Garmin Lock
Mar
8
2006
Garmin Lock has been introduced in the latest Garmin GPS receivers. We previously broke the news of the new Garmin StreetPilot c550 which includes this new feature. Garmin Lock was created to help prevent against GPS theft… a growing crime.
Garmin Lock works by requiring the user to type in a four digit PIN number before the GPS receiver becomes operational. If the PIN number is not known, Garmin Lock will prevent the GPS receiver from working.
[...] The Garmin Nuvi 360 comes with Garmin Lock which is a system for requiring an PIN number to access the GPS receiver functions. Text-to-speech is also an advantage the Garmin Nuvi 360 has over the Nuvi 310. June Mid July is the target availability date. [...]
My c550 was stolen out of my car last week. It is protected by GarminLock but I was wondering if this is known to be cracked already. I’m asking this question because I had these (tini) anti-theft-stickers at the windows but this didn’t prevent the bast**ds to break the window and take away the c550. From the police I learned that there is a gang going around which seems to be well organized so chances are that they didn’t care much about GarminLock.
I would really love to see a way to report this device as beeing stolen just to make sure that it is useless for the new “owner”…
Olaf, one of the best things you can do is to contact Garmin and report it stolen. They will mark it as stolen in their database. Then if someone contacts them about a repair (like if they can’t get past the lock) then they have a chance of assisting the recovery of your GPS.