How Your “Keyless” Car Became a Criminal’s Playground

 

Your car’s biggest enemy isn’t a thief with a crowbar—it’s a hacker with a signal booster. Keyless convenience has become a trap, and this book is the survival manual automakers hoped you’d never read.

Cars were meant to usher in comfort, not chaos. They promised convenience, status, and a sense of control—press a button, tap a handle, walk away feeling invincible. Instead, they opened a battlefield no one asked for. A silent one. A clean one. A war where the enemy doesn’t break windows, doesn’t hot-wire ignitions, and doesn’t even touch the keys hanging by your front door. That is the unsettling truth Dr. Joseph Ejike Ojih, an adjunct professor at Morgan State University, peels open in “Gone in 60 Seconds Again.”

What he argues—quietly, sharply, unforgivingly—is that the machines built to secure us have turned against us, not through malice, but through weakness. And criminals? They smelled that weakness before the engineers did.

The author dissects incentives the same way a detective dissects a crime scene. Thieves don’t ram doors or smash glass anymore because they don’t have to. Antennas extend the reach of your key fob. Tablets coax onboard computers into trusting impostors. Signal boosters whisper digital lies that cars blindly believe. It isn’t magic. It’s math—cold, brutal, efficient. In suburbs from Maryland to Manchester, relay attackers glide through neighborhoods like shadows with Wi-Fi breath, coaxing sleeping vehicles awake and rolling them out like obedient pets.

And just like the mercenaries of old who fought without fighting, these modern bandits exploit the system because the system pays them to. Why wrestle with steering columns when microchips surrender faster? Why sprint from alarms when alarms don’t bark? Criminals keep their hands clean, their risks minimal, and their profits high. All they need is a quiet driveway and a distracted owner who trusts their car a little too much.

Some models fall more often than others—not because of fate but because of physics. Some fobs shout louder than they should. Some computer modules accept strangers with embarrassing eagerness. A few brands might as well leave their digital doors ajar with a welcome mat rolled out. And people cling to the fantasy that “nice neighborhoods” are force fields, that crime checks ZIP codes before striking. Dr. Ojih laughs at that illusion without ever raising his voice.

But this book does not merely trace the arc of criminal ingenuity; it punctures your assumptions, then hands you a battle plan. It explains how key-fob signals behave, why rolling codes sometimes fail, and how thieves manipulate the electromagnetic weak spots most drivers never knew they had. It strips away the Hollywood theatrics and shows theft for what it now is: a software problem disguised as a hardware crime.

In these pages, knowledge becomes weaponry. Awareness becomes armor. Readers are shown how simple, almost embarrassingly simple, moves can tilt the odds. Park differently. Store differently. Think differently. Because the thieves are not slowing down, and the global rings shipping out stolen SUVs before sunrise aren’t losing sleep over sentimental owners. They evolve. They collaborate. They treat the world like an open-air auction where your vehicle is just another item on the block.

Across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and France, Dr. Ojih tracks how this cancer spreads through cities that thought they were too sophisticated, too modern, too well-engineered to fall victim. Relay squads sweep blocks in minutes. Hackers hijack onboard computers faster than a driver can microwave leftovers. SUVs vanish from driveways without footprints or fingerprints, swept into overseas shipping crates where they will live a second life far from the people who paid for them. It is a global hunt, and the prey rarely hears the predator coming.

If the book stopped there, it would be terrifying. But it doesn’t. It pivots, teaching you to see the angles thieves see, to spot the gaps they crawl through. It shows how to strip away the illusions manufacturers wrap around their marketing. Thieves adapt, but so can you. A locked mind is easier to steal from than a locked car, the book seems to whisper, letting the warning simmer beneath the surface.

What emerges is neither despair nor paranoia, but something leaner, sharper: clarity. The kind of clarity that makes you step into your garage differently, listen to your car differently, trust your instincts more than the salesman who swore the system was unbreakable. Drivers who finish this book leave with a new spine: stronger, more alert, unwilling to play victim in a game rigged against the unaware.

If you own a keyless car—and at this point, nearly everyone does—then this is not a casual read. It is not comfort food. It is a manual for survival in a world where crime no longer wears ski masks. These days, it carries antennas.

“Gone in 60 Seconds Again” clocks in at 95 pages, but the weight it carries—6.2 ounces or not—lands heavier than many books three times its size. It is Book 71 in the Brief Books Series, but it punches like a standalone wake-up call. Compact, direct, unblinking.

Cars may be getting smarter. Thieves already are. And this book reminds you that standing still is not an option.