please carry this GPS so that the government can find you at all times.

Do you really think they can't find you if they want to? All they need is your imei to find your approximate location through your cellular connection, even if we disregard your phone's gps. It's not the same thing though, cars are registered because they need to be trackable. If you don't want your car to be easily found then you shouldn't own a car. Plus the location of your car isn't necessarily your own.

[pas008]

16 minutes ago, Sauron said:

I'm sure the actual policy is that it doesn't matter, if someone says they're law enforcement you give them what they want and ask questions later, it's not worth risking an incident like this both in terms of potentially endangering someone and more simply just because it's very bad publicity. Is VW really going to care if one guy gets away with not paying 150$ one time by pretending to be the sheriff only to be sued by VW later? We're talking about licensed vehicles they know the position of at all times, you think they wouldn't immediately find out if you tricked them?

It's a car, it has a plate, you can find out its location in so many ways it's not even funny. The police did find it within half an hour even without this information after all. At most it might be reasonable to ask the officer for their badge number (which could be verified very quickly if they actually do have a procedure in place for this) but that's it. It's not at all the same as, say, a phone manufacturer giving the police access to someone's phone while they're in custody and pose no immediate danger.

As opposed to... "just" volkswagen having unrestricted access to your car's location at all times? Do you trust them? What if the guy who answered the sheriff had bad intentions?

The car still has it regardless of whether you get to access it and, again, it's a registered vehicle, your expectations of it not being trackable should be 0.

Do you really think they can't find you if they want to? All they need is your imei to find your approximate location through your cellular connection, even if we disregard your phone's gps. It's not the same thing though, cars are registered because they need to be trackable. If you don't want your car to be easily found then you shouldn't own a car. Plus the location of your car isn't necessarily your own.

how do you figure city, county, and even state know the positions/locations of vehicles or even where a person is with a dang phone

 

[wanderingfool2]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

I wonder how many people will stop reading after the headline and not look more into the situation.

 

I see at least one person in this thread who already did. 

 

Because why provide nuance and understanding when you can write a headline that gets people mad.

That's what I have an issue with a lot of media, they essentially bury the important bits (or sometimes just outright ignore it).

 

Overall I can't fault VW too much on this, other than maybe not outsourcing something like that a third party (who might not really keep up rigorous standards...boy once third parties get a long term contract the quality of work can drastically drop)

 

23 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Regardless of whatever personal failing the "teenager" may or may not have had it's clear something went seriously wrong on WV's end because they claim they have a specific pipeline set up for law enforcement requests (which makes perfect sense) that had already been of use in the past. So either the guy on the phone was supposed to pass the call on to another guy whose job it is to handle this stuff or he WAS the guy and either way he failed to do his job in a way that could have cost a child his life. If that's the result of a lack of proper training then hopefully the person responsible for that training gets appropriate repercussions. And if WV is lying about having protocols in place for this... then it's still their fault, is it not?

I don't know specifically about VW, but having had a job at one point where my duties were to assist law enforcement by providing them information; I can say that at my work the rules are in place and not all SR's have the capability of enough thinking to actually follow those rules (they are great sales reps...but get fixated sometimes on things like "making a sale"...I mean admittedly we would find them and get rid of them but we don't know until they are boneheaded to pull a stunt like that or get customer complaints).

 

So unless there are employees that actually come out saying that it doesn't exist, my feeling is that VW likely does have the policy in place and I bet they also rely on the rep having some form of common sense.  My guess here, either the guy was trying to make a sale (without any care for the situation) or simply didn't have the whereabouts to realize he should be escalating it

 

Like at the level where it's someone claiming to be the police, it shouldn't require to realize that you shouldn't stick to your script (and in the event you don't know what to do escalate it to your manager).

 

39 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Uh... why does the user paying for it make a difference? Also this is a registered car on public roads, WV can clearly already access its location at will, it's not something that would be reasonably considered sensitive information that should be withheld from police officers with a warrant...

I agree that it shouldn't matter if the user is paying or not paying...but GPS is 100% considered sensitive information.  VW might have to ping the car's location (so not like they have it sitting there watching you drive).

 

1 hour ago, tkitch said:

No, it was done correctly.

 

Companies should not provide data to the police without a court-issued warrant.  

 

This is how things go very wrong, if the police can just get whatever they ask for.  

 

Yes, it sucks, but in situations like this a court order can be very expedited, and would get signed quickly.

So here is where it also gets tricky, it's from having been a person responsible at a company (obviously not VW) for giving out sensitive information, sometimes you get requests from people who aren't police officers and in one case a request from a police officer who made an "official" request that wasn't actually an official request (he was stalking his ex).  When it's a time sensitive situation there likely isn't a proper warrant.  Even an expedited warrant will take time, it's actually why the company I worked for had clauses where if it was a request by law enforcement in regards to a crime we were permitted to give out that information at our discretion (but reserved it for cases where it's needed).

 

With that said, it only took me 15 minutes to verify and get information for the cops the one time it was important at my job.  Like for perspective of what I had to do when I received a time sensitive request, I received the call, officer told me quick situation, I got the info I needed to start grabbing the information, but while I was pulling information I tried to get the officer to send me an email from his official email address (which he couldn't since he wasn't near his cruiser), so I got his badge number and the info to the local police department where he was dispatched from called them (which they of course were aware of the situation) and had one of them send an official email citing an emergency request (at which point since it was a verbal confirmation and written confirmation from a second officer I was free to give the information).

 

So I would say that when it's dealing with time sensitive stuff, it can actually add quite a bit of head-aches to the situation (You have to verify it's a cop you are talking to, get some type of written confirmation that an urgent event is occurring, and you need to assess if the information you are giving out would be in any violation which would need full on warrants to cover yourself)...with that said, the third-party employee definitely dropped the ball by getting stuck on requiring the payment.

 

Sometimes the public interest should trump the need for privacy.

[Arika]

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

The sheriff called VW (or rather, a call center that VW hired to handle their calls) and the service representative didn't activate an expired service just because someone called in and claimed to be a sheriff. It's not like there was a long call with evidence provided either. The call was apparently 30 minutes long because the sheriff couldn't find a credit card

Maybe i'm interpreting the story wrong, but if the delay was because the sheriff was trying to find a credit card, then it means that VW don't actually care who is paying, as long as they get paid, and then they will help. it doesn't seem to be a matter of not knowing who the person on the other end of the phone is to avoid giving out location data to a potentially bad actor. the story comes across as "well pay us $150 and we'll tell you where the car is regardless of who you are".

 

assuming the service was "active" would the consultant have just told the sheriff immediately?

[rcmaehl]

2 hours ago, Sauron said:

Uh... why does the user paying for it make a difference? Also this is a registered car on public roads, WV can clearly already access its location at will, it's not something that would be reasonably considered sensitive information that should be withheld from police officers with a warrant...

Regardless of whatever personal failing the "teenager" may or may not have had it's clear something went seriously wrong on WV's end because they claim they have a specific pipeline set up for law enforcement requests (which makes perfect sense) that had already been of use in the past. So either the guy on the phone was supposed to pass the call on to another guy whose job it is to handle this stuff or he WAS the guy and either way he failed to do his job in a way that could have cost a child his life. If that's the result of a lack of proper training then hopefully the person responsible for that training gets appropriate repercussions. And if WV is lying about having protocols in place for this... then it's still their fault, is it not?

The call was probably already 15 minutes long due to the sheriff having to explain the situation, then 5 minutes of trying to convince the guy to budge and 10 more minutes to get a hold of a credit card, doesn't sound unreasonable to me... it didn't make much of a difference because they found the car quickly anyway but in a situation like this 15 minutes of unnecessary delay could mean life or death for the victim.

I don't know what West Virgina has to do with this.

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, Fasauceome said:

To be fair, I think that's a job requirement

Yep.

 

Like, I get why this story is spun the way it is, but this tells you more about how these features are not for safety but are deemed a luxury.

 

And stories like this are how "optional" features get deemed a requirement later by regulation. Personally, I'm of the view that vehicle tracking features should be a de-facto requirement, and always-on, but insurance companies are the ones who pay for it, they are the ones who benefit from the data. If the customer wants access to the data on their car for transparency, they plug in their USB cable into the car and they get the data.

 

If they want to turn it off, then they pay the insurance company the extra cost, and remove the sim card from the telemetry radio.

 

 

[Kisai]

7 minutes ago, Arika S said:

Maybe i'm interpreting the story wrong, but if the delay was because the sheriff was trying to find a credit card, then it means that VW don't actually care who is paying, as long as they get paid, and then they will help. it doesn't seem to be a matter of not knowing who the person on the other end of the phone is to avoid giving out location data to a potentially bad actor. the story comes across as "well pay us $150 and we'll tell you where the car is regardless of who you are".

 

assuming the service was "active" would the consultant have just told the sheriff immediately?

It's more likely that the representative can't do anything, they're probably in India or Philippines and have no authority to override anything. As long as someone's card is in the system, they don't care who's.

 

[rcmaehl]

4 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Personally, I'm of the view that vehicle tracking features should be a de-facto requirement, and always-on, but insurance companies are the ones who pay for it, they are the ones who benefit from the data. If the customer wants access to the data on their car for transparency, they plug in their USB cable into the car and they get the data.

 

If they want to turn it off, then they pay the insurance company the extra cost, and remove the sim card from the telemetry radio.

 

 

That is a BOLD opinion. I could see it being a thing though to sell cars. Get XX% off your auto insurance by buying the new 2025 MAKE MODEL!

[Arika]

1 minute ago, Kisai said:

It's more likely that the representative can't do anything, they're probably in India or Philippines and have no authority to override anything. As long as someone's card is in the system, they don't care who's.

 

i understand that the lowly rep can't override it most likely, but it seems that LAWLz was trying to say that it was because they didn't actually know if the guy was a sheriff or not so they didn't want to give out information, but the story paints it as though they would have given the information, regardless if the caller was a cop or not, if they got payment.