They might look and dress like respectable working people. They sometimes call in advance from pre-paid cell phones that, when you call back later, have long been discarded. They know how the equipment rental industry operates and they seem to have a pretty good idea about who has national account status with what major rental company. They might show up with fraudulent credit cards and identification that look legitimate. They might associate themselves with a company that has a corporate account with the rental company they are trying to rent from, and then claim to have been sent by “Mike” or “Jim” to pick up the equipment.
Such is the modern face of equipment theft. Yes people still steal equipment the old-fashioned way, backing up a truck to a rental center in the middle of the night, loading up with machines and heading for the highway. Or steal from a jobsite where security measures are lax. But increasingly equipment thieves are more sophisticated and adept with technology.
According to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, almost $1 billion worth of construction equipment is stolen each year. That’s a lot of machines; any many are stolen through fraudulent rentals with fake ID.
At the recent Rental Show I sat down with Mike Marsalini, senior manager of corporate security with United Rentals. United approached the International Association of Financial Crimes Investigators, which has an information-sharing technology platform called CrimeDex. United talked to Jim Hudson, president of 3VR CrimeDex, to see if a platform could be created specifically for the rental industry. Hudson created a collaborative, rental-specific message board called the Equipment Rental Industry Group to share information about criminals and scams as soon as rental personnel become aware of them. It costs nothing to join and there is no limit to how many employees of a company can participate.
Quite a few rental companies, large and small, have signed on, as have representatives of the National Equipment Registry and the American Rental Association. Already some thieves have been stopped as a result. An ERIG registration link may be obtained by contacting Michael Marsalisi at [email protected].
Marsalini wrote an article for RER that we have posted online and will soon run in print. Check it out at: http:// rermag.com/headline-news/new-anti-theft-group-combats-equipment-theft. This is a great rental industry effort to deter equipment theft, working in conjunction with organizations that have been doing this kind of work for years. It’s non-denominational, the industry working together for a good cause.
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Noted construction equipment journalist Frank Raczon has written a great book on the history of Caterpillar earthmoving machines t it l e d Cater pillar : Modern Earthmoving Mar ve l s . Wr i t t en with construction equipment historian Keith Haddock, and illustrated with hundreds of application photographs, many of which go back more than 100 years, “Marvels” is a comprehensive history of Caterpillar machines that details the Peoria, Ill.-based manufacturer’s unparalleled contributions to the history of construction equipment and how its hundreds of machines have evolved.
Chapters focus on track-type tractors; motor graders and pull graders (from horses to joysticks); wheel tractor-scrapers and towed scrapers; wheel loaders and track loaders; hydraulic excavators (crawler and wheeled); articulated, off-highway and mining dump trucks; backhoe loaders, mining machines and more. The book is well researched, easy to read and includes explanations of how and why machines work the way they do as well as interviews and quotes from Caterpillar engineers and operators.
Author Raczon, senior editor of Construction Equipment magazine, has had a writing career spanning nearly a quarter of a century in magazine publishing and public relations with some of the industry’s major equipment manufacturers. Haddock has worked for major earthmoving contractors in the U.K. and Canada, and has written for a number of construction publications.
The brand new book is published by Motorbooks, and is available on Amazon, eBay, Barnes & Noble, Walmart and other stores and sites.
You know how people have coffee table books on great artists like Picasso or Rembrandt? Well, I won’t compare pictures of Caterpillar equipment to Picasso, but this would be a terrific coffee table book, if you have a coffee table. Some of you would rather look at pictures of construction equipment than art. So if you have room on your coffee table next to your collection of RERs, check this book out!
