HAS MY PADLOCK BEEN PICKED?

[kiwifighterinuk]

Hi i would like to ask a question about my garage door lock that I suspect has been picked. I have tried to attach a photo to this message without any luck. File is very small and in jpeg format? I would be happy to send you the pick...just email me at vernonkelliott@hotmail.com

The padlock pin now pulls right through and out since the suspected tampering.

There was other possable evidence of entry into my garage.

It is a stainless steel Tri Circle Padlock.

I have since put an alarm on my garage door but need to know if this has been picked as I suspect it was picked so they could access my car and hardwire in a tracking device.

Any help would be very much appreciated

Thank you

Vern

[Solomon]

Upload the pic with imageshack or photobucket. To be honest you can't tell if a lock has been picked just by looking at it but if it's open and you didn't open it then... well yeah. Tri circle aren't exactly known for their high security, they're easily picked and even easier to bypass. It sounds like yours is a shutter lock though; I'm not sure if those can be bypassed in the same way as their regular padlocks although it'd still be an easy job for anyone with basic knowledge of picking.

If it's still locked and you mean that the shackle completely comes out when it didn't before then I'm not sure how that happened... but it wouldn't have anything to do with the lock having been picked. Picking a lock does the same job as the key so there's no way that could have happened, your lock has probably just randomly got banjaxed somehow so I wouldn't jump into the conspiracy theories straight away.

[kiwifighterinuk]

Thanks I will upload a link about it on youtube, will take a few hours to upload but be there this evening.

Yes I agree not to jump to conclusions too early but I will list a few below that all happened at the same time....this is months ago now, but still a problem.. we also have a huge court action case looming on a major company.....who may want to know our movements

1) Car Garge Lock Picked? or malfunctioned when I opened it with my key on the same morning that

2) Key Fob failed to unlock car door for the 1st time ever, still not working. It will lock the car but not unlock, Auto Boot function working ok, I have to put the car key in the lock and turn it to unlock my car 2001 Ford Focus Hatchback. On the same day / morning

3) When driving about a half mile from home our baby's back door unlocked itself with a loud POP...baby strapped in baby seat and was far too small to reach or kick the back door lock from his car seat. This is still happening and it is my belief that a car tracker has been hard wired into the cars electrical system and probably set with a GEO fence or timer and interfering with the car door locks.

4) This continues to be a problem....I have spent hours going over the car but I understand that trackers can be even made to look like a car part and only work if the car is moving and set at intervals of 20 minutes or whatever.

5) What does work is a friend of mine lent me a signal jammer...the jammer blocks all cival GPS and GPRS! Great this stops the doors unlocking! This is why I assume a tracker has been put on the car unlawfully, because the jammers stopped the car locks from opening by themselves... but I cant use them because I found out later they are not legal to use and who knows how safe for the kids in the car.

6) I also tried a good RF signal detector ....fun to use but not realistic to find a tracker that only gives off a 2-3 second signal when the car is moving. I dont want to spend a fortune finding this tracker but I would like to locate it as I feel it is a safety issue with a baby in the car with the doors unlocking. I even purchased a small tracker just to see how close I would need to be to locate it with the RF detector...it was within 4 - 6 inches only and this was a £200 RF detector.

I reckon an auto electrician would just want to sell me a whole new locking system....who's going to believe its a tracker?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated and if someone can tell me how to locate or disable the tracker I will send you £30 for your information and help. Thanks

[kiwifighterinuk]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csbfNOLHfuM

some video of the lock in question

Cheers

Vern

[Wizer]

If the lock was picked, it should not affect any other part of the lock than the plug that turns.
But a word of warning: most of the other keys in your keychain can be decoded visually from the video. If you suspect a high-tec attack on your property / car, you should NOT show ANY keybittings on youtube. I strongly recommend you remove the video. I could make half of your keys just from the images on the video.
Either you`re paranoid, these things just happened to accur on the same day or you´re being attacked by real professionals.
Keep us posted on what happens..

[Squelchtone]

It looks by the key of your padlock that it is an Abloy style disc lock. That would not be easy to pick using a normal pick set, but I suppose a specialist may have home made tools to do this. I honestly think the pin on your lock looks rusty and old and just failed.

What are the chances that some secret agency or government is following you around? Are you a criminal, going through a divorce, or does an insurance company have reason to hire a private detective to keep track of you? Sounds a bit far fetched.

As for the door remote not working and the doors opening by themselves.. sounds like a stuck button on the remote, or maybe try new batteries, or something. If you want to find a tracker, and you think it is inside the car, you'll have to take apart your seats or look under seats, or if it is outside, look for a pipe or flat box attached with magnets.

good luck,
Squelchtone

[gloves]

I seriously hope that you've just been paranoid. Attacks that high tech are scary stuff which AFAIK often need even higher tech countermeasures, so at last it's a budget war

I concur on Wizer's suggestion, and also apologize for not being able to spill more knowledge on the subject.
By using that signal jammer you already surpassed my tactics on the matter, other than going to see how do tracking devices looks like and where are they usually installed.

It may have been installed in the car's electrical system (not that it is easy to check any length of the electric circuit) so that it can use the car's battery power instead of needing one for itself, though there are more than some points which I'm missing for sure.

Good luck.

[kiwifighterinuk]

Thanks for all your advice! On Wizer's very good advice I have now removed the video which shows my keys...silly me lmao

The whole incident has made me get the place extra secure anyway with all the best security...in fact i think we must be the only place around here that has not been broken into lol....well not yet or that I know of anyhow

[raimundo]

Haven't seen your photos, but I get from your handle that you are in the UK where even the media might be doing spook work.
In fact it seems that media just hire some freelancers to do it for them.

Just being in the UK means that your not paranoid, you live in a persistant threat environment. No doubt corporations will hire private spooks, Just as Wiki leaks recent dump of STRATFOR emails proves.

you are thinking of a burst transmitter, when you say that it only transmits for two to three seconds.
take your frequency detector and turn it on, then watch it while you search the car, check all the electrical circuits in the car, some of them will be drawing power when the car is turned off,
In sweeping a house, the wireing is typically checked to see if the current draw in things like phone wires is the same from one check to the next, it should not fluctuate much.

any tracker needs a battery or needs to parasite power off the car, and this may only report some waypoints during a journey, you could drive it to an area in the country then use the frequency detector to see if there is a frequency that pops on when the car is GPS, but it would need significant power to transmit this unless it is reporting via the cell phone and if its using cell tower reports to give a location that would only be an approximate location.

If the device uses battery power, and if it were a listening device, you could put a radio in the car or two of them and turn them on 24/7 which in the old days would spool out the tape or these days fill up any digital recorder with noise and hopefully cause the storage to fill up and the device would then need to be serviced by an operator, thats how nixon got in trouble, when his burglars made a return housecall.

If you live alone, they may only want to find out when you are gone to the grocery store, so they can enter the home,
but if someone is at home, you likely would not care if spooks worked out where you shop for groceries, give them all the most useless data that they can collect and when you are traveling to do something that might be significant to your corporate nemesis consider borrowing a car, or using public transport, or a bicycle.

In england it is possible to track a person using the cell phone that they carry, I have seen the information on this online, you should google around and try to find it. There are companies that are selling this program on the internet.
get a prepaid anonymous phone if you can and only carry that when you don't want to be tracked. keep if always where no one else can get to it. If you carry it on you, make sure that its turned off, most of the time so no frequency grabber can get on it and read its identifier.

if you believe that they already have the contents of your phone calls, you can set them up to believe that you will not be home when you will be home and have some traps set for them, anything from a beercan pyramid that they might tumble over noisily and where the exact placement of the different cans is something they probably cant reproduce after tumbling them.
If you speak about this to anyone, locally, you trust that person a lot, your problems if real could be coming from far closer than you expect. In fact most real problems are closer to home most of the time. If you have nothing to steal, and no information that someone wants, theres still the personality clash problem.
remember, few if any people are actually the kind of friend you can trust to believe and help you in this, most people will only listen to the story for gossip material, they are not actively on your side and never will be.
still if you can bring a discussion around to security in the modern world, watch to see who is somewhat knowledgeable,
about these things and watch to see if someone is being deliberately clueless when you know that they are more knowlegable than they let on.

[Evan]

Yes I agree not to jump to conclusions too early but I will list a few below that all happened at the same time....this is months ago now, but still a problem.. we also have a huge court action case looming on a major company.....who may want to know our movements

Well then you would want to pay attention for people following you in a car videotaping you, as this is typically the level of proof required to prevent "they said, you said" about where you were on such and such a day at such and such time... Private Investigators are really adept at doing this without being spotted...

1) Car Garge Lock Picked? or malfunctioned when I opened it with my key on the same morning that

Inconclusive, your immediate grasping at a rather unlikely scenario leaves out all sorts of environmental possibilities or that some random vandal put something in the lock that didn't totally jam it up...

2) Key Fob failed to unlock car door for the 1st time ever, still not working. It will lock the car but not unlock, Auto Boot function working ok, I have to put the car key in the lock and turn it to unlock my car 2001 Ford Focus Hatchback. On the same day / morning

And you think that power door locks continue to work perfectly forever and ever on a car that is 11 years old ? Wow... You do realize that there are two circuits which operate the lock actuators, an unlock circuit and a lock circuit... Since the remote successfully sends the lock command and the trunk open command, you either have a defective unlock button on your fob or a problem in the wiring (like a loose connection somewhere that breaks the unlock circuit) somewhere in one of the doors...

3) When driving about a half mile from home our baby's back door unlocked itself with a loud POP...baby strapped in baby seat and was far too small to reach or kick the back door lock from his car seat. This is still happening and it is my belief that a car tracker has been hard wired into the cars electrical system and probably set with a GEO fence or timer and interfering with the car door locks.

Sounds as if you could have gone over a bump which jarred that loose connection and grounded it to metal inside the door somewhere causing that one door to unlock -- that is where I would start looking for the problems...

4) This continues to be a problem....I have spent hours going over the car but I understand that trackers can be even made to look like a car part and only work if the car is moving and set at intervals of 20 minutes or whatever.

You seriously can't look at a car and tell the difference between something BRAND new and something which is 11 years old/dirty/weathered ? Surrender to your enemies, real or imagined now...

5) What does work is a friend of mine lent me a signal jammer...the jammer blocks all cival GPS and GPRS! Great this stops the doors unlocking! This is why I assume a tracker has been put on the car unlawfully, because the jammers stopped the car locks from opening by themselves... but I cant use them because I found out later they are not legal to use and who knows how safe for the kids in the car.

A watched pot never boils... Just like when you sit and watch for something to happen it often doesn't occur until you look away or aren't paying close attention to it...

6) I also tried a good RF signal detector ....fun to use but not realistic to find a tracker that only gives off a 2-3 second signal when the car is moving. I dont want to spend a fortune finding this tracker but I would like to locate it as I feel it is a safety issue with a baby in the car with the doors unlocking. I even purchased a small tracker just to see how close I would need to be to locate it with the RF detector...it was within 4 - 6 inches only and this was a £200 RF detector.

So how is the RF detector supposed to tell the difference between your cell phone or the kid's cell phone down the block as he is chatting up his girl while you pour over your car ?

I bet you haven't really looked at your car properly yet... You would have noticed if someone took your door panels off, as if they were in a hurry they might not have properly snapped it all back together correctly and there are acres of open space inside the doors of an automobile...

I reckon an auto electrician would just want to sell me a whole new locking system....who's going to believe its a tracker?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated and if someone can tell me how to locate or disable the tracker I will send you £30 for your information and help. Thanks

I reckon that an auto electrician would find the non-functional portion of the unlock circuit of your power door locks... That circuit BTW is not powered all the time so it would be a piss poor place to tap in to feed vampire power to some sort of tracking device... Look for strange/new looking single wires tapped onto the positive terminal block under the hood, not the battery terminal itself, but the high power block at the other end of the battery cable... A tracker is no good without constant power and not many things in the car have a constant power feed which are easily accessible on the inside of the dashboard... Look for freshly drilled holes in the metal under the car and an extra wire in the harness for the doors...

I would say that unless and until you have stripped the entire inside of the car out and put it up on a lift so you can look at the bottom of it properly, you have not "gone over it" very well at all...

Sounds more like two coincidental events happening the same day (although the locks could have failed the day before as you only locked the car when you parked it the last time, no ?) which when combined with your present legal situation and rampant imagination had led you to conclude things that logically are a giant leap from reality...

~~ Evan

[Squelchtone]

Remember the 1970's movie "The Conversation" with Gene Hackman where he thinks he is being bugged and literally takes his apartment walls down to the plaster, lathe, and studs? yeah.. don't let yourself get so consumed by this that you end up taking your car apart into 10,000 parts on your garage floor.

Squelchtone

[kiwifighterinuk]

Mostly good advice people and points taken.

I probably need to sell the car and get one of those £150 padlocks on ebay for the next car in the garage as well as the existing alarm.

I guess every padlock is beatable? I dont know

If its not a tracker then I can not explain why the gps and gprs jammer stopped the doors from unlocking and returned them to normal working order as they ( the car locks and trackers ) work on different frequencies.

Its all good....I will check further as I would love to beat these snoopers....my guess is under the front dashboard somewhere...any room in the airbag compartments? shi* I better the sell the little car before I trash it looking lol....

Oh one point I forgot to mention there must be something to this as I found a phone tap on my landline a few days later....I turned off the hand held phone and plugged in the old corded phone and lifted the handset and the RF detector went crazy, the internet was off etc etc...and I was able to follow the tap / signal right down the phone line and all the way outside. The snoopers also put some pre recorded conversation to come over my land line as a cross signal and were talking about something important!!! I knew then it was a trap probably to see if I would listen in and report it or not as a fault....I reported a phone tap to my provider....shi* I am no spy or criminal or bad guy but someone thought / thinks I am.

Thanks to all ....I will keep you posted

[Squelchtone]

Mostly good advice people and points taken.

I probably need to sell the car and get one of those £150 padlocks on ebay for the next car in the garage as well as the existing alarm.

I guess every padlock is beatable? I dont know

If its not a tracker then I can not explain why the gps and gprs jammer stopped the doors from unlocking and returned them to normal working order as they ( the car locks and trackers ) work on different frequencies.

Its all good....I will check further as I would love to beat these snoopers....my guess is under the front dashboard somewhere...any room in the airbag compartments? shi* I better the sell the little car before I trash it looking lol....

Oh one point I forgot to mention there must be something to this as I found a phone tap on my landline a few days later....I turned off the hand held phone and plugged in the old corded phone and lifted the handset and the RF detector went crazy, the internet was off etc etc...and I was able to follow the tap / signal right down the phone line and all the way outside. The snoopers also put some pre recorded conversation to come over my land line as a cross signal and were talking about something important!!! I knew then it was a trap probably to see if I would listen in and report it or not as a fault....I reported a phone tap to my provider....shi* I am no spy or criminal or bad guy but someone thought / thinks I am.

Thanks to all ....I will keep you posted

Please post photo using http://tinypic.com/ hosting of this bug you found out on the phone line outside.. this I gotta see. if it is an RF device operating on the phone line's power it should only be able to transmit for less than a 1/4 mile, maybe its time to go look for any vans parked in your neighborhood and see if anyone is sitting in them listening... or maybe its time to put down the Jason Bourne novel and get your Dr to refill your prescription.

[unjust]

why would they want to unlock your doors when you drive? (or pop open the hatchback it sounds like) what prupose does that actually serve other than to make you stop on occasion, or to annoy you. there are FAR more devious things that could be done to accomplish both or either.

i suspect that your car's remote has either an old battery which low voltage is producing the occasional odd unlock send, (which the jammer would block) or the contacts for that button are dirty or failing, resulting in it occasionally sending/not sending the signal.

from your description, the old mid-low quality lock failed. assuming someone was clever enough to install a hidden tracker/gps activated door widget, without you being able to find it, i'm quite certain they'd have been able to open the lock w.o destroying it.

on your phone, depending on your neighborhood, and phone system, it's not impossible that a digital system could share analogue data over part of it. older phone systems connected each other commonly, and while i'm not familiar with your system provider at all, you mentioned the internet, and removing the digital phone, which would bypass the hardware filter and let you hear other chatter on the line that the company is sharing across multiple households.

now, it's entirely possible that you are being spooked, but it doesn't seem likely. if you *are* and they're good at it, barring $$$$ of countermeausres, there's not much you can do. if they got a tracker on this car, and you buy a new one, they'll slap on a magnetic one next time you park your car, and go into a shop, and refresh it's battery the same way. heck you don't even have to be unattended. you just have to not be looking at them while they reach next to your wheel. the gps jammer, while illegal would allow you the intermittent chunk of privacy if they're not tracking your cel, or a cel attached to the vehicle, or using a burst transmitter that's recording accellerometer data, which won't matter unless you jam the burst....

i'll wager that on occasion your car remote has been temperamental in the past, and you've changed the battery on it, but without the added stress of the legal action and the padlock wearing out (like all mechanical things, they can, especially if they're exposed to the environment) you haven't noticed, or put the items together. add the others together and daily things seem ominous, but coincidences happen and correlation is not causation.

check the remote, bring it to 2 random lock shops who service them, and have them check it. heck, if you're god with electronics, pop it open yourself and see what may be happening. it'll be a lot cheaper than a new car, and yes, most padlocks can be opened by a pro. if you're concerned about unauthorized access, go with some of the classic trade craft tricks like securing a hair to the door, or wedging a *tiny* pebble in the door as it closes (so you'll notice it falling when it opens, but others won't) and remember that sometimes those can come off due to wind or a bird interested in the hair.

[kiwifighterinuk]

Thank you, more great advice and yes I have implemented just about all the measures mentioned.

I think a large part of the problem is I noticed when I first started being followed and would throw them off by simple measures such as driving around a round about several times untill they choose an exit and then taking another exit or getting behind them.

Then they put 2 cars on me! They must have a big budget. And a car tracker is cheaper than 2 cars with snoopers

So I probably made the situation worse as there was nothing to hide but I kept using countermeasures!.
So from 'Their' point of view they will be thinking that to notice them I must have something to hide. Well I consider my privacy worth protecting but looking back using the jammer probably just annoyed them to the point where they have determined to get me at all costs.

It does all sound like Jason Borne stuff but in this case its no movie and Im not having any fun and I dont get paid by the agency haha.

Many of you are thinking Im just paranoid....dont worry I to am a skeptic and logical thinker and would be thinking the same thing if this was not happening to me.

I checked my car key remote ages ago and changed the batteries and it should all be working.

As there is nothing to find ie illegal activity I thought they would have given up by now? Ive never been in jail and havent even had a speeding ticket. I was even concerned that the jammers would be knocking out other people's sat nav's and mobile phone connections, another reason why I dont like using them.

Before all this happened I do remember making a comment in reply to a friends comment on a social network site that implied I had connections in the underworld but it was just banter and in a joking way.

I guess I have to resign myself tp defeat or using a out of area payphone or new mobile phone to set up an appointment with an auto electrican with car tracker experience out of my local area and drive there using the jammers ....now I just have to find £ for his time.

If your one of these and living in Kent UK let me know (-; And yes they could put another tracker right back on but why would they even bother? If we can locate the tracker I will take some pic's etc and let some media friends run with it on an invasion of privacy story and take it to the police to investigate. That's about all I can do to put an end to the matter...thanks again for ALL your comments and advice, you people know your stuff and it feels good to share a problem that I have been keeping to myself.