Thieves targeting work vans

Large increase in the number of break-ins of vehicles belonging to skilled manual workers

Mar 16, 2015

Thieves are targeting vans belonging to contractors, construction workers and skilled manual workers. According to insurers Gjensidige and Topdanmark, work vans packed with tools are prime targets for opportunistic crooks.

“It does not matter whether the vans are parked at a home address or at a business or a workplace,” Thomas Berg, the underwriting director at Gjensidige Nordic, told the contractor’s newspaper Licitationen. “If there is a craftsman’s name on the vehicle, it indicates to thieves that it is filled with tools.”

Thieves doing recon
Berg revealed that he had examined reports that showed thieves hit six or seven vans in the same area on the same night.

“It is obvious to me that they have been casing the area and know where the vans will be sitting,” he said.

Topdanmark has seen an increase of 13 percent in the number of break-ins: from 578 reports in 2012 to 652 in 2014.

“The skilled manual workers who are most vulnerable are typically electricians, pipe fitters, carpenters and painters," Topdanmark’s head of industrial insurance, Lars Hem Simonsen, told Licitationen.

Topdanmark experienced a 70 percent increase in thefts from construction vans from 170 break-ins in 2012 to 289 in 2014.