When the Police find a machine they believe to be stolen but which has been completely stripped of any identifying marks there’s only one person they turn to – Datatag’s resident Sherlock Holmes, Nick Mayell.
Nick has decades of experience sniffing out the truth when it comes to plant and machinery and anything he doesn’t know about the tricks of the trade simply aren’t worth knowing.
Which is handy for the Police as Nick also manages Datatag’s Accredited Police Training Courses ensuring at least some of his encyclopedic knowledge is passed on to the serving officers.
The particular suspect JCB dumper Nick had been called out to help identify bore all the hallmarks of a stolen vehicle.
The theft indicators Nick highlights Police to look out for on his Plant Identification Course were all there including a smashed beacon, missing company branding and most tellingly the missing CESAR identification labels.
To top off Nick’s suspicions about this particular machine it only had 88 hours on the clock.
On closer inspection what Nick found was a seriously thorough job by the criminals in trying to remove all trace of an identity. Chassis, engine, pump, gearbox and axle numbers were all either defaced or completely ground out or missing altogether.
Nick said: “It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen a machine quite so thoroughly ‘erased’ as this one. It’s usually the bigger machines which get this amount of attention by the gangs.”
However hard the thieves had tried to hide its identity they didn’t bank on one small but vital fact – that being that the machine had been fitted with Datatag’s unique layered security marking technologies found within the CESAR Scheme.
These provide an indelible identification which time and time again prove to be the downfall of criminals who find it impossible to locate and remove them all.
Partly down to Nick’s skills but in large part down to the Datatag technologies it took Nick less than five minutes to determine the machine’s true identity – considerably less than the thieves spent trying to hide it!
As a final check Nick also scanned the machine to locate the RFID tags buried within its wiring and this just confirmed his prior identification.
The Police have already contacted the owner who is very pleased to getting his machine back and the person found in possession of the dumper is now facing some tough questions.
The CESAR Scheme is now in its 10th year and has protected over 250,000 items of plant and machinery valued at over £5billion. It is the Official security scheme of the CEA and AEA and has contributed to an enormous reduction of theft since launched in 2007 prior to the Olympic Games in London.
CESAR is now fitted as standard to a host of leading brands including Manitou, JCB, John Deere, New Holland and Class to name a few. Such is its effect on theft that the NFU offer premium discounts of up to 25% on CESAR protected machinery.
More information can be found at www.cesarscheme.org
