The owner of a trucking company in China is in trouble with law enforcement after she admitted to installing GPS tracking devices on police vehicles in her area to help her trucks evade law enforcement.
A woman in Xiangyang, Hubei Province, can count herself lucky to have been sentenced to just eight days of administrative detention and a fine of 500 yuan ($70) for the very serious crime of tracking police vehicles using hidden GPS devices.
Her plan was accidentally discovered during a routine inspection when Xiangyang traffic police found a mysterious black box attached to the chassis of one of their patrol cars. Further inspection revealed that the box contained a GPS tracker, which was later found on six of the team’s 11 cars. Using traces of SIM cards linked to tracking devices, authorities were able to track down the culprit – a local woman named Zhu, who admitted to monitoring the movements of police cars.
Fleet owner Zhu came up with the idea of tracking local highway patrol vehicles to improve her drivers’ chances of avoiding being pulled over and potentially getting fined. She admitted that she installed the GPS trackers herself, taking advantage of the late night parking of police cars at a station in Xiangzhou.
Zhu bought six magnetic GPS trackers online for 350 yuan in June last year and used them to track cars through a phone app until the end of last month. In this way, she could pinpoint the location of traffic police vehicles and warn her drivers to avoid them.
In the Western world, such bold actions would be considered serious crimes, but according to China Daily, Zhu got away with only administrative arrest and a fine of 500 yuan, which seems disproportionately trivial.
