It's time for True Crime Tuesday. The story is true, sounds true? No, it sounds made up. I don't know. Gerry and Shannon present True Crime, all right.
I've had my car stolen. I know a lot of people have had their car. In fact, I've had two cars stolen in the course of my career. I suppose there is a whole new world of car thievery that is going on, and it is concentrated along the West Coast and more specifically right in Washington, d C. Think think of the violent carjackings that we've heard of in DC in just the last couple of years.
Right.
For example, the attempted robbery of a vehicle used to transport oh, I don't know, the President's granddaughter, Joe Biden's granddaughter Naomi. Secret Service agents had to shoot a guy. Another Washington shootout involved US marshals who were consecurity for Justice Sonya Sotomayor. There was an FBI agent who was carjacked by a seventeen year old. Congressman Henry Quaar of Texas had a gun stuck in his face and his
car was stolen. A guy who was arrested after crashing in a stolen vehicle, evaded police custody at the hospital, then stole an ambulance to escape. He was seen in surveillance footage driving away while wearing an hospital gown with the IV needle still in his arm. The thriving used car market of West Africa, it's what's driving the stolen car market.
On the East coast of the United States.
There have been I think it's about what is it, a million, roughly a million cars in twenty twenty three. Car theft had been falling steadily since nineteen ninety one, and then we saw at least most of that, I should say most of it, not at least most of that was because of simple security systems that became very, very popular in cars and then became installed. They came installed on cars that you would buy. But early twenty
twenty auto thefts have increased by about thirty percent. And the statistics for last year are incomplete, but right now they already suggest that we could see a record number of car thefts and violent car thefts like carjackings in the year twenty twenty four. About ten percent of those cars that are stolen in the United States today are smuggled overseas and what's amazing is those used car brokers in West Africa. They are very specific about what kind
of cars they want. You saw this in Gone in sixty seconds. There's a market out there for high end cars and all it takes is a buyer to say something like I want a twenty twenty four Mercedes SL three fifty with leather interior, and you go get your henchmen to go out and find that car. The majority of times, the most common way to see deal of vehicle is the most basic. Find one with the engine
still running and the keys inside. That is a crime of opportunity, and according to law enforcement, that's about forty percent of car thefts are again just the most basic. You left your car running and you left your keys inside. Think about times of extreme heat or cold. When it's one hundred and fifteen in the valley, you leave your car on to keep the air conditioning running. Or extreme cold. That's probably even more likely where you don't want the
car to freeze up. So at fifteen below, I'm looking at you, Minnesota. You leave the car running, you leave the ignition fob in the center console, maybe not the key with the ignition anymore. You are trying to carry a bag of groceries into the house and they slip in while you're in the house and take your car and they're gone. If you figure that each I'm gonna say punk kid, because I'm gonna make generalization, gets about five hundred to one thousand, maybe fifteen hundred dollars a car,
especially for the higher end ones. Then the next guy is going to get about two thousand four it, and the next guy's going to get twenty five or three thousand for it, and the price goes up so that, for example, in West Africa, the most sought after vehicle is probably a range drover or a Toyota pickup or a BMW Sedan. And if you get a BMW seven series to your pickup point, you're going to get fifteen hundred bucks for it.
But as it goes along the supply.
Chain, you've got the fence, you've got the shipping company, you've got the customs broker.
Everybody has to get paid.
And even after expenses, there's plenty of profit because you could sell that same BMW seven series for about fifty thousand dollars in the capital of Ghana. And like I said, Washington, DC, was sort of the ground zero for a lot of this. In one specific place, there was a parking garage on Florida in Washington, DC that was an ideal place to stash the Mercedes or the BMW or the Dodge Challenger.
The stolen car business was so robust in Washington in twenty twenty three that that parking garage became a de facto showroom for these stolen cars. The buyers and the sellers would meet there every night, they would inspect the cars, the deal was sealed. Cars not sold within hours were listed on Instagram. They were shown by appointment, and it was dependable. It was a business. It was a marketplace
that opened up. Text messages that were intercepted by law enforcement captured the buyers that were placing orders for very specific cars, very specific makes and models. One eighteen year old delivering stolen vehicles had six carjackings in a week. There was a twelve year old who made headlines throughout all of twenty twenty two and into last year after he stole a BMA, a Jaguar, an Audi, a Tesla, a cargo van, and at one point he hit a
half a dozen dealerships in Maryland. In less than a month. He had been arrested twenty two times by the middle of last year, but because the Maryland judicial reform stipulated that kids under the age of thirteen couldn't be charged with property crimes, he was returned back to the property to the custody of his parents. Kids like that being manipulated by older gang members come in as pseudo father figures and the kids, a lot of them. Teenagers brag
about their recent heightsts. They text each other gtarl Grand theft auto real life.
You can train on social media.
You could see the Kia challenge on how to pick up a key or a Hyundai using a screwdriver in a USB cable. But the GPS tracker that you have in your car, that's not gonna help. They know where those are. They'll just pull him out. And most of them, like I said, some of the high end cars end up in West Africa for the burgeoning stolen used car market there for those high end the Mercedes that'd range
rovers and things like that. About some of those weird and unbelievable stories in the world of crime, and this is a kind of a combination of crime and artificial intelligence.
And this is something that should be a crime.
Drew Crecente a couple of months ago got a Google alert that flagged what appeared to be a new profile of his daughter online, the daughter that had been murdered eighteen years earlier. It had Jennifer's full name, It had an old high school yearbook photo of her. It had a biography of Jennifer. It said she was a video game journalist. It said she was an expert in technology,
pop culture, and journalism. The website where this new profile popped up was character dot Ai, and Jennifer's image and likeness were used to create a chatbot that people could talk to.
Now. The company.
Is a website that allows you to converse with digital personalities using the generative artificial intelligence. Think you're having a conversation with a computer like chat GPT or grock on Twitter, but it's interacting with you as if it's a person. These chatbots engage in conversation. They can be programmed to adopt specific personalities, biographical details of specific characters, whether they're real characters or imagine. You know, you can program it
to be Benjamin Franklin or Darth Vader. And these companies that put up these chatbots have found a growing audience online because people want friends or mentors, or they want romantic partners. But this controversial technology also comes with incredible drawbacks. A guy in Belgium died by suicide a couple of years ago. He was encouraged to do so in a conversation with a chatbot. We saw that also with a kid, a twelve year old kid who was having conversations with
these chatbots and eventually ended his life. So character AI again needless to say Dad Drew Crecente, who's seeing his murdered daughter's face on this website. He said, my pulse was racing of just looking for a big flashing red stop button that I could slap and just make it stop. It takes it quite a bit for me to be shocked, he said, because I really have been through quite a lot, but this was a new luw and give you an
idea what he's been through. His daughter, Jennifer, was killed by her ex boyfriend during her senior year in high school. Character AI says that the company will remove any chatbot that violates as terms of service. They're constantly evolving and
they're refining their safety practices to prioritize community safety. When they were notified about Jennifer's character, they said they reviewed the content and the account and took action based on their policies because the terms of service prevent anybody from impersonating any person or entity. Now, because of the nonprofit that Drew Corescente put up after his daughter was murdered,
they spend time preventing dating violence. He was appalled the character had allowed somebody to create this facsimile of a murdered high schooler without her family's permission, and because of his work, like I said, in that nonprofit, he keeps the Google alert that tracks mentions of his daughter's name online. Every once in a while it shows up on a spam website, maybe a news report that repeats old information.
But that October alert led him to his daughter's name and picture on character dot Ai, and he couldn't figure out it first, he said. The more he looked into it, the more uneasy he felt. In addition to using her name and her picture, the chatbots page described her in very lively language, as if she were alive. Like the tech journalist who geeks out on video games, always up
to date on the latest entertainment News. He said the description didn't appear to be based on her personality or any specific interests about what her real life was, and he said the factual inaccuracies were beside the point. The idea of character hosting and then potentially making money from a chatbot using his murdered daughter's name was distressing enough
he did not start at a conversation with it. He did not investigate the user that created the bot, but he immediately emailed the character company to have it removed. Asked about other chatbots on their site that impersonate public figures, a spokesperson said the reports of impersonation are investigated immediately by the Trust and Safety team. The character is removed if it's found to have violated. There is a privacy
researcher at Mozilla Foundation. They said that this approach to moderation is way too passive because it plainly violates its own term of service. In the case of Jennifer Crescente, he says, if they're going to say we don't allow this on the platform, then they allow it on their platform until it's brought to their attention.
That's not right.
All the while they're making millions of dollars potentially. I mean it was it was disturbing enough to push this guy to ponder up taking a new cause, and now he's considering legal options and advocating for more active safety measures to prevent AI companies from harming or re traumatizing anybody else that may have been the victim of.
A crime, in this case, the murder of his own daughter. So that's that awful.