Hacked - Kia Boys

Episode Date: July 1, 2023

The story of a wave of car theft for internet clout on Tik Tok and the security vulnerability that made it possible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Just a heads up, this episode contains some audio with adult language. Discretion is advised. There's this TikTok video. Filmed by a woman watching as someone tries to steal her car. She's filming as she walks up behind the vehicle, and there's someone sitting in the front seat, fiddling with the ignition. And it's a kid. The kid hasn't noticed her filming when the video starts.

The kid's maybe like 11 or 12, if I had to guess. And the video starts as the woman reveals herself to them, asking, Hey, how are you? This is my car. The kid jumps and looks around all panicked and realizes he's being filmed trying to steal this car. And she says, This is my car. And I am calling the police.

And the kid jumps out of the driver's door and just cooks it down the road. Wide shot, kid getting smaller and smaller as he runs off. and she's just kind of laughing as he hoofs it off down the street. The video is tagged Kia Boys. I'm not going to play audio of all of the TikToks showing teenagers stealing Kia's, because that would be way too many. Or videos of people explaining how their Kia got stolen.

Or all of the music with lyrics specifically about how fun it is to steal Kia's. that then other teenagers play as the musical score in their videos of them stealing other Kia's. But all of this kind of begs the obvious question. Why is there a thriving internet subculture about stealing specifically Kia's? Last month, Kia and its parent company Hyundai agreed to a $200 million settlement due to this wave of theft. This is a story about what happens when a security vulnerability becomes a meme and when the conditions are right for a meme to become a pretty big problem.

This is the Kia Boys here on Hacked. I have heard about the Kia Boys. I'm not a TikTokers, you know, but I am aware of the Kia Boys. When you first started talking, I thought we were going to be talking about the Flipper Zero and all the hype it's been getting lately. I don't know if you have seen that, but like the little USB, bad USB antenna, a little hacking gadget. I see it popping up in mainstream media.

So I was like, oh, I was going to say, I wonder if it can be actually used in this hack. Kia boys. It probably could be useful. I do want to talk about the Flipper Zero. I kind of wanted to talk about it at Christmas, but by the time I heard about it, you couldn't order them anymore. But this story does not concern.

the Flipper Zero. Okay. It's both higher and lower tech than that. So are you a Kia boy, Jordan? I am not a Kia boy. I can definitively say I am not a key. Are you a Kia boy, Scott?

I am not a Kia boy, Jordan. That's probably, given where this all goes, that's probably for the best. So there's been this thing that, this media thing that I've noticed since I was a teenager. And it's the genre of news story about scary teenage fads.

Of course. Tidepod Challenge. All the rest of it. It's Tidepot Challenge. Exactly. Tidepot Challenge. Yeah. When I was a kid, news broadcasters, I remember this, became convinced that there was a whole weird thing involving high school kids and jelly bracelets. I won't get into the details of that rumor, but there was, in retrospect, no evidence that was ever real. Before that, you had satanic panic and fears kids were worshipping the devil in their Dungeons and Dragons games.

any issue real or imagined with like you said Tidepods or whatever teens are allegedly doing is always kind of made worse by all the media coverage about this thing teens are all doing. I think we'll avoid doing that here because this isn't really one of those stories. The stats which we'll discuss suggests that unlike any of those things,

this actually did happen. And because it's not really done, but we're sort of in the last act of the story. So I don't think we're going to be fanning the flames by discussing it here. Really, this is a story about a security vulnerability going viral.

Who gets hurt in that situation and how the virality is often blamed before the vulnerability. Well, let's break that statement. I just want to break that statement down a bit. You know, there's the, to commit a crime requires intent

and malice. You know, for a vulnerability to exist doesn't mean that people have to exploit it. It takes determination to exploit it. So I think society, I think we all agree the society is full of vulnerabilities, be them the human form or be them technological. But to take advantage of loopholes and laws, policies, you name it, requires somebody who is, I would say, morally unlawful, It all starts with the person who does it.

I agree with that. But understanding why they do it is where it gets interesting. But before we get to all that murky ethical stuff, let's start with some music. Why don't we? Let's start with Milwaukee rapper's Mary Mac and Sean P's hit song, Shake Yo Neyne. The opening line,

If I see Akea, then I'm taking your shit. 870,000 listens on Spotify, 670,000 on YouTube. It's a hit. It's a hit, Scott. It's certified. Is this the background music for all the TikToks? Like, do they, are they thematic? It is.

Exactly, it is. You're gonna, it's not the only one though. You're gonna find it on a bunch of Spotify playlists labeled Kia Boys, which is just songs that you play while you're stealing Kiyas. stealing Kias, exactly. So, Kia Boys, let's unpack this. What does that mean?

We're going to go back to 2019. You are a numbers, guys, Scott. I want you to load these into your noggin. Yep. According to the Verge in 2019, Columbus, Ohio registered 3,500 car thefts, 6% of which were Hyundai's and Kiyas. Okay.

By 2021, that number spiked to 10,500. car thefts, 67% of which were Hyundai's and Kia's. The numbers are loaded. The numbers are loaded? That's a pretty big spike in the number of cars stolen and them specifically being Hyandise and Kia's. Well, you say 10,500? Yes, 3,500 to 10,500. Yeah, so like an additional 7,000? Mm-hmm. Yep. And of those 10,500, like 660s. 800 were Kia's, 6,900 were Kia's, and Hyandes. There's a reason I brought this to the math guy. You crunch the numbers. Basically all of the new cars being stolen.

Are keys and Hyandes? Yeah, exactly. So like what the heck happened here? What happened in this two-year stretch that just someone decided we're stealing all of the Kia's? Well, that hit song by Sean Pee and whatever the other rapper was. It sure didn't help, though it is good. During this time, TikTok videos started to emerge of kids and teens, most not old enough to have driver's licenses, going for joy rides in stolen kias. It became clear that these cars weren't being stolen to sell for parts, to be stripped down. They were being stolen for clout, to be filmed being stolen,

and then abandoned somewhere. Over time, the trend began to coalesce around hashtag, Kia boys because obviously the cars are all Kia's. I tried to find the first video that used this hashtag to figure out who was the first person to figure this out and sort of branded in this way. TikTok has scrubbed thousands of these off of their app, so the answer to that specific question might be lost to time. But right around that point, these memes, these Kia boy memes, they began to flow. Look at us in this Kia we stole blasting the song about how cool it is to see. steal a Kia, isn't this fun.

I'm breaking so many laws, but look at my TikTok viewership is way up, so we're all good. There's literally a Simpsons joke about this about filming this crime spree was the best idea we've ever had. Those two sets of numbers. 3,500 to over 10,000 and 6% Kia's going to 67%

Kiya's in Hyundai's. Dank memes about car theft going viral only explains part of this, right? It explains the 3,500 to 10,500 spike. Of course. The other important number is that 67% of them being these two brands of cars. So why these brands? So for context, for anyone that does know, Hyundai owns Kia.

So while Kia got the name recognition, it got into the songs, it got the meme named after it. It's really this kind of family of vehicles. Why did the car theft trend coalesce around them? So there's no Hayende boys? There's no Hyandai boys. There's Kia Boys spelled boys with an S, and then in a different state, there seems to be it sort of like etymologically shifted to being Kia boys spelled with a Z. But they're all just the Kia Boys. There's some variation on that. Z is Canadian for Z for all of our American listeners.

Oh, I just, well, I'm about to out myself as Canadian again in a second case, so. Must we'll break it to them. So why did it coalesce around these brands? And the answer to that hinges on something called an immobilizer. You're familiar with an immobilizer, Scott? I want to say yes, but at the same time, no. I want to say that it's something that plugs into the control unit of the car, but I don't fully know if that's the case.

An immobilizer is an electronic security device that stops the engine of a vehicle from starting unless a corresponding smart key, like your fob, is present. Yes, yes. Now I am aware. Yes, and I was wrong. That's not what that would have been. Okay, gotcha. Yeah, gotcha. So all modern cars have RFID chips and the keys,

and as long as the key is present in the car, the car will allow itself to start, give or take. Exactly. I think BMW introduced this system in 2002 maybe. I think I remember the first time I heard about it. Yeah. That would make sense with the timelines here. It's pretty simple tech, like you said.

When you put in your key, there's this little radio handshake between your car and your fob. The immobilizer in the car needs to receive this simple code stored in the fob before it will allow the engine to start. Immobilizers are an answer to the well-known issue of hot wiring. There are ways around it using something called a relay attack. You can essentially remotely steal that fob code and then use it later.

but that requires equipment, an advanced planning. It's more of a targeted vulnerability. Sure. Yeah, you can't do it to any random Kia. Exactly. You can bypass an immobilizer, but you either need to use a manufacturer's app or if you have a record of the specific code stored on the fob,

some cars have workarounds that you input it in different ways. Some have you can do it with key turns. They're all different. They're all novel. But broadly speaking, for now, as a security layer against random, random theft, immobilizers do an okay job. Because we live in Canada,

I think I can definitively say that your car has an immobilizer in it. Sure does. In September 2007, the Canadian government passed regulation saying you cannot sell a car in this country without one. If your car is newer than that and you live here, you almost certainly have an immobilizer in it. Importantly, and this whole story turns on this, there is no such regulation in the U.S.

You can sell a new car without an immobilizer. And let me guess. Almost every single brand puts one in anyway because they're doing it for probably the rest of the world. But a few key Korean car companies aren't doing it to save a little bit of money in certain markets. Let me guess. Let you guess away.

In 2011, Hyundai Motors, who makes Ki as a Hyundaiondas, decided not to install immobilizers in the U.S., allegedly, as a cost-cutting measure. Their settlement in that $200 million lawsuit would suggest they do not disagree with those allegations. Importantly, that same car sold at the exact same time a few hours away up here in Canada was sold within a moment. in it. Now, the absence of an immobilizer on its own probably wouldn't account for this

much of a spike because you still need to know how to hotwire a car. Sure. Unless, Kiyas were designed with a physical security flaw that made doing that exceptionally easy. So easy, a child could literally do it. If you were to pair that vulnerability with the absence of an immobilizer, you would have the recipe for a viral trend of car thefts. You need both for this to work. I mean, you need both of those. Then you need, I guess, our new form of microcelebrity on social media. That's the first funny coincidence of this story. The second weird coincidence concerns

the size of a standard USB cable. A standard phone charging cable that almost every teenager has a bunch of kind of explains why this car was so uniquely. hot-wireable. If you were to rip off the plastic steering column cover of any Kia's or Hyundai's made during this window, and then just pop off the ignition cylinder, again, both literally so easy a child can and many have done, instead of like a crazy tangle of wires to start like stripping and chopping and twisting together, all you would find is this little metal nub, this little metal rectangle. You'd probably need some like needle nose pliers to turn it. It'd be finicky and kind of tricky to do. But weird coincidence, this nub happens to be almost the exact same size as the hole

in a USB cable, like a classic USBA charging cable. Like the plug. Exactly. You pop that charging cable hole over the nub and just turn it like a key and the car starts. And because it doesn't have an immobilizer, it works. For context. For context. I feel okay explaining this in this level of detail because this has been very well documented in both the media

and the courts. But it goes without saying please don't use this as an instruction manual to steal a Kia. Yeah. Especially when there's probably an iPhone cable plugged into a USB port inside of those said kias. So they literally, most of them probably have the tools to steal them sitting inside of them. That's crazy to think about, actually.

That's a really good point. I hadn't really thought about that. When you're leaving a USB cable in an American Kia or Hyundai built during that time, you are leaving the key in the ignition effectively. Interesting point. Like I said, we don't know the first person to post this compromise, and we don't know the first person to brand themselves a Kia boy that's lost to TikTok's scrubbed archives. But we know it started in and around Milwaukee, and it's spread out from there. to be a Kia boy isn't really to be in a gang there isn't money there's no structure

there's no initiation there's no hierarchy it's not what we think of when we think of a gang it's kind of something else it's like a very extreme meme it's like the contemporary equivalent of like the prankster gangs online or like the online syndicate of prankster social media personalities

yeah I mean it I think it's part of that like it is definitely part of that same watch me do this thing I'm not supposed to do. Isn't that fun and cool because I'm 15? It's like that's since time in memorial. You got a bunch of teens during lockdown on TikTok in Milwaukee and they have the thought that has gotten teenage boys in trouble for a very long time. It seems like everyone is doing this thing.

I should do it too. Never seen that before. Never seen that before. Wouldn't have any experiences with that myself. So people in Milwaukee in the surrounding states, you know, kind of spreads into Ohio, are having themselves a pretty big worry about this. Not just about the skyrocketing thefts,

but mostly about what happens immediately after. Because the reason you steal a Kia is so that you can go on a joyride in a stolen Kia and film it and put it on TikTok where you saw all the other videos about that exact same thing. And I really do get this instinct. I grew up watching Jackass the number of things I jumped off of

into other things, countless. I think that's called a victory lap. It's a victory lap. Exactly. It's a victory lap. They're going on a victory lap. You plug in your iPhone and put some music on.

You take it for a rip. You do the victory lap. It's a victory lap. But the thing about a teen meme that involves doing a joyriding victory lap in a stolen car is that suddenly you have hundreds of not thousands

of quite young teenagers in a pretty concentrated area ripping around on the road and stolen cars crashing them. Quite a lot. So is there like a classic end to the victory lap here? Do they just joyride the cars into walls?

Or is it just kind of random? I mean, it's weird to say, but in the ideal case, it's random. You drive for a bit and you abandon the car, but there is another way it can end. And on a not very long timeline, someone's getting hurt. Yeah, exactly. Got a bunch of youth that don't fully know how to drive and don't probably have a lot of thousands of hours behind the wheel.

That makes sense that there would only be, that the risk factors would definitely increase. The definitive document of all this beyond the TikToks was a video by donut media called Kia Boys, documentary, a story of teenage car theft. Could you show us how it looks to steal a car? Y'all can show you inside your car. A YouTuber named Tommy G. interviews folks around Milwaukee about the Kia Boys trend. There's a lot to unpack and go into in this video.

That's not what we're going to do. But during the intro, he's talking to some people on the street. And he talks to a woman who had her car stolen. And you're reminded that it doesn't really matter who stole it or why. It just sucks to have your car stolen. It can really mess with your life. Yeah, totally. Especially if you're underinsured.

Completely. Sakea boy stole your car? Yes. Can't take the kiss to school. Can't make a point. We've got to call it to work. So it's trying to go aside and tragic. Was it a big financial hit to you?

Definitely. Good time as an adult. Tag onto that, the fact that they probably have payments on said car. If they weren't insured for theft, the car gets stolen and destroyed. They're still making the payments every month, and they're just out of vehicle at that point. Like it's a significant impact to, I think, anybody's life to have anything stolen. So yeah, definitely not a joyous, laughable outcome. No.

For any of the people involved. Tommy G then interviews some kids and teens doing this whole key. I'm Tommy G and I'm here with. My name's Sunny. I'll call you Marvin the accountant, okay? So Marvin, when did you start getting to the key of business here? I ain't gonna lie like shit. Three summer ago, that's when that's when they're

Oh, I started, Hondas and Kia. Do you get nervous before you do that? Hell no. I'm going to film you guys, but I don't think I'm going to get into a car with you because I feel like I might die. Are there Kia boys that have crashed the car and died? Yeah, I know I was thinking I ever seen? Somebody asked to drive and then they flipped a car in less than 20 seconds.

And while he's interviewing them, I imagine because some other kid saw there was a YouTuber on their block. In the background of the shot, this red Kia just tears through the frame. Uh-oh, hey, watch this, watch this. Perfect timing. This red key just rips through. Off in the distance, it gets all squirrelly in the intersection, kind of bounces up the curb, off the road, skitches between a tree and a fire hydrant,

scraping kind of between them, and it scoches back onto the road and drives off. What? In a video with a lot of kind of YouTubery artifice to it, it's a very real moment. What did we just see right now? Smacken-ass-ass shit, man. How fast you think they were going?

He tried to eat burnt that motherfucker. It's very clearly a person without a driver's license going full, like it reminds you of Grand Theft Auto, like, but in a real car. In that moment, you kind of realize what it would be like to have hundreds of kids joyriding around in your city. Not a safe situation. There's a few headlines. from this story worth discussing.

And the first concerns the driver of that red Kia. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writes, Markell Hughes charged after Kia Boys video got millions of views. Markele views of Milwaukee was identified as one of the participants in a Kia Boys documentary style video that has been viewed six million times on YouTube, filmed May 17, 2022. It shows a red car driving erratically, at times coming close to striking pedestrians.

A couple of weeks later, police say they received an anonymous tip that the driver of the vehicle was Hughes. He was arrested June 9th after police say he attempted to flee from officers. He admitted on June 10th to being the driver of the vehicle. How old was he? He was 17 at the time of the filming. Okay. And I think he is now 18. I was going to say, how was his name published?

Because I assumed he was like a youth youth, like 1213. Like that'd be very rare. He was on the older end of it. Yeah, he was 17, I think, when it happened. And I'm not sure if he was 18 or not when he was arrested, but they sure did publish his name a whole bunch. In April, he pled guilty to two felony counts, dropping all other charges,

faces a total of two years jail time and four years of extended supervision. That arrest was one of a handful of bigger stories to come out of this. The other was worse. I guess just a heads up for folks. It gets a bit heavier from here out. October of last year, headline 14's dead and crash possibly linked to TikTok car theft. Yikes.

Buffalo police said six teenagers between the age of 14 and 19 were speeding on a highway and a stolen Kia Sportage before the roll over crash. The car was reportedly stolen on Sunday night. Just to sort of summarize it, all five passengers were ejected from the vehicle. The fourth, a 15-year-old girl was taken to a hospital. On Tuesday of that week, police named the four teenagers who were killed. Marcus Webster, Swayzean Swindle, Kevin Payne, and Ageny Harper. The driver pled guilty to manslaughter.

Pretty rough situation. So, what happened here? The responses of TikTok, Kia, and the public at large after a quick break. Think about the last time you heard a breach story on this show. It always starts the same way. Someone, somewhere, saw something too late. An alert buried. a signal missed, an SOC that just couldn't keep up.

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Let's start with TikTok. Let's start with TikTok. What does it start with TikTok these days? So social media platform content moderation is a weird, wild subject unto itself. More than an episode, we could probably do a whole series on it. Could you imagine having that job? I remember, didn't we talk about this like 42 episodes ago where we talked about the Facebook moderators?

Yes. And like just how dark that world can get? It's like this weird unspoken thing that we must know there's terrible. Like videos of people stealing cars sounds kind of extreme. On the spectrum of things that could be uploaded to social media platforms, it's pretty mild. the people who have to sort of be the filter against that even worse stuff, I cannot imagine having that job.

Especially given how, what's the right way to put this? Especially given how this, what we're discussing here with the Kioboys is becoming like that overall trend where you're seeing quote unquote pranksters. You could just call them petty criminals mostly, just doing things for, impressions. Imagine being the people sitting on the other end looking at all of this.

Imagine the skew that it would give you on society if all you did all day was look at the worst things on the internet. Not that we all don't spend a lot of the day on the internet and most of it's the worst things on the internet. But it is by definition the less worse stuff because they caught the worst stuff. By definition the less work.

It is. They stopped you from seeing that. Or they didn't. and you reported it, and then they also had to see it. Well, I remember when the Facebook stuff all went public back, when we talked about it, you know, whatever that was years ago, and there was like, you know, you had moderators that were seeing, like, abuse, child abuse, sexual abuse,

violence and murder. Yeah, just wild. Anyway, the big digression. It's going to go back to TikTok. It is and it isn't. Because the way that filtering and moderation process works is it tends to live and die by the company's community guidelines. People want to know what they can post. The company doesn't want to be held responsible for moderating speech on a case-by-case basis, even though they have to be.

So it's sort of like a middle ground. You write these rules that you can then refer to when you do or don't remove content, these community guidelines. It's not abdicating responsibility because they wrote them, but it makes it, easier to kind of say, you know, we didn't really choose to keep or remove this content. We have the guidelines. You have the guidelines that you theoretically agreed to when you uploaded this content. We're sort of all underneath them, and they either do or don't breach the terms of those rules. That every time this comes up in a conversation, it just reminds me of when Zuckerberg was speaking in front of some American political body.

whether it was a subcommittee or a committee or the whatever. And he was like, you need to tell me what to do because I don't want to be in charge of the morality of society. Like this isn't my role in this. Like, please guide us. Like, everybody can be critical of what we're doing, but at the same time, like, we're trying to figure this out in real time. And it's like I totally sympathize with that perspective.

It's like that would be such a weird place to be, to be like, we know. what's good for our business. We also think we personally know what's good for society. But should I, like, with billions of users, should I be essentially quote-unquote the person who gets to decide what people read and see? Like, that's got to be a crazy, that's a weird job to exist.

Quandry. Yeah. Yeah, God of information. Billions of users and billions of dollars. And the threshold for the billions of dollars is, well, what will the advertisers get angry about? That's where the money is coming from. And that's not a great moral standard.

That shouldn't be where those rules come from. But I digress. But we digress. Tonight, four teens killed in a deadly upstate New York car crash involving a stolen Kia that police say may be linked to a popular TikTok challenge. Those teens I mentioned weren't the only ones. I think the number connected to this is up to about eight now. People have gone to jail. Lives have been altered.

TikTok did not drive those cars or create those videos. But it's complicated because they probably wouldn't have been driving them if it wasn't for videos they saw on TikTok. So what does TikTok say and do? A representative from TikTok emphasized to a bunch of different outlets that the company does not endorse or support the trend. It goes against their policies, the community guidelines. They assure that any content found on their platform that violates those community guidelines will be promptly removed. It is also good. But like we said, how you navigate these community guidelines is not straightforward.

TikTok employs a workforce of 40,000 human moderators who are tasked with determining whether content aligns or doesn't with those community guidelines. In the context of the Kia boys, a TikTok video demonstrating how to steal a Kia is going to get taken down. As it should. As it should. You should definitely take that video down. On the other hand, a video showcasing how to steal a Kia as a means to alert Kia owners about the potential vulnerabilities could probably be permitted, which I guess... Surprisingly is the exact same video? It's the same video, but also if everyone's getting their Kia stolen and you wanted to know how it was happening so you could prevent it, that's pretty important content. But is there, I would return with this question is,

is there anything that the car owner can do to prevent it, besides other forms of immobilizers being like boots and steering wheel locks, etc, etc. In which case you could make a video that you could just showcase other forms of immobilizers. Sure, sure. That seems like the only actual potential maybe solution. but it brings up the question, would this episode of this podcast past that gut check in regards of their community guidelines?

Because I explained it in pretty vivid detail. That's true. For purely educational, like, wanting people to understand how this vulnerability worked. This is a show for people who are interested in that kind of thing. It's not for 14-year-old car thieves, but would this get through? I don't know. It's a really, really tricky situation. Yeah.

But what it all means is that unless a video actively encourages a lot of, legal activities, a lot of TikToks created by Kia Boys are safeguarded by those community guidelines. And interestingly, videos featuring Kia Boys driving stolen cars in many cases don't actually violate the company's policies because there's typically no concrete evidence in the video to prove that the vehicle was stolen. It's just a video of a person driving around in a car. That's TikTok, this endless hamster wheel of content moderators versus whatever ridiculous idea the internet cooks up this month. And then there are the car companies.

And the question kind of in the middle of all this, why in God's name did you not put immobilizers in your cars? Save money, Jordan. Like you put them in the cars up here and there's not one Kia boy in Canada. It has not happened here. Like I could end the episode there. Like you should have done that. The first class action lawsuit was filed in California.

Cleveland, Milwaukee, New York City, Columbus are filing their own suits against the car company. Columbus City attorney Zach Klein on the subject of car manufacturers failing to install security and safety devices as a cost-cutting measure said, quote, four years, Kia and Hyundai cut corners and sold vehicles they knew were so unsafe, they could be stolen with ease by a teenager with access to simple tools and a TikTok account. Kia and Hyundai's negligence in pursuit of corporate profit is unconscionable. in response, Hyundai, I'm editorializing here. I think this is kind of a shrug.

The official statement on their website, quote, it is unfortunate that criminals are using social media to target vehicles without engine immobilizers in a coordinated effort. All of our vehicles meet or exceed federal motor vehicle safety standards. The rules say we don't have to do this. So we don't. So we don't.

Yeah. If there wasn't a law against it, I genuinely wonder if there would be seatbelts in those cars. Probably not. Well, they might be there as optional accessories. Sure. It'd be an upsell. Yeah, exactly. Oh, you want seatbelts, an extra $300. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I don't know. That's a complicated one. It's like the, it reminds me, it reminds me again of, let's go back to the digression of Mark Zuckerberg sitting instead of, in front of a government committee being like, it evokes that, being like, you guys haven't given me rules to follow. Like,

all he wants is all they wanted at that time was rules. Like, you tell me what's right and wrong. Don't put that in our hands. Like, how are we supposed to decide? Like, you were seeing that, obviously, now with, like, you know, Twitter's bias versus Elon's acquisition versus free speech. Like, it's happening all over the internet now where you've got, there's this conflict between, you know, all these different morality and what is ethical and what's not,

and what's a right and what should be, you know, constrained, etc. etc. So it's, it's... Yeah. I don't know if you're a car company and somebody says you don't need to do something and you decide not to do it,

are you liable? It would seem in this case they are because those lawsuits, they did start losing those. May 18th, Reuters reports Hyanda and Kia Motor Corp agreed to a consumer class action

lawsuit settlement of $200 million. In February, the Korean automaker said they would offer software upgrades to 8.3 million U.S. vehicles without anti-theft immobilizers to help curb increasing car thefts using a method popularized on TikTok. Continuing that, Reuters coverage, the settlement covers about 9 million U.S. owners, and includes up to 145 million for out-of-pocket losses for consumers who had cars stolen, lawyers for the owner said. Hyandine Kia said they will compensate owners who, quote, incurred theft-related vehicle losses or damage in addition to reimbursement for insurance deductibles, increased insurance premiums,

and other theft-related losses. For customers whose vehicles cannot accommodate security software upgrades, the automaker will provide up to $300 for the purchase of a steering wheel lock. And it summarizes TikTok videos showing how to steal cars without push-bund ignitions and immobilizing anti-thept devices

has led to at least 14 reported crashes, and as I mentioned earlier, eight fatalities in the United States. You know what's funny? Shoot. Is that, like, you and I both travel at these things. amount. Something that I very rarely see in Canada is a steering wheel lock.

But when I'm in the States, I see them all the time. And I wonder if... That's a really good point. I wonder if our legislation about car immobilizers isn't the reason why we... Like, I wonder how many other car manufacturers didn't put emobilizers in their American cars, except for the fact that maybe they can't be stolen with an Apple iPhone charging cable. Yeah, sure. Right.

so that they're not memeable. So it's like, I've always wondered that when I travel. I'm like, why, everybody here has a steering wheel lock. And it's like, you never see them in Canada. Yeah, that's a really good point. And I remember some interesting. I remember seeing them a lot when I was a kid. Yeah.

Prior to 2007. Yeah, exactly. When the Canadian government passed a law saying you have to put this basic anti-theft thing in your car because people keep stealing cars. So maybe. That's a really good point. conspiracy theory here. Hit me.

The steering wheel lock lobby is behind this all. Big lock. Big lock. Yeah, big lock did it. Big lock. Because I'd like, oh, they strike again. It's funny. I've never, I've never, it's never even clued in.

It just popped it to my head. And I was like, you know what? Every time I travel, I'm always like, so weird. Like, everybody here uses these things. And we, like, nobody at home does. Like, our car thefts can't be that. Like car theft seems like a global crime that happens everywhere, no matter demographics or what. It's just something that happens. It's strange. You never see it in Canada. But this could be the missing link. We put it all together. Yeah. Solved. I'll take this one down off the board, unpin all the pins and detach all the strings.

Yeah, there you go. I want to end just with like a very quick discussion about. you know, why do teens do stuff like this? Because there's the vulnerability and there's the meme element of it. But it's a pretty extreme form of teenage rebellion, and I think that's worth talking about. There's this, I think, important statistic that I think needs to be included here for this last little bit to make sense. I learned while reading about this,

that there is an often repeated claim that Milwaukee's America's most segregated city. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel did a long piece on it. While Milwaukee City is technically only in the top 10, at 7th, the Milwaukee metro region is first, as in the most racially segregated place in America. It's both New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland. Redlining and housing discrimination have entrenched this problem.

So I'm just going to come back to the Verge's very good coverage on this. The article quotes Paul Belair, Professor of Sociology and Director of Ohio State University's Criminal Justice Research Center. And they're talking about this question of whether teens getting into trouble are motivated by what we think they are. And Paul talks about this other sociologist, late sociologist Albert Cohen, who studied youth trouble making in the mid-20th century.

And Paul says, quote, he observed that they would steal things, get outside the store, laugh, and eventually all the stuff they stole would wind up in a dumpster, meaning they didn't really want the stuff. The Verge continues. Belar observes that when a society economically and racially segregates certain populations, this isolation births new social structures outside of the mainstream, fostering subcultures like the Kia Boys. Quoting Bel Air, you reject the prevailing norms and you recreate a system in which you can gain status and where you do have status. In under-resourced areas of Columbus like Linden, young black men are given few opportunities within their neighborhoods.

Quote, it's a rebellion, Bel Air argues, against their low standing and institutional structures. I think, if you're a young person and the culture around you literally segregates you in those ways,

you're going to do what teens do and make your own subculture within it. And if that othering is really extreme, worst in the country, so it seems might your subculture. And in 2023, whether that subculture is about doing like a little internet dance

or whether it's about stealing people's cars. A lot of that's tied up in a role of the algorithm. Teens have always done some version of this. They're always going to do some version of this. I don't know if this ends with a software update or better anti-theft legislation or TikTok's community guidelines changing

or they're just being no Kia's left in the states to steal because the boys stole all of them. I have no clue how it ends. But looking at this map of Milwaukee and these places where this happened most intensely, it sure seems like these kind of subcultures are going to keep coming along as long as the larger culture that surrounds it keeps looking like this.