Van security and tool theft — two different problems

If you run a van for a living, two separate things can go wrong overnight and they need separate answers. Somebody can take what is in the back, or somebody can take the van itself. People tend to spend all their money on the first and none on the second, usually because the first has already happened to them once.

The load area is a physical problem and it has physical answers. Deadlocks, slam locks, hook locks, an internal cage, an alarm on the rear doors, and the habit — the only free one on the list — of emptying the van overnight where that is realistic. All of it is worth doing, and none of it is what this page is about, because none of it stops the vehicle being driven away with everything still in it.

Taking the whole van is the version that ends a business rather than costing it a week. Tools can be replaced in a few days if the insurance behaves. A van that has gone takes the tools, the racking, the signwriting, the diary and every job booked in for the next fortnight with it, and the replacement is not sitting on a forecourt ready to go.

The methods are the same as on a car, and the newer the van the more familiar they look. Keyless entry has been standard on a lot of commercial vehicles for years now, which means a relay attack works exactly as it does on a driveway car: one device near the wall of the house where the keys hang, one beside the van, and the vehicle is unlocked and started without anything being forced. Where the van is older, the diagnostic socket is the route instead, and on many models it will accept a device that programs a working key in about a minute.

What makes a working vehicle a better target than a car is that it is easier to read from the street. Signwriting tells somebody what trade you are in, and therefore roughly what is likely to be inside. A roof rack and a ladder say the same thing. A van parked on the same bit of road every night from six until seven the next morning is as predictable as anything gets, and around the residential streets off Leagrave and out towards Stopsley there is rarely anywhere else to put it.

The other thing worth saying plainly is that alarms have stopped working as deterrents on vans specifically. Everybody has heard one going off in a residential street at two in the morning and nobody has ever gone out to look. An offender knows that better than you do.

A CAN-bus immobiliser answers the part the locks cannot. A Ghost II or a CAN Phantom sits on the vehicle's own network and refuses to let the engine fire until a sequence is entered on buttons already in the cab. There is nothing to relay, nothing to clone, no LED and nothing on a diagnostic tool. Somebody who has already got the doors open finds a van that cranks and will not start, in a street, at night, with no way to work out why.

Two practical points for a working vehicle. If a mate, an apprentice or a subcontractor drives it, everybody who needs to start it has to know the sequence, so keep it short enough to teach and change it when somebody leaves — the CAN Phantom lets you do that from your phone, which on a van is genuinely useful. And if the vehicle is on a lease or a finance agreement, nothing here is cut, drilled or spliced, so it comes out at the end without a trace and without a deduction.

We fit on your own drive or at the yard, across Luton and the LU1 to LU4 postcodes, in two to three hours. Send the registration and we will confirm which system suits the van and what it costs before anything is booked.