Today, Explained - The Kia Boyz are coming for your car

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

Turns out Kias and Hyundais are easy to steal. Teens are taking advantage, and putting it all on TikTok. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My name is Taylor Durrell. I am a freelance writer in Columbus, Ohio. How did you come to write about this story where people are stealing Kias and Hyundais? So I first found out about this phenomenon by my sister's car being stolen. What? Yes. You have a personal connection. The Kia boys were thrust upon me. They stole my sister's car, and it was just severely damaged and not where it was supposed to be.

And the only thing stolen was my sister's strawberry candy. Was it stolen by an 8-year-old? It was stolen by 12- to 15-year-olds, yes. That is the demographic of the Kia boys, as I later found out. Kia and Hyundai thefts are up 100%. More than 100,000 of these cars went missing last year. The Kia boys are coming up on Today Explained.

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Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. So the Kiya Boys aren't just a car theft ring. They've become the kind of cultural phenomenon. They have their own slang. They make their own music. They, of course, upload these videos of them driving around, often to the very music that they make.

And they call themselves boys because these boys are definitely underage? Yes, so most of these kids don't even have a license. And so you'll often find that the younger the kids are that are stealing these, the more cars they end up stealing because of how fast they total them. So the kid will steal a Kia, they'll crash it, and then they'll be like, well, the knight is still young, so we must steal another. When we're talking about the Kia Boys,

we're not just talking about car theft. We're talking about entire culture that's been developed. So a lot of these joyrides are filmed often on Snapchat, and some of them end up making it to social media sites like TikTok. And so these videos of the joyrides get spread around as a kind of status symbol. And because I believe it started during the pandemic, I think you have the situation where parents who are these essential workers are going off to work and the kids have to stay home and do online school. And in some cases, they don't even have the access to the online schools. And so they look elsewhere to have fun, I guess, to do something outside. And they figure out through word of mouth and through the internet that you can actually steal Kias and Hyundais.

And that becomes kind of a real life GTA. The video game Grand Theft Auto, for those who don't game. What's up, man? Wanna go to prison? What? Okay, so you have this personal experience where your sister's Kia gets stolen.

It somehow ends up in a backyard. But this isn't just your sister. How big is this phenomenon? It's huge and it's impossible to stop because once the knowledge spread of how to steal these Kias and Hyundais, there was no infrastructure in place to be able to stop it because it's a technical problem. And so if you wanted to stop it because it's a technical problem. And so if you wanted to stop it, you would have to recall every car between 2011, 2021.

Wow, a decade of Kias and Hyundais? Right, it's like millions of cars, basically, would have to be completely recalled and fixed. And so you see these huge numbers spiking once the Kia boys come onto the scene. A new report shows car thefts nationwide are surging, topping one million last year. In Chicago, up 55 percent. In Columbus, they spiked from, you know, 3,500 to, you know, having over 4,000 just at the half-year point.

In Milwaukee, where it started, they went from seeing 3,500 stolen cars in 2019, and only a small percentage of those were Kias and Hyundais, around 6%. And then by 2021, you see over 10,500 cars stolen, and 67% of those were Kias and Hyundais. So you see this huge spike in car theft. And it was very confusing to people because nobody understood that it's kind of like a movement. It's not like these kids are stealing these cars and selling them. They're stealing them, enjoy riding them, and then they're being found in these random places. So it sounds like it starts off sort of regional. How does this become something that's happening maybe all over the country?

Yeah, it definitely spreads through the internet like wildfire. Around this time last year, you see a YouTube video uploaded by this Milwaukee YouTuber called Tommy G. And he follows this group of Kia boys around. Can you show us how it looks to steal a car? I can show you inside your car. And you see them driving a Kia or a Hyundai around very violently. Hold on.

Then he's interviewing these Kia boys, and they say, you want to see how I do it? Let's do a simulation of him stealing my car. And normally when you steal a car, you would have to find, you know, these wires and cut it. Let's do a simulation of him stealing my car. And normally when you steal a car you would have to find you know these wires and cut it but instead that you take out the ignition cylinders. Where the key goes in if you can pry that out with a screwdriver, there's something underneath that, and that is perfectly shaped as a little rectangle. That's where you can stick the USB in and you just turn it like a key.

So we're not talking about hacker software here. We're just talking about you put a little USB in here because it's perfectly shaped and you turn it. Wow. So it's very low tech. It's a very low tech hack. And it's democratized car theft, I would say. And so on TikTok, you will see this little clip of this kid saying, this is how you do it. And so this is what's become known as the source of the Kia Boys or what Boomer journalists call the Kia Challenge.

Okay, Boomer. It is kind of not a thing. You know, nobody's saying, you know, this is a Kia Challenge. How many Kias can you steal? It's really just this video got uploaded and kids saw it and started stealing Kias. And the kind of checklist of what a Kia boy is behind it has

gone kind of ignored, which is the fact that it's these underage kids stealing Kias just for fun, just to joyride them and total them, as opposed to just stealing them and selling them for economic ends. So you have kind of this spectrum of car theft that has emerged. And the Kia boys are on the joy ride slash for fun side, whereas I think traditional car thieves are on the economic side where they want to steal and sell to make some money. Okay, so for the Kia boys, it's about joy, it's about fun. Has any of this turned violent? Yes.

There are obviously car wrecks that result from those actions. The bus just hit you. They hit a bus? And so you have, for example, one of the kids who was in the Tommy G YouTube video ends up crashing into a school bus later that day. He's accused of not just hitting the bus, which lifted off the ground, but the SUV in front of it and an MPS truck. The front seat passenger in the Waikia is blurred in this video because he was dangling unconscious from the door by his knees. That passenger was severely hurt and remains in a medically induced coma

and sustained a crushed skull, fractured arm, and brain bleed that required surgery. And you have kids in Columbus, you know, who aren't wearing seatbelts when they're doing this because why would you put on a seatbelt when you're going on one of these joyrides if you don't even know how to drive a car? If you saw their faces, they're babies. And they're out here stealing cars and doing reckless behavior. And so there were these three kids that went full speed and got into a wreck and they got ejected from the car and two of them ended up dying and the third

was in serious condition and all of them were 14 years old. Well, Jared, if it takes a village to raise a child, some might see our village here in Columbus as failing some of these teens. Columbus police say they're doing everything they can, but it's going to take everyone to keep more children from dying like this. And one of those boys, you know, was supposed to start high school the next year. So it can be tragic. And also for the people whose cars these are that they're stealing because they obviously don't have access to a car for X amount of time until it gets back to the owners.

And they usually do find their gets back to the owners. And they usually do find their way back to the owners, but it usually takes forever for these victims of the Kia boys to get their cars fixed because you have a huge backlog. Wait times on necessary parts to fix the car can be three to six months. It's a destructive trend that is costing people money, time, and their cars. So the Kia boys are stealing these Kias and Hyundais for fun, whereas you also have other forces, for example, the Game Over Kids in Columbus, which is a gang that also steals Kias and Hyundais,

but they do so to rob banks or commit murders and other very violent crimes. Are these various factions stealing Kias getting caught? Yes. Not always. I would say a lot of the times they get away because they leave these cars abandoned. And because there's so many cars, you can't brush for prints in every single one. But when they are getting caught, they're underage, so they're not getting jail time.

They're usually let go same day, and they're not forced to pay anything for the damages. Taylor, what are Kia and Hyundai, which I believe are kind of like cousins-related companies, what do the companies have to say about all this? So the initial response from Kia and Hyundai was basically they shrugged their shoulders and said, we're following all the laws, these cars are up to standard. Attorneys for the automaker say that vehicle theft is a consumer's risk, their ignition systems are not covered by warranty because they're not defective, and that car owners could have purchased upgraded security measures. And more recently, as these lawsuits have been filed from cities like Cleveland, Milwaukee, Columbus, there's a class action lawsuit filed in California.

They say Hyundai and Kia haven't done enough to warn consumers about the vulnerable ignitions and didn't install immobilizing technology that's been around since the 90s. And they started to walk their way back and say, look, we will do what we can, basically. So they started donating tens of thousands of steering locks to all these police departments across the country. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, since November, they gave 26,000 steering wheel locks to 77 agencies across 12 states.

Of course, this wasn't enough. There is also a free software update that you might be eligible for. The manufacturers rolled it out in February. It would extend the alarm sound from 30 seconds to a minute and require the key to be in the ignition. And so as all of these lawsuits continue to unfold. Auto giants Hyundai and Kia agreeing to pay up to $200 million to settle a class action lawsuit covering roughly 8 million vehicles.

A lot of that money is going to go towards updating the security systems in these cars. Victims eligible for payments of up to $6,300, plus up to $4,000 for associated costs like raised insurance premiums. But as I said, there's so many cars being totaled that you have this backlog. And so all of these car owners who are already having a hard time getting their cars fixed after they've been essentially totaled by the Kia boys. After this lawsuit, you're going to have an entire new group of people, millions of cars who want to get their cars updated. And so you'll have this even bigger backlog. And it's

not clear even if these security upgrades will do anything to deter the Kia boys because most of them are just updating the alarms as opposed to actually fixing the problem by installing some kind of electronic immobilizer so that the Kia boys can't actually start the cars themselves. So what does that mean? Does that mean that this trend isn't going anywhere? It really feels like the Kia boys are unstoppable right now

because everything we've thrown at trying to stop them hasn't worked so far. Taylor, I just, before we go, I want to ask how your sister's doing. How's her Kia? Is she okay? She is obviously a little bit traumatized. But after the car got fixed, which took over three months, we got a steering lock and it remains on the car. Even if we're just going in to pick up something very quickly, if she just has to do something in and out,

the steering lock stays on regardless because the Kia boys often strike when you least expect it. Taylor Durrell is a freelance journalist based in Columbus, Ohio, where his sister's Kia was stolen, but they only took her strawberry candy. This Kia Boys thing might feel relatively new, but it's part of a long criminal tradition. That's coming up on Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames.

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University of Central Florida in Orlando. He says the key to understanding the Kia boys is understanding something called performance crime. They've been around for a long time, but they're more prevalent and common today. You know, one type of performance crime is, I've come to call it like a theater play type of crime, where you have all the participants are voluntary. They know what they're doing. They know they're going to be recorded committing a crime. And they all have roles to play. Bathrooms damaged, toilets broken, even keyboards in urinals.

It's part of a new viral challenge on TikTok. It is called the Devious Licks Challenge. It apparently encourages people to vandalize their schools. Schools say the vandalism is costing them thousands of dollars a year. The second type is sort of what I've come to call a nature film type of performance crime. And this is where there's involuntary participation. And you have people who are just kind of going about their business and somebody will roll up and film them being assaulted or whatever.

A good example of this a few years back was a crime that took on the name happy slapping. A social phenomena that began in England. Basically, someone assaults a stranger while being recorded on a camera phone, hopefully creating a video that will go viral on the internet. As with most of these assault-type crimes, some of them ended in serious injuries. There was actually one fatality. Hmm. What's the history of performance crime? How long has it been around? It goes back to antiquity.

So it precedes the mass media. The modern version sort of came into being in the 1840s with the penny press newspapers, which really marks the beginning of modern mass media. The coverage of Jack the Ripper is a good example of that sort of thing. Now, he wasn't seeking out publicity, but to get this massive coverage, and crime became a way to gain celebrity status in society, both negative and positive. In the 1930s, you had highway robbers, Bonnie and Clyde.

It was a nonstop soap opera. Everybody was tuned into the radio, everybody was reading the papers and actually it's almost like they were rooting them to get away. So you had these sorts of crossover between offenders and celebrities and people emulating and admiring these people. You know human nature hasn't changed but what has changed really in the 1990s is the development of the internet and social media. Today, any 15-year-old with an iPhone can quickly commit a crime, upload it.

So what society gets is sometimes these horrendous examples of how bad human nature can be. So you have uploads of people being tortured, people being raped, people being murdered. Yeah, I mean, does the nature of the crime change once we get to this social media era where literally anyone can upload anything? Well, the nature of the crime doesn't change. We've always had rapes, murders, and assaults, and we've always had crimes being committed to try to get attention. What has changed has been more the impact of the crimes on society. So you have more people exposed to visuals of these sorts of events. My speculation is that there's often a disconnect between the audience they have in mind and the audience that their friends on the team are going to see this and everybody will have a good chuckle and that'll be the end of it.

And they don't seem to have much concern with the exposure to thousands and thousands of people, including the police and including friends of the victims and that sort of thing. So the crimes often seem to be aimed at a small local group, but exposure is to a large society-wide group. And that's where the impact really comes in. Yeah, I mean, you're historically talking about crimes like murder, rape, sexual assault, really grim stuff. But of course, bring this back around to these Kia boys who are seemingly stealing Kias because it's easy and funny and their friends get a kick out of it. It seems like there's just a sense that this isn't a serious crime amongst

these kids, that this is something you can just do for fun. What do you think it is about this performative aspect that doesn't seem to be grave to these kids? Yeah, performance crimes run the gamut of all sorts of crimes. So the more heinous ones are the more newsworthy ones. So those are the ones that the public hears the most about. But a lot of performance crime is sort of considered not serious, more dangerous to the offenders than to the public. And that's sort of the reality of crime in general. Most crime is low-level property crimes. And the coverage of crime, the news coverage, what attracts attention is really the rarity of it. So yeah, I'm certainly not the expert on the teenage psyche, but there's a perception on my part that they really don't have a long

time horizon. So they just don't have a long time horizon. So they just don't think through the consequences. Since you've been studying performance crimes for some time, do you see an obvious solution here? Because it doesn't seem like the police have one. It doesn't seem like Kia has one. And I don't know if, you know, China cares that much about what kids are posting on TikTok in the United States and Milwaukee or whatever.

I'm pretty pessimistic about a larger solution. You're not going to change human nature. And so you're going to always have teenagers that are going to be sort of pushing the boundaries of things. You're not going to rework the media and you're not going to rework society. They're always going to sort of have the ability to encourage people to do things to gain attention and fame and notoriety. But unless you're really going to change the culture and the structure of the media, it's for profit. And the content that draws an audience is the content

that's going to generate profit and as long as that's the case you're going to get this encouragement for people to post things that draw audiences yeah i mean from my vantage it feels like building more secure cars would be a good place to start. Maybe they felt, who the hell would want to steal a Kia? But, you know, apparently enough people really jumped at the opportunity. You don't drive a Kia, do you? Me, no. I barely drive it. I drive a Mazda. Which I've now had for like a decade or more.

Sweet. My car is more likely to have somebody tuck a $20 bill under the windshield wiper with a sympathy card. I do not worry about it getting stolen. Professor Raymond Surrett, University of Central Florida. Our show today was produced by Heidi Mawagdi. It was edited by Amina Alsadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by Patrick Boyd.

The rest of today's Explained team is comprised of Halima Shah, Avishai Artsy, Amanda Llewellyn, Miles Bryan, Siona Petros, and Victoria Chamberlain. My co-host is Noel King. Our managing editor is Matthew Collette. We get lots of extra help lately from Jolie Myers and Michael Rayfield. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. I'm Sean Ramos for him. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

My bike got stolen once and it sucked, so my deepest sympathies to all the Kia and Hyundai owners out there.