GPS trackers on drugs

I was in my office this afternoon and in walked a private investigator, with whom I do a quite a bit of data forensics and technical intelligence work. I knew something was up as he had dollar signs in his eyes. When I'm not working with him and his partner on marital infidelity cases or sniffing out a network for days on end looking for evidence of industrial espionage, he's usually cooking up some 'get rich quick' scheme. He's not a scammer - he just wants to hit a big payday. Who doesn't, right?


I talk with him a bit and he's wanting to know a little bit about GPS trackers. That is really his partner's forte, but as he was out installing micro cameras I guess I would do in his absence. Actually, even when he is around I still get the occasional email, call, or visit (if it is REALLY important).


This PI is always looking to bid on jobs and today was no different. Inside a manila folder was two sheets of paper. One was a printed detail of a GPS/GSM tracking device that used telephone SIM cards. Another was an email with a bid proposal from an anonymous 'Fortune 500' client.


Apparently this large client was a chain pharmacy who was interested in devices that could be placed in drug bottles, so that when they were stolen they could be traced and the perpetrators dealt with accordingly. When he vocalized this request, the first thing out of my mouth was "somebody has been watching too much television". Visions flooded my mind of some big business know nothing manager type who has seen a few episodes of 24, or perhaps even Spooks (my favorite) and said, "Hey, we can do that too!" The company did specify that they wanted the device to be able to be placed in a bottle roughly the size of a 100 count Advil bottle. You know, something the size of a grain of rice that would give global positioning updates every 100 milliseconds or so. Yeah.


Well they were not wanting to protect their ibuprofen, obviously. They want to deploy these trackers into their stock of hard and often stolen narcotics. It's a plan that makes sense, at least on the surface and at least to someone who has no clue about how GPS technology works other than what they've seen in the movies or on television. Yes, pharmacies get broken into quite a lot. There's an independent one right down the road from me that used to get broken into all the time, but I believe that's stopped for the most part. I wonder if they bought GPS trackers? No, most likely they did the sane, intelligent, and cost effective thing by simply locking up their narcotics.


Did I mention there was a $1M budget for this project? Amazing. Needless to say, among much laughter I tried to explain to this guy that there's no way you can stuff a tracking device that is 60x40x15mm into such a small bottle without it being abundantly obvious, even to a dope fiend. I think I got the point across to him, but now I'm just curious if the client will get it too.