**The Dark Side of Car Sharing: How Social Media Can Be Exploited by Thieves**

Imagine posting a picture of your car online, thinking that it's safe behind your fancy gate or in your garage. But what if someone like Jimmy, who has been renting out a $3 million house in Los Angeles, can hack into your garage system using off-the-shelf products for just $200? That's exactly what happened to our producers, who were trying to steal a car from Jimmy's rental property.

It all started when we posed the hypothetical question: "Can I actually steal someone's car based on information I got from a single post on their social media?" Our team thought it was just a theoretical exercise, but we didn't realize how easy it would be. We took a picture of Jimmy's house in Beverly Hills and ran it through a reverse Google image search to find more information about the location.

To our surprise, it worked! The image popped up with pictures of Jimmy's hat, his sports car, and even his face. It was like we had found him. We realized that anyone can use these free tools to exploit social media and gain access to private information.

Our producers tried this tactic with other houses just for fun, and it picked some of those up too. So, who's to say that posting pictures of your house online is safe? It might be a good idea to keep your car in a garage or use a key immobilizer system instead of relying on social media.

But what happened next was even more surprising. Our team used the information we found to locate Jimmy's rental property and wait for him to come by so they could record his gate code. When he finally arrived, our producers opened the gate, and Jimmy was left feeling foolish.

It's a scary reality that we uncovered, and it's not just about car theft. This highlights the importance of online security and the potential dangers of social media sharing. So, be careful what you post online, and always keep your valuables safe.

**In related news**

* Donut, the tiny car from Donut, is back in stock at StockyCars.com. Limited quantities are available, but don't forget to subscribe to the newsletter and follow Stocky on social media for updates on new color drops and models.

* Our team has been using their "top secret" Thief vehicle to get into Jimmy's house. It's a pretty cool car, and we're glad it came in handy.

**Stay safe out there**

Remember, always use your online presence responsibly, and never share information that could potentially put you or others at risk. Thanks for watching, and don't forget to follow us on Donut Media!

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enbehind the Gates of this Ultra luxurious 3 million dollar mansion is a Priceless sports car today I'm going to attempt to steal it with information I gained from this single photo here's the thing I don't have the key to the car I don't even have the code to the gate or the garage so how could a wood be Thief like myself do something like this and why should you be worried today we're gonna find out welcome to Donut last week I posted a picture on my Instagram of my car keys with my new M3 here and some of you guys in the comments drop some knowledge on them so that got me curious how could someone steal a car with just a picture of a key people post pictures of their keys on Instagram all the time got a new car post a picture of it on Instagram your bus hit wear a keychain on your pants keys in the picture you're busted take an overhead shot of a key perfectly placed on a flat surface you're not driving that car anymore because I got it in my garage but could it really be that dangerous well I have the keys to the money pit Miata I'm gonna take a picture of it right now and then see if I can duplicate this key and then steal the car now if we're going to steal this Miata we first need to figure out how locks work one of the most common types of car locks is called a wafer lock wafer locks use tiny spring-loaded metal gates that move up or down and your key is cut specifically to fit through these Gates pushing them up or down and unlocking the car now depending on how many Cuts your key has there could be thousands potentially even hundreds of thousands of unique lock combos so how do you get all the information of these combos from a picture well first thing we got to do is download that picture now this was already a crappy photo to begin with and when you upload it to Instagram it gets down resed even further and turns into a complete pile of pixelated mess which is a problem because when you zoom in you can see that there's a lot of compression artifacting around the edges of the key now the spacing in depth on a car key are within tenths of a millimeter so we want this pitcher to be as high resolution as possible no problem though because I'm just going to run this image through a free online AI High image enhancer if only enhancing things could be that easy in physical life so after we upload the image we can see here this is our original image and this is enhanced original enhanced that's pretty crazy now we'll take this image and upload it into another free software blender now here we can use the picture as a reference image trace the key and create a 3D model now that we have our 3D model done we're just going to go on Amazon and order some blank Keys no special information here it's just the internet telling me what to do at this point Jeremiah Burton that's me and once you have your blank in we're gonna do our best to take some measurements so we can accurately scale our 3D model once you have those measurements from the blank we can apply those measurements in our slicer to get it ready to print now we'll take our 3D printed model and overlay it on a blank key and with this 30 dollar cutting tool start making some Cuts now these Cuts don't need to be exact over the lifetime of a car the ignition cylinder as well as a driver's side door they get used in we just got to be right in the ballpark it's like a haircut for a key all right I had the actual key to The Money Pit Miata I'm gonna put it in here lock the door confirmation door is locked perfect score now I have our reproduce key I'm gonna take it see if I can open this sucker all right little key it's time to it's time to do what you're meant to do take someone else's property away from them it's close it wants to go in maybe I just gotta take some pin some down okay we made a couple of fine tune adjustments let's try this let's put the key around okay that is the lock position now let's see if I can do the unlock position Sweet Sweet Success that is so insane and wild okay now here's the real part we got into the door that's great let's see if we can put it into the ignition cylinder all right that was shockingly easy but what if you don't have a 3D printer or what if the picture of the key you're using is a little off-kilter the angle's not great well technically a thief could actually skip all of those steps that's because most Keys unique sequence of cuts is actually hiding in plain sight every key has a bidding code which is determined by the depth and spacing of each cut it's different for every key manufacturer even style of key and it's dependent on the type of lock the key was made for but here's the thing if you've got a little bit of knowledge about Keys you could technically sight read a key and then make it that way if you look at the profile of a key each Valley or cut represents where a pin will fall into when it's inserted into the lock by counting the cut beds the key will tell you the number of cuts needed for the bidding code and now you can start making an educated guess for the actual code itself let's say you have a key that has six cuts on each side if you look closely you can see one of the cuts is almost touching the beveled edge of the key so we'll assume that's the deepest cut say it's .035 inches which would correlate to 6 for the bidding code the bidding code is what makes your individual key unique to others of the same brand and model and it's really the only info a locksmith needs to reproduce your key and that's because most lock Smith have a cutting machine that has a database with the depth as well as the spacing for each car out there which is kept secret for very obvious reasons but sight reading a key is a bit of a key smithing Legend so what if we go approach a locksmith and see if you can reproduce a key with the bidding code alone and up the stakes this is what I'll be wearing hey I lost my key for my car I have a 1994 Mazda Miata they gave me the bidding bidding code can I give you the bidding code are the bidding code yeah yeah is that something I can give you unfortunately okay so no respectable locksmith is going to cut a key for you with just this code you need identification of VIN number proof of ownership etc etc but honestly respectability aside how secretive could this depth and spacing info be it turns out not very wow because another free AI powered software was able to tell me oh okay now I think chat GPT is catching on because when I asked it for other cars information it wouldn't tell me and to be honest that's actually probably a good thing but I also found another website which gives you access to their database which gives you their depth and spacing information on any key you can think of a thief would definitely need a lot more knowledge of keys to make this information useful but theoretically it's possible now here's the thing this all sounds pretty easy on paper but it starts getting much harder when you start using newer keys keys like this Sidewinder for example which are found in a lot of Honda cars and obviously this isn't going to work with any sort of Chip key or immobilizer system a chip key or transponder key like this one is one of the best defenses against a thief they work by sending out a low level radio frequency from a small chip inside your car key to receiver in the ignition cylinder that signal contains a unique code that is programmed from the factory and if your car doesn't detect that exact signal your car will never start nowadays most cars are going to use the transponder Key System but you'd be surprised how many cars on the road right now don't have an immobilizer like the one that we stole in a video a few months back see a boy's application we're stealing a whole bunch of cars on this channel now you might be thinking who cares if I posted a picture of my Kia online my car is still behind my nice fancy gate or inside my garage well there's actually an off-the-shelf product you can get for 200 bucks a thief can hack into your garage system just like this booing you can also do stuff like this and go who's interfering what happened why are you laughing wait wait check the plug I just put this in yesterday okay sorry all right thank you but they can also read and emulate radio frequencies to open garage doors there are even some custom firmware updates you can use online for free that allows you to transmit frequencies that are technically illegal in the United States so all this has been theoretical so far what I want to know is can I actually steal someone's car based off of the information I got from a single post on their social media so our producers have rented out a three million dollar house somewhere here in Los Angeles where Jimmy has stashed The Money Pit Miata and I have to go find out where he is and steal the car right out from under him without him even knowing based off of information from a single photo okay so first things first I gotta find out where Jimmy is now like a bozo he tagged that he's in Beverly Hills not the exact location but I know round about where he's going to be so I think what I'm going to do is take this image run it through a reverse Google image search to see if maybe some images of this house pop up online part of the image that I want to search for popping up with Jimmy's hat and the Miata and all this other stuff but what I really want is just this house oh there we go is that it that's it oh holy crap boom there it is Beverly Hills California busted Jimmy I found you baby okay so that was actually pretty easy kind of scary how easy it was and maybe it's because this is a rental house and so there's more information of it online but I've tried it with a bunch of other houses just for fun and it picked some of those up too so who's to say all I know is that you probably shouldn't post pictures of your house online either because some psycho like me could find it okay so now that we have an address let's go give Jimmy a little visit big announcement for a little car stocky the tiny car from donut is back in stock at stockycars.com limited quantities of this run but while you're at stockycars.com subscribe to the newsletter and follow stocky on all social media to be up to date on new color drops and new models stocky the tiny carbide donut okay I'm in my top secret Thief vehicle pretty sure I'm outside Jimmy's house so now it's just a waiting game I'm gonna wait for him to come by and then I'm going to record the gate code when he goes to open it don't do this at home do we have any food perfect all right open the gate you little idiot got him such a beautiful day God I love my Priceless sports car in the garage safe and tucked away no one will be able to steal it uh-uh Oh Henry Henry what are we having for dinner tonight later Jimmy you freaking idiot foreign okay look guys this all started because we posed this hypothetical question and it turns out yes you can now are thieves gonna be stealing cars this way probably not thieves are pretty lazy and they could steal plenty of cars with much less work and do it the old-fashioned way but at the end of the day we did do this we got all of this information online using free tools that are only going to get better and easier to use as time goes on so now that you have this information use it for good protect yourself use a key immobilizer system put air tags on your car don't go off and use it to go steal cars that'd be bad use it to protect your Grandma thank you guys so much for watching this everything else at donut follow us on donut at donut media follow me at Jeremiah Burton till next week byebehind the Gates of this Ultra luxurious 3 million dollar mansion is a Priceless sports car today I'm going to attempt to steal it with information I gained from this single photo here's the thing I don't have the key to the car I don't even have the code to the gate or the garage so how could a wood be Thief like myself do something like this and why should you be worried today we're gonna find out welcome to Donut last week I posted a picture on my Instagram of my car keys with my new M3 here and some of you guys in the comments drop some knowledge on them so that got me curious how could someone steal a car with just a picture of a key people post pictures of their keys on Instagram all the time got a new car post a picture of it on Instagram your bus hit wear a keychain on your pants keys in the picture you're busted take an overhead shot of a key perfectly placed on a flat surface you're not driving that car anymore because I got it in my garage but could it really be that dangerous well I have the keys to the money pit Miata I'm gonna take a picture of it right now and then see if I can duplicate this key and then steal the car now if we're going to steal this Miata we first need to figure out how locks work one of the most common types of car locks is called a wafer lock wafer locks use tiny spring-loaded metal gates that move up or down and your key is cut specifically to fit through these Gates pushing them up or down and unlocking the car now depending on how many Cuts your key has there could be thousands potentially even hundreds of thousands of unique lock combos so how do you get all the information of these combos from a picture well first thing we got to do is download that picture now this was already a crappy photo to begin with and when you upload it to Instagram it gets down resed even further and turns into a complete pile of pixelated mess which is a problem because when you zoom in you can see that there's a lot of compression artifacting around the edges of the key now the spacing in depth on a car key are within tenths of a millimeter so we want this pitcher to be as high resolution as possible no problem though because I'm just going to run this image through a free online AI High image enhancer if only enhancing things could be that easy in physical life so after we upload the image we can see here this is our original image and this is enhanced original enhanced that's pretty crazy now we'll take this image and upload it into another free software blender now here we can use the picture as a reference image trace the key and create a 3D model now that we have our 3D model done we're just going to go on Amazon and order some blank Keys no special information here it's just the internet telling me what to do at this point Jeremiah Burton that's me and once you have your blank in we're gonna do our best to take some measurements so we can accurately scale our 3D model once you have those measurements from the blank we can apply those measurements in our slicer to get it ready to print now we'll take our 3D printed model and overlay it on a blank key and with this 30 dollar cutting tool start making some Cuts now these Cuts don't need to be exact over the lifetime of a car the ignition cylinder as well as a driver's side door they get used in we just got to be right in the ballpark it's like a haircut for a key all right I had the actual key to The Money Pit Miata I'm gonna put it in here lock the door confirmation door is locked perfect score now I have our reproduce key I'm gonna take it see if I can open this sucker all right little key it's time to it's time to do what you're meant to do take someone else's property away from them it's close it wants to go in maybe I just gotta take some pin some down okay we made a couple of fine tune adjustments let's try this let's put the key around okay that is the lock position now let's see if I can do the unlock position Sweet Sweet Success that is so insane and wild okay now here's the real part we got into the door that's great let's see if we can put it into the ignition cylinder all right that was shockingly easy but what if you don't have a 3D printer or what if the picture of the key you're using is a little off-kilter the angle's not great well technically a thief could actually skip all of those steps that's because most Keys unique sequence of cuts is actually hiding in plain sight every key has a bidding code which is determined by the depth and spacing of each cut it's different for every key manufacturer even style of key and it's dependent on the type of lock the key was made for but here's the thing if you've got a little bit of knowledge about Keys you could technically sight read a key and then make it that way if you look at the profile of a key each Valley or cut represents where a pin will fall into when it's inserted into the lock by counting the cut beds the key will tell you the number of cuts needed for the bidding code and now you can start making an educated guess for the actual code itself let's say you have a key that has six cuts on each side if you look closely you can see one of the cuts is almost touching the beveled edge of the key so we'll assume that's the deepest cut say it's .035 inches which would correlate to 6 for the bidding code the bidding code is what makes your individual key unique to others of the same brand and model and it's really the only info a locksmith needs to reproduce your key and that's because most lock Smith have a cutting machine that has a database with the depth as well as the spacing for each car out there which is kept secret for very obvious reasons but sight reading a key is a bit of a key smithing Legend so what if we go approach a locksmith and see if you can reproduce a key with the bidding code alone and up the stakes this is what I'll be wearing hey I lost my key for my car I have a 1994 Mazda Miata they gave me the bidding bidding code can I give you the bidding code are the bidding code yeah yeah is that something I can give you unfortunately okay so no respectable locksmith is going to cut a key for you with just this code you need identification of VIN number proof of ownership etc etc but honestly respectability aside how secretive could this depth and spacing info be it turns out not very wow because another free AI powered software was able to tell me oh okay now I think chat GPT is catching on because when I asked it for other cars information it wouldn't tell me and to be honest that's actually probably a good thing but I also found another website which gives you access to their database which gives you their depth and spacing information on any key you can think of a thief would definitely need a lot more knowledge of keys to make this information useful but theoretically it's possible now here's the thing this all sounds pretty easy on paper but it starts getting much harder when you start using newer keys keys like this Sidewinder for example which are found in a lot of Honda cars and obviously this isn't going to work with any sort of Chip key or immobilizer system a chip key or transponder key like this one is one of the best defenses against a thief they work by sending out a low level radio frequency from a small chip inside your car key to receiver in the ignition cylinder that signal contains a unique code that is programmed from the factory and if your car doesn't detect that exact signal your car will never start nowadays most cars are going to use the transponder Key System but you'd be surprised how many cars on the road right now don't have an immobilizer like the one that we stole in a video a few months back see a boy's application we're stealing a whole bunch of cars on this channel now you might be thinking who cares if I posted a picture of my Kia online my car is still behind my nice fancy gate or inside my garage well there's actually an off-the-shelf product you can get for 200 bucks a thief can hack into your garage system just like this booing you can also do stuff like this and go who's interfering what happened why are you laughing wait wait check the plug I just put this in yesterday okay sorry all right thank you but they can also read and emulate radio frequencies to open garage doors there are even some custom firmware updates you can use online for free that allows you to transmit frequencies that are technically illegal in the United States so all this has been theoretical so far what I want to know is can I actually steal someone's car based off of the information I got from a single post on their social media so our producers have rented out a three million dollar house somewhere here in Los Angeles where Jimmy has stashed The Money Pit Miata and I have to go find out where he is and steal the car right out from under him without him even knowing based off of information from a single photo okay so first things first I gotta find out where Jimmy is now like a bozo he tagged that he's in Beverly Hills not the exact location but I know round about where he's going to be so I think what I'm going to do is take this image run it through a reverse Google image search to see if maybe some images of this house pop up online part of the image that I want to search for popping up with Jimmy's hat and the Miata and all this other stuff but what I really want is just this house oh there we go is that it that's it oh holy crap boom there it is Beverly Hills California busted Jimmy I found you baby okay so that was actually pretty easy kind of scary how easy it was and maybe it's because this is a rental house and so there's more information of it online but I've tried it with a bunch of other houses just for fun and it picked some of those up too so who's to say all I know is that you probably shouldn't post pictures of your house online either because some psycho like me could find it okay so now that we have an address let's go give Jimmy a little visit big announcement for a little car stocky the tiny car from donut is back in stock at stockycars.com limited quantities of this run but while you're at stockycars.com subscribe to the newsletter and follow stocky on all social media to be up to date on new color drops and new models stocky the tiny carbide donut okay I'm in my top secret Thief vehicle pretty sure I'm outside Jimmy's house so now it's just a waiting game I'm gonna wait for him to come by and then I'm going to record the gate code when he goes to open it don't do this at home do we have any food perfect all right open the gate you little idiot got him such a beautiful day God I love my Priceless sports car in the garage safe and tucked away no one will be able to steal it uh-uh Oh Henry Henry what are we having for dinner tonight later Jimmy you freaking idiot foreign okay look guys this all started because we posed this hypothetical question and it turns out yes you can now are thieves gonna be stealing cars this way probably not thieves are pretty lazy and they could steal plenty of cars with much less work and do it the old-fashioned way but at the end of the day we did do this we got all of this information online using free tools that are only going to get better and easier to use as time goes on so now that you have this information use it for good protect yourself use a key immobilizer system put air tags on your car don't go off and use it to go steal cars that'd be bad use it to protect your Grandma thank you guys so much for watching this everything else at donut follow us on donut at donut media follow me at Jeremiah Burton till next week bye