Originally posted by Curval
I am now pretty sure the thei got my bike by simply unlocking it...with my keys. They are missing along wth my cell phone.
That's actually more common than you might think.
My brother had two vehicles: a Ford F150 crewcab and a Toyota 4runner (he liked mine so much he decided to get his own). The previous owners of his house had converted the garage into a spare room, so both of his vehicles were parked one behind the other in the driveway, the 4runner against the house with the F150 behind it.
My brother also has 2 small children who ride in carseats, and he only has 2 carseats (1 per child). Often, he finds himself having to take the seats out of one vehicle and installing in the 2nd vehicle so the kids can be carted around. To make the transition easier, he kept a key to each vehicle in the other vehicle.
One night he's lying in bed and he hears the "blump blump blump" of a slowly-cruising street rod. He's thinking "hey, that's a pretty cool sounding car." Then the motion-sensitive light goes on in his side yard but he doesn't think anything about it because his dogs will sometimes trigger the light when they go out the doggy door to relieve themselves. Then he hears the sound of his 4runner being started.
Just about the time he gets out of bed and to his front door, he sees his 4runner being backed across his lawn. He goes charging out, cell phone in hand with the police, yelling at the perps but they drive off.
Apparently, what had happened was that the thieves had broken into his unlocked F150 (his son likes to push the buttons on the remote control key fob to watch the truck blink and honk its horn, and the son probably turned the alarm off without my brother knowing it) and had found the key to the 4runner in the glove box. The thief then opened up the 4runner and decided to steal it for a joyride since he didn't have a way to start the F150 that was more conveniently parked by the road (by a stroke of luck, the key to the F150 had been removed from the 4runner's glove box earlier that day).
So the cops show up and take his information and tell him they'll get back to him. He's thinking the thieves probably didn't get very far and the 4runner should be found fairly easily. He thinks they'll have it back later that night.
Wrong.
By morning, he hasn't heard from the cops, so he decides to turn vigilante and solve the crime himself. He drives the F150 around and finds the 4runner parked, undamaged, all 4 doors open, a couple of blocks away at a house under construction, key still in the ignition. He drives home, parks the F150, walks the couple of blocks to the 4runner, drives it home, tells the police he's recovered the vehicle (and tells them a few more things about their effectiveness in the area of law enforcement), and tells the wife that she'll have to pick one vehicle or the other as "her" truck because they won't be leaving keys in vehicles any more.
Now he drives an 1988 300ZX that he's restoring. It doesn't have remote keyless entry.
