Hyundai to hold software-upgrade clinics across the US for vehicles targeted by thieves

NEW YORK (AP) — A sharp uptick in thefts of Hyundais and Kias over the past two years has been linked to viral videos posted to TikTok and other social media platforms that teach people how to exploit a security vulnerability to steal the cars. Police and others say despite voluntary fixes from the automakers, waves of thefts have continued, illustrating the lingering effects of dangerous content that gains traction with teens looking to go viral. Police departments are frazzled, attorneys generals have urged federal intervention and cities and consumers have resorted to lawsuits to hold car companies accountable. Still, some point the finger at social media platforms unable to remove content at the breakneck speed it appears.

NEW YORK (AP) — Jonnifer Neal’s Kia was stolen twice in one day — first from in front of her Chicago home and later from outside the mechanic shop where she took it to get fixed.

But Neal’s ordeal didn’t end there. After her car was recovered a month later, she was stopped by police twice coming home from work because a police error caused the Optima to remain listed as stolen. The same error resulted in officers waking her up at 3 a.m. another night. On yet another occasion, a swarm of officers pulled her over as she was traveling to Mississippi, handcuffing and placing her in the back of a cruiser for more than an hour.

The Kia now sits in her garage.

“It’s been a few months, but honestly I’m still nervous,” Neal said. “I drive that car maybe once in a blue moon and I loved that car.”

Neal’s story is one of thousands from Kia and Hyundai owners across the country whose cars were stolen or damaged in the past two years.

The sharp uptick has been linked to viral videos, posted to TikTok and other social media platforms, teaching people how to start the cars with USB cables and exploit a security vulnerability in some models sold in the U.S. without engine immobilizers, a standard feature on most cars since the 1990s preventing the engine from starting unless the key is present.

But unlike some social media-driven trends that seemingly disappear just as police get a handle on them, the car thefts have continued. Hyundai has tried to work with TikTok and other platforms to remove the videos, but as new ones surface fresh waves of thefts occur, illustrating the lingering effects of dangerous content that gains traction with teens looking for ways to go viral.

It’s a phenomenon known as performance crime. Police departments in a dozen cities have said it factors into an increase they’ve seen in juveniles arrested or charged with car thefts. Still, criminology experts caution that the role teens are playing in the theft increases — which began during the pandemic and aren’t limited to Kia and Hyundai — may be artificially inflated because teenagers inexperienced at crime are more likely to be caught.

Attorneys general from 17 states have called on federal regulators to issue a mandatory recall, arguing the voluntary software fixes issued by the companies aren’t enough. Multiple cities including Baltimore, Milwaukee and New York have filed or announced plans to join legal action against the automakers, which also are facing class-action and civil lawsuits from consumers like Neal. One such lawsuit was settled for roughly $200 million last week.

The National Highway and Safety Administration blames the trend for at least 14 crashes and eight fatalities, but lawyers suing the carmakers say the number is likely much higher.

Morgan Kornfeind was driving to a yoga class in Portland, Oregon, at the end of March when a man in a stolen Kia barreled into her as he drove the wrong way while fleeing police. The 25-year-old suffered lacerations, broken bones and extensive injuries to her leg. She needed surgery and attends multiple medical appointments every week.

“I’m unable to work my job that I love dearly. I’m unable to practice yoga or walk my dogs. I’ve missed planned trips with friends because of my ongoing rehab. The idea of ever driving again causes me great distress,” she wrote in a statement.

Earlier this month in Milwaukee, a stolen Kia collided with a school bus, leaving a 15-year-old who was hanging out the window in critical condition. Police later arrested four 14-year-olds, one of whom allegedly was driving.

Many of the calls for accountability have been directed at the automakers. MLG Attorneys at Law, a California law firm specializing in automotive defect lawsuits, has received more than 4,000 inquiries from victims like Kornfeind.

“And the amazing thing is it’s not slowing down,” said Randy Shrewsberry, MLG chief strategy officer.

But some police departments, victims and the automakers also point the finger at social media platforms. Videos posted on YouTube in recent weeks show people breaking into various cars or using a USB cable to hotwire cars. The company removed the videos when notified by The Associated Press.

YouTube removed videos depicting what’s known as the “Kia Challenge” in recent months, spokesperson Elena Hernandez said in a statement, while stressing the company considers context when making those decisions.

“We might allow some videos if they’re meant to be educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic,” Hernandez wrote.

In a statement, a TikTok spokesperson pushed back on assertions that many of the dangerous challenges mentioned in news reports had reached mass popularity on the platform.

“There is no evidence any of these challenges ever ‘trended’ on TikTok, and there is a clear documented history that many challenges falsely associated with TikTok pre-date the platform entirely,” TikTok spokesperson Ben Rathe said.

Hany Farid, who stepped down in January from TikTok’s U.S. content advisory council because he felt unable to affect change, said TikTok tends to be defensive when criticized for its content moderation practices. He acknowledged the challenge of knowing where some trends originate because content moves quickly between platforms.

“It’s very much a Whack-A-Mole problem,” said Farid, a digital forensics expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “Because these platforms were not designed to be safe for kids, or for anybody.”

TikTok’s enforcement report from the last three months of 2022 showed 5% of the videos the company removed were due to dangerous acts and challenges, with 82% removed within 24 hours.

Like many social platforms, TikTok screens content with a combination of artificial intelligence and human moderators who try to catch whatever AI might miss. A spokesperson said it’s easier for technology to spot certain violations, like nudity, than things like teens breaking into cars. The human moderators are a second level of screening when content is questionable.

Users also sometimes subvert the platform’s controls by misspelling or changing words in hashtags. Some see that as a loophole deserving attention. TikTok says it monitors misspellings and touted the content being forced away from mainstream hashtags as a success.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, did not reply to a request for comment on how it screens for similar videos.

While the Kia Challenge is the social media crime trend of the moment, it’s not the first. And, experts say, it’s not indicative of social media creating a paradigm shift in criminal activity.

In LaGrange, Georgia, a city of about 31,000 people close to the Alabama border, before the Kia Challenge the police dealt with fallout from the “Orbeez Challenge,” which directed people to use toy or airsoft guns to shoot small, gel-filled balls called Orbeez at strangers or friends. Lt. Mark Cavender said officers were alarmed when they saw middle schoolers using toy guns painted black to look like real weapons, immediately putting out warnings to stop.

Michael Scott, director of the Problem-Oriented Policing Center at Arizona State University, said social media hasn’t completely changed crime.

“Social media seems to be a radically new thing, but the only new things are the speed and the breadth,” Scott said.

There are also plenty of examples of trends in criminal activity spreading before social media existed as it does now. Before there were “rob mobs” there was “wilding” in the 1980s, in which groups of people gathered in public to cause chaos, vandalize or steal property. And before the Kia Challenge, there were groups of teens in the 1990s who figured out they could steal General Motors vehicles using a screwdriver.

Scott, who was an officer in the St. Louis Police Department at the time, said the carmaker was slow to act when officers noticed the uptick in their cars being stolen.

“Even without social media, that technique spread around the country,” he said. “What social media changed, was it sped up the process. Before, you had to know or meet someone who had figured out that all you needed was a screwdriver.”

UNDATED (AP)- Nearly three months ago, Hyundai and Kia unveiled software that was designed to thwart an epidemic of thefts of their vehicles, caused by a security flaw that was exposed on TikTok and other social media sites.

So far, it hasn’t solved the problem. Across the country, thieves are still driving off with the vehicles at an alarming rate.

Data from seven U.S. cities gathered by The Associated Press shows that the number of Hyundai and Kia thefts is still growing despite the companies’ efforts to fix the glitch, which makes 8.3 million vehicles relatively easy targets for thieves.

From Minneapolis, Cleveland and St. Louis to New York, Seattle, Atlanta and Grand Rapids, Michigan, police have reported substantial year-over-year increases in Hyundai and Kia theft reports through April. An eighth city, Denver, which was hit early by the theft outbreak, reported a 23% decline from 2022 levels but still endured a high number of thefts.

So far this year, Minneapolis police have received 1,899 Kia and Hyundai theft reports, nearly 18 times the number for the same period in 2022.

“The scope of the problem is only expanding and is exponentially worse than it has been in the past,” Brian O’Hara, the police chief of Minneapolis, said in an email. “We have some weeks where nearly as many Kias and Hyundais are stolen in a week as had previously been stolen in a year.”

The most recent nationwide numbers on Hyundai and Kia thefts aren’t yet publicly available. The figures for early 2023, as calculated by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, will be released until later this year. (Hyundai and Kia are part of the same South Korean corporate family.)

Some U.S. cities have reported that 60% or more of their auto theft reports now involve Hyundais or Kias. Videos on TikTok and other sites that illustrate how to start and steal Kia and Hyundai models — using only a screwdriver and a USB cable — have allowed the thefts to spread across the nation since late 2021.

In New York, the Hyundai-Kia theft problem has grown so worrisome that the city held a news conference last last month to offer owners devices that can track their vehicles if they’re stolen. Police there reported 966 Hyundai and Kia thefts as of April 30 — nearly seven times the number in the same period of 2022.

The disturbing theft rate, which authorities nationally have linked to other crimes including at least 14 reported crashes and eight fatalities, has persisted despite the automakers’ unveiling of their anti-theft software campaign in mid-February.

“GLA is driving our crime,” New York Mayor Eric Adams said, using an acronym for grand larceny of autos. “Kia and Hyundai are driving the GLAs.”

Hyundai and Kia have said they’re accelerating their distribution of the software, with Hyundai saying it’s reached 6,000 installations a day. The company says it’s using direct mail, phone calls, digital advertising and social media to try to reach the affected owners.

Ira Gabriel, a spokesman for Hyundai, said the company has tried to remove from social media the instructional videos that show how to steal the cars.

“But as new ones surface,” he said, “there have been additional waves of thefts.”

Kia said in a statement that it began developing and testing the security software last year.

“The process occurred at an accelerated pace and allowed us to begin rolling out the enhanced security software earlier this year in phases,” the company said.

Safety authorities say the companies’ software rollout has been far too slow. Of the 4.5 million Kia vehicles that are eligible for the fix, the automaker says it’s installed the software on about 210,000 — nearly 5%. Kia says it has sent notifications to about 2.8 million of the affected owners and expects to have notified all of them by the end of this month.

For Hyundai, the figure is about 225,000 out of 3.8 million vehicles — roughly 6%. Hyundai said he expects to have contacted all the affected vehicle owners by May 18.

The companies’ affected cars, many of them lower-cost models from the 2011 to early 2022 model years, were not equipped with a theft immobilizer. Such a device contains a computer chip in the key that must be recognized by another chip in the steering column before the engines will start.

Though most automakers have had the chips for years, Hyundai and Kia have lagged behind the industry as a whole in installing them on many models, thereby allowing thieves to exploit the security gap. In the 2015 model year, immobilizers were standard on 96% of other manufacturers’ models but on only 26% of Hyundai and Kia models, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety said.

The automakers’ service campaign to install the software should have been more aggressively pursued, said Michael Brooks, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Auto Safety.

Brooks suggested that if the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had managed a recall of the affected vehicles, it would have stood a better chance of alerting owners to the danger and need to seek a repair.

“Unless people are really following the news,” he said, “they might not know about theft issues.”

Shakira Ellis, a music instructor from Long Beach, California, is among those who hadn’t heard about the thefts — until her 2019 Hyundai Tucson was stolen in front of her home around 4 a.m. on April 25. The car, which contained some of her musical instruments, hasn’t turned up.

Ellis, 26, said her Tucson lacked the immobilizer, and she hadn’t been informed of Hyundai’s campaign to distribute the software fix. If she had, Ellis said, she would have immediately taken it in to be fixed. She feels Hyundai should provide her with a new car to replace her stolen vehicle,

“I feel like I should be compensated,” she said. “It’s been ruined because it’s defective. And people know. It’s a target.”

Even with a recall, not everyone takes an affected car to a dealer to be fixed. Recall completion rates, Brooks said, average only around 60% of owners.

Some of the vehicles, about 15% in Hyundai’s case, can’t be fixed with software. But both Hyundai and Kia say they’ll pay for anti-theft devices for those owners.

In Minneapolis and other cities, police say teenagers, some of them too young to have a driver’s license, have exploited the vulnerability. Often they crash or are involved in other crimes. The Minneapolis police recorded 209 cases of Hyundais or Kias being involved in hit-and-run injury crashes, and they’re investigating 169 reports that Kias or Hyundais were used in other crimes.

Multiple cities, including St. Louis, Cleveland, Milwaukee and Seattle, have sued the automakers, accusing them of failing to install industry-standard anti-theft devices and placing an undue burden on city services.

“Kia and Hyundai prioritized profit over people by not installing engine immobilizers in these vehicles,” Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb said in announcing his city’s lawsuit.

O’Hara, the Minneapolis police chief, said the thefts are a “public safety crisis” that is overwhelming communities.

“Juveniles are joyriding in these stolen models, and when they are caught by police, he said, they’re rarely held accountable for their behavior” by the courts and youth corrections systems.

That can lead to more serious crimes, he said, “until they get very seriously injured or killed themselves.”