Back in the good ol’ days of truck heists, you could get your four best friends together in three matching Honda Civics and steal yourself a truck full of all the DVD players your heart desires. In modern times, however, things are more complicated: You’ll need some high-tech GPS-spoofing equipment if you want to make off with a pair of trucks full of Guy Fieri and Sammy Hager tequila, as an unknown number of thieves did earlier this month.
Two trucks full of Fieri and Hagar’s Santo Tequila, worth over $1 million, disappeared en route from Texas to Pennsylvania earlier this month according to USA Today. The bottles were bound for an import shop, but never arrived — it turned out the trucks’ GPS tracking had been falsified:
The trucks left Laredo, Texas, on Nov. 7, and at some point during the weekend of Nov. 9-10 the import firm began getting what eventually were discovered to be “fictitious updates from the trucker that won the bid (to deliver the tequila), about a breakdown … they were going to have to get some things fixed,” Santo Spirits CEO Dan Butkus told USA TODAY.
After a few days, the trucking company and the importer “realized that something was amiss,” with the cargo, he said. Apparently, a third party had diverted the trucks, sending GPS emulators to show the “product was still going where it was supposed to be going,” Butkus said. “It took about five days to the point where the broker said, ‘Okay, this product’s been stolen’.”
It sounds like the GPS updates were spoofed, an attack far beyond what Dom’s 2001 crew could handle (though it’d be a piece of cake for Tej.) Location spoofing involves sending false information to GPS receivers, convincing them they’re talking to satellites that they don’t actually have a connection to. It’s possible such a setup informed the trucks’ fleet management GPS tracker that it was all on course — anyone checking the truck’s location would see it as on track, because the truck’s GPS receiver would really think it was.
The bottles of tequila remain in the wind, and it seems some individual or group has made off with seven figures worth of apparently pretty bland tequila. One truck was tracked to California, but investigators don’t yet have the full story on how it got there. Do you think, after the heist, the perpetrators celebrated with a bottle or two of the stolen goods? Or did they settle for Corona?