ANDOVER residents are urged to be vigilant after reports of theft of high quality off-road motorcycles, quads and ATVs.
Hampshire Constabulary warns those who sell the high quality vehicles online, particularly on Facebook Marketplace and Gumtree.
According to police, there have been a number of thefts or attempted theft of high-quality vehicles.
It comes after numerous salespeople receive a phone call or message from people posing as “buyers” requesting a picture or video of the vehicle’s engine running from the salesperson.
Recently, a high-quality break-in at Thruxton Airfield near Andover stole a BMW 3 Series and a Honda Quad after a hangar was broken into.
A spokesman for the Hampshire Constabulary said, “Those posing as ‘buyers’ then extracted the image metadata – which allows users to see when and where the picture or video was taken – thereby putting the bike on one specific location can be located.
“The vehicles are then targeted by criminals and are often stolen or attempts to steal the vehicles.
“We know that online buy and sell sites have grown in popularity over the past few months, but we want to remind people to be vigilant when selling items this way.”
The police are now advising to ensure that the location settings on mobile devices / cameras are disabled when sending images to potential “buyers”, which would prevent the extraction of the location metadata and the tracking of the vehicle.
Sellers are also encouraged to upload additional photos directly to their online listing instead of sending them directly to potential buyers.
The police also ask that buyers not give their home or work address and instead arrange a meeting in a public place or a neutral place.
Comments are closed.