As you can see, these guys are good. They prey on unsuspecting people who are busy pumping gas, checking texts, or just daydreaming as they pump gas into their car. Here is how you avoid becoming the next slider victim.
First off, you must be focused and pay attention when you are fueling. Don't be lulled into a false sense of security by the monotony of waiting for the tank to fill. While most people are daydreaming at the pump, other people are driving through the gas station unsafely, they are coming close to hitting cars, and still others could be planning robberies. If you are fueling obliviously, you won't see any of this, and your chances of being the next victim go up tremendously. So first thing, be focused and aware of your surroundings. If something looks out of place, don't dismiss it out of politeness. Pay attention. These criminals thrive off of the obliviousness of customers paying attention to texts and daydreaming while fueling rather than paying attention to what's going around them. If you are a person who pays attention, you might be able to see a slider coming, and save yourself, and possibly others, the pain and hassle of a theft.
The next thing you can do to protect yourself from sliders is to keep all of your doors locked. Yes, I said all. What I normally do when I fuel up is I take the keys out of the car, lock all the doors while I'm outside fueling, and keep the car locked up until I'm done. This has a few advantages. First off, it secures all of your belongings. Next, it keeps you from accidentally starting the car or moving away while fueling. Lastly, it secures you from having someone get in your car while you aren't looking. This can be a hard thing to do with automatic door locks, which unlock all the doors at one time if you choose to have the car do that. You will have to remember to press the lock button again on either the car door or the fob to lock everything up once you're out. It's easy to overlook, but if everyone of those victims (with the exception of the one whose window was rolled down) had done just this simple step, most of those thefts would not have happened because the slider isn't going to waste time picking a lock or smashing a window, as it exposes them too much. If you have a young child in the car, I would adjust this to maybe locking up the entire car except the door by the child, or lock the door and roll the window down next to the child so you can talk to the child while you fuel the car.
The next thing I would do is get in the habit of not leaving my purse (or phone, or laptop bag, or tablet) out for the world to see. I would take my purse and put it behind the driver's seat any time I left the vehicle. This is even more important if you can't lock all the doors for whatever reason. Remember, these sliders are not after confrontation as the person in the video stated: they are after your valuables. Just like with a car or a house, the more difficult and time consuming you make getting your goods, the more likely a thief is going to look elsewhere for an easier target. Placing your valualbes where it's harder to get to will make you less attractive as a target.
Another possibility if you want to be as safe as possible from sliders is to carry the purse with you, although I wouldn't recommend that because you are then a target for purse snatchers. My advice is to leave the purse in the car. What I recommend is that you pull up to the gas pump with all the doors already locked (which is how you should be driving all the time anyways, but that's another article). Then, after stopping and turning off the engine, take out the card or cash you need for the gas, place the purse behind the driver's seat, get out of the car, close the door, lock the car up, making sure the keys are in your hand, and then fuel up. Do not display the money or the card: keep it in your pocket or out of sight any way you can. If this means that you have to bring your purse inside the store to pay so that you are not displaying money, then do so, but return it to the car and lock it up before you start fueling. The number one tip for not getting robbed is to not display to a potential thief that you have anything on you worth robbing. One stumbling block for this strategy could be keys. If your key chain is too large because of knick knacks or other things on it to allow you to quickly and efficiently take the keys out, consider taking some of the knick knacks off the key chain, or possibly attaching them to things like separate mail keys or other keys that you don't carry with you, but keep in the house. That way you keep your knick knacks, but they aren't preventing you from being secure in any way.
Near the end of the video, you saw people catch on to the sliders and attempt to confront them, but most were too late to do anything. If you catch a slider or see one, should you tackle them or try to apprehend them in any way? ABSOLUTELY NOT! These people are criminals, and even though the crimes committed in the video are not life threatening, they will in all likelihood not think twice if they had to drag you down the road or run you over to escape to avoid going to prison. As you saw in the videos, most gas stations have excellent cameras. What you should do is try to make a mental note of the license plate and color and make of the car, and get this to police if you are the victim of sliders or witness a slider theft. A good option is to get to your phone right away, and use the voice memo to record everything you can remember about the car, then play it back for police when they arrive. Above all though, don't be a hero apart from remembering some information and calling police. They are much better equipped than most people reading this blog to handle this kind of event.
If you remove yourself as a target, you will be less likely to be targeted for theft. You do this by keeping your doors locked, keeping your purse or valuables in a location that is hard for thieves to get to, and by being focused and aware of things that are out of place while you fuel up. This notion of slider theft is only going to get more pronounced the more media attention is given to it due to copy cat criminals, so if slides haven't hit your area yet, you can bet they soon will. If you fuel up your car in a focused way and remember to lock all your doors and place your belongings where they aren't easily accessible when you are out of the car, your chances of being a victim go down tremendously. Until next time...
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