Back when I was a kid, some 20–30 years ago, my aunt used to get her car regularly “stolen” overnight. The car was parked in the street, locked, but it was an entry model (or whatever you call the smaller cars a company makes) and was easy to open and start without the keys.
Every so often, someone would “steal” the car overnight, and then bring it back with a full tank.
This went on for years. We never found out who was doing it or where they were going. My aunt never reported it because a full tank was quite a bit of money for her at the time and the car wasn’t so fancy that she cared so much about it.
It would be so cool if this was just a case of someone regularly mistaking your aunt’s car for their own. “Huh, my key’s not working, oh well, I know a trick to get ‘er started”
Plot twist: Someone posts in this thread how THEIR uncle who worked nights' car was "borrowed" regularly through the daytime and always returned empty. (waiting for that free fill-up of course)
Happened to me. The key for one car worked on another car of the same model.
Nice elderly lady at work asks us to take out her car at lunch to diagnose a noise. We found her '73 Buick Skylark in the multi-story car-park and went to lunch. Ran great. Afterwards I asked, "I thought you were Baptist? Why did you have a St Chris statue on the dash?" Of course she didn't.
We had found the "wrong" car on a lower deck of the car-park but when we got back from lunch parked it on the uppermost deck, unaware it belonged to someone else. When we discovered our error, we imagined what the owner might go through when the car was discovered missing but we kept our mouths shut, fearing some sort of liability.
I bought that old lady's Skylark. Ran like a dang tank.
Certain 80s/90s Toyotas had something funny about their keys, where they were widely interchangeable between different cars. A friend of mine tells a story about how there were a few students at his high school with identical looking blue Camrys, which caused major confusion when they learned–by getting in the wrong car and driving home–that their keys worked in each other's cars.
Even easier, someone has the same car and their keys just work.
When I was learning to drive in a 1990 Ford I locked the keys in. Dad just asked a random person in the parking lot with the same car to borrow their keys. It opened the door and started the engine no problem.
My 90s Toyota truck got moved from one side of the street to the other one day. Turned out friends dad noticed it was street sweeping day so moved it for me.
His Toyota keys from a different year / model truck fit it just fine.
Those cameras were likely broken. CCTV was mostly crap back then. The old monster cctv cameras had tubes in them, before ccd's and so on. They had a habit of burning out, tube vacuum fouls giving blurry or little image, coax cable issues, etc. Even the CCD cameras were a pain as the recording tech was also crap.
Recording was done on time lapse VHS vcr's which were really expensive costing around $1000+ USD at the time. And they only recorded one channel so you had to buy a costly multiplexer so you only recorded a few seconds of each camera losing all video between switching. Video was shoppy due to time lapse trying to record 24 hours onto one VHS tape.
So after all this money was spent once something broke it was so expensive to repair they usually let it stay that way hoping the presence of a seemingly working CCTV system was enough of a deterrent. Most small mom and pop shops couldn't afford the repairs.
I wouldn't be surprised if the resolution of those cameras 20-30 years ago was bad enough that it'd be easy to hide one's face/features. And since the car wasn't theirs, they wouldn't care about the license plate showing up on a camera.
The latter. I knew a guy who used to steal a neighbour’s car to run weed across state lines between the pet stores that ran the show. He made more than enough to fill it up, which he did, religiously, as he felt it was bad karma not to - he usually did it one village over. Dude even got the thing valeted one time, although that was because one of the aquariums sloshed.
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it was something similar - I know that the whole setup was something his boss at the pet store had devised, including the “treat the car nice, fill it up” thing, so I’d wager this was maybe a Thing.
Unless OP’s aunt lived in Chicagoland, in which case it’s maybe a more specific Thing.
Yes, there were video surveillance cameras in the 1980s, hooked into VCRs for playback. And many places used them, including stores and gas stations. That's how gas stations could track down people who filled up and ran. Toll booths had them too.
(And it mentions a bank where they pressed the button to film a robbery, then after developing the film found it had taken pictures of the Christmas party months before, when the button was pressed by accident.)
I mean, we had webcams by the mid 1990s. It's not like Exxon couldn't afford something better for their stations.
Security cameras existed, but they very frequently didn't work. One of my college professors was murdered in a bank robbery around 20 years ago. The bank technically had cameras, but they didn't work and no one bothered to do anything about it. Consequently, there was no recording of the robbery and the police chose not to investigate the crime.
I mean, after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 I remember seeing many video clips of the vehicle making its way to the building. Checking now, https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-oklahoma-city-... says "A 1999 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by investigative journalist David Hoffman revealed that the FBI had twenty-two video surveillance recordings of the Murrah building and surrounding area stored at the FBI’s Oklahoma City field office." Its Wikipedia entry links to https://web.archive.org/web/20170510090822/http://newsok.com... saying "Agents also examined more than 900 security videotapes".
If most cameras 'very frequently didn't work' then that means there were huge amounts of non-working cameras in the area. Which seems like an expensive waste of money.
I can well believe that some cameras didn't work - I already mentioned the bank robbery where the cameras had run out film months previously.
In any case, the original claim "No cameras 20-30 years ago" is simply not true.
And yet, think of all the servers that get hacked today because they are running unpatched versions of their operating systems. I agree with you that there were lots of CCTV systems 30 years ago. I'm just pointing out that the fact these cameras exist doesn't mean they are maintained or that employees know how to use them, and that this problem was more challenging in the past because stuff was mechanical and analog and not as easy to automate.
There's quite a range of gas stations, so it's hard to be certain about any specific one.
But a gas station for a major chain seems exactly the place that would have working cameras, because you're going to get people who fill up and drive away without paying.
It's really hard to know if my memory is faulty, so I looked for images of gas stations from the 1990s.
On the other hand, the five or so other US stations I found, from the same time frame, don't have an apparent camera. (Which doesn't mean they weren't there, though that seems unlikely.)
So .. I don't know. But I can say that at least some gas stations had video cameras going, and I don't place much weight in your argument that they "very frequently didn't work".
In the mid-1990s someone had a fender bender with a co-worker's car in the parking lot. The building had roof cameras, and he was able to get security to review the video the next day. However, it didn't have the detail for that purpose. So my anecdotal evidence is that it wasn't all that hard to have a working system 20+ years ago.
After all, it wasn't all that expensive for Jennicam to get started at that time, with automatic image capture and uploads.
That's really not true though. I worked at a gas station in the 90s and we didn't have any video surveillance. There were FAKE cameras INSIDE, but not connected to anything.
Unlikely, but the point is that the car kept getting returned, so it was (reasonably) safe to assume that it would continue to be returned after each crime spree. Sure, the thief could have crashed the car at some point, or gotten caught (and the car impounded), but I think it's not entirely crazy to judge that risk worth the benefit of the free gas.
Now, I probably wouldn't come to that same conclusion, even if I had a cheap/old/crappy car, but I can see how someone might.
Back in the good old days, a friend of mine had a sticker on his Citroën 2CV reading: "Can you also double the value of your car with one tank of fuel?"
Every so often, someone would “steal” the car overnight, and then bring it back with a full tank.
This went on for years. We never found out who was doing it or where they were going. My aunt never reported it because a full tank was quite a bit of money for her at the time and the car wasn’t so fancy that she cared so much about it.