Published Aug. 15, 2026at6:00am
It started like any other morning in Glen Park, a charming, often foggy, village near the city’s southern border. But when Alex Hao approached her car, she noticed a door was ajar. Then she spotted the contents of her glove box strewn across the front seat.
Two pairs of sunglasses — the only items that had been in the vehicle — were gone from the center console.
Hao might have assumed that she or her husband had forgotten to lock the car had she not just seen a YouTube video laying out precisely this new flavor of crime.
Goodbye, smash-and-grab. Hello, hack-and-nab. The altogether less messy technique allows tech-savvy thieves to spend a few hundred dollars to build a tool to get inside a car with nearly no fuss.