[shajufx]

I like to report a professionally planned and operated tyre robbery gang in Bangalore city. This time its 9 cars in a matter of 1 hour that took place at TATANAGAR last night. All 4 wheels are removed from every vehicle and the body is supported by bricks and concrete blocks. I just visited the spot and found 3 of them close to each other, other cars are within 1 km of these cars, all in the residential area of Tatanagar, bylanes of 80 feet road that starts from Aadhaar office.

Some pictures below. All of them are brand new, the Creta is still with the "registered" sticker. Its a warning to car owners who use public road for night parking. Please ensure your wheels are secured !!

Mods: please move this post if it does not belong here

[Gannu_1]

Thanks for sharing shaju! Moving your post to a dedicated thread.

Looks like a well thought out move by the robbers. 9 cars in a span of an hour sounds ridiculously well executed!

[shajufx]

Originally Posted by Gannu_1

Looks like a well thought out move by the robbers. 9 cars in a span of an hour sounds ridiculously well executed!

I was shocked to see the perfection its executed. If this is a 'trial run' by the gang, we will surely see more massive robbery in the coming weeks or months. Because Tatanagar is nothing compared to over a dozen other residential zones with plenty of expensive cars parked on the roads. I could see Police patrol vehicles moving around here, curious to wait and watch what they could dig up from this incident !! Lot of houses in this area has CCTV cameras. Thats the only hope for investigations.

[paragsachania]

And this I received on Whatsapp and reported from Mumbai. More "professional" with tripod Jacks stands!





Whether this was theft or otherwise, I am not sure but again a rare case that someone would purposely remove all 4 wheels to get some job done for the wheels by leaving the car like this in open.

[SmartCat]

This happened in a street next to ours too last week. The local cops put a note on all cars parked outside warning owners about this new menace.

Originally Posted by paragsachania

And this I received on Whatsapp and reported from Mumbai. More "professional" with tripod Jacks stands!
Whether this was theft or otherwise, I am not sure but again a rare case that someone would purposely remove all 4 wheels to get some job done for the wheels by leaving the car like this in open.

This doesn't look like robbery - no self-respecting thief leaves behind expensive jacks, when blocks/bricks/stones are available. Unless they were forced to leave the site in a hurry because somebody happened to pass by.

[audioholic]

Quite a well organised and sequenced theft. I think there will be quite a few hands involved in this and a vehicle to load so many tyres. This cant be a one or two person job. If the time window is actually one hour to steal four tyres from nine cars, then these guys should be employed in some tyre shop for faster turnaround. But from where on earth did they get so many bricks to support the cars? Some construction site owner might have lodged a complaint regarding his bricks being stolen. Else if they have actually got it from where they came from, then they should have got it on a mini van.

A similar story happened a few years back near my house when a brand new innova had its tyres stolen on a saturday night, presumed to have been sold in the sunday bazaar. This car was purchased on Friday and the owner was heart broken with the incident as well as the cost of the replacement wheels + rims.

Originally Posted by paragsachania

And this I received on Whatsapp and reported from Mumbai. More "professional" with tripod Jacks stands!

Attachment 1679341

Attachment 1679342

Whether this was theft or otherwise, I am not sure but again a rare case that someone would purposely remove all 4 wheels to get some job done for the wheels by leaving the car like this in open.

If it was indeed a theft, then the owner should live with that hydraulic jack and jack stands for any DIY repairs further. What a return gift

[paragsachania]

Originally Posted by smartcat

This doesn't look like robbery - no self-respecting thief leaves behind expensive jacks, when blocks/bricks/stones are available. Unless they were forced to leave the site in a hurry because somebody happened to pass by.

You never know. Cost of 4 Alloys and 4 Tires (almost brand new?) vis-a-vis cost of these cheap fabricated stands?

You get these OE Jacks from Kurla for throw away prices too and if you are a professional thief, a friend will give it to you for free too. After all,we know the who's hand in glove with whom here in these types of thefts - mechanics, Punture shop guys, scrap market dealers.

Except for the Jack stands that can be easily fabricated by any workshop next door for few hundred rupees, I don't see a reason why this can't be a well managed theft. The OE jack is a jack of all Jacks! Can be used for any car for that matter.

So now let us scratch our heads and think of all possible reasons why the 4 wheels were purposely removed that way .

Leaving bricks and stones is a very age old technique we all have seen haven't we?

Originally Posted by audioholic

If it was indeed a theft, then the owner should live with that hydraulic jack and jack stands for any DIY repairs further. What a return gift

I see these 2 pics itself as DIY

"DIY: Removing 4 wheels and parking the car on jack stands"

[GTO]

Here's a related thread, guys - locking nuts!

[pradyblr]

This is scary for people like me in Bangalore who park our cars on the road.
Hoping for my builder to handover my apartment soon so that she gets a secured parking .
With no good quality wheel locking nut (Thank you GTO for the link) or any other solution, one can only hope that the police catches this gang very fast before it becomes widespread.

[Latheesh]

This is not new in Bangalore, but stealing multiple vehicles in a row is unheard of. Same thing happened to my colleague's car back in 2005/06 in Koramangala. All 4 wheels were stolen from his Indica and vehicle was left supported by four concrete blocks.

This looks like a well executed plan, multiple people are involved, big goods carrying vehicle is used to carry those brick/stones to the site and take all wheels back. Those concrete blocks/stones do not look like new or picked from a small home construction site. They looked like picked from some residential layout development site or apartment construction site.

[shajufx]

I did another rounds in the area towards evening and found one more on the rocks in another bylane. There is a confusion on the total number of cars involved because I hear 4 cars to 9 cars from different residents here.

The gang had no issues of finding rocks and hollow bricks in the area because there are multiple construction sites that are open to the road. Power tools are used for faster execution and I am sure they are trained well for the job as one of my friends said "they qualify to be in the racing pit crew"

[kvish]

Looks like one gang operating across Bangalore. I heard multiple incidents near my house about wheels getting stolen. They are coming in cars and stealing wheels.

[abhishek46]

For people who park on roads, please consider pooling in some cash and getting CCTVs installed on-the-lanes.
If 5-6 car owners are using a lane to park, the cost per person will be quite less as well.

[sandsun7]

Originally Posted by shajufx

I did another rounds in the area towards evening and found one more on the rocks in another bylane. There is a confusion on the total number of cars involved because I hear 4 cars to 9 cars from different residents here.

My colleague with whom I carpool to work lives in Tata nagar and he is a residents association executive body member. His Ertiga (VXi variant with steel wheels) which we use to travel to work was parked right next to one of the Innovas whose tires were picked. The cars with non alloy wheels in the lane were spared.
The figure according to him is total 8 cars. They did call the police ,and the Circle inspector of the area inspected the vehicles yesterday. Some CCTV footage captured showed the gang members, but with faces covered with masks. Police does not seem to be very optimistic about recovering anything back, but they have promised beat patrolling in the odd hours on a daily basis now on.

[hrman]

Wow. This is shocking. What a loss to the owners. They will need to shell out anything between 4k to 7k per tyre and rim. For alloys, the loss is even higher. Its high time they invested in a Cctv camera to cover the parking area on the road. Does insurance cover stolen tyres as well at a depreciated cost?

Such a large scale operation would have involved the highest levels of efficiency, secrecy and modes to transport the stolen tyres. A large gang seems to be involved. But when for F1 racing, the tyres can be changed in a matter of a few seconds (one of the fastest I heard was 1.92 seconds for all 4 tyres), this is also possible.

A funny story we used to hear in our younger days. Some person who took his Premier Padmini car to Chor Bazaar in Bombay and when he came back, the tyres were missing. The car was propped on bricks. He found and purchased back his own tyres from the same bazaar. This tale may have been an urban legend and was heard in different versions across the years. Some talked about the guy going to purchase a wheel cap and he was sold a stolen wheel cap from his own car.