Plant tracking specialist AMI Group works closely with clients and police forces all around the country to help recover stolen plant and agricultural machinery. In the company’s latest recovery, a JCB 2CX Airmaster Backhoe Loader worth £40,000 was stolen from a construction site in Bolton, Greater Manchester, and was recovered within 90 minutes of notification after being found on a travellers’ site some 35 miles away.
The owner of the JCB realised that the machine had been stolen upon arrival at the site in Hardy Mill Road, Bolton, in the morning. They immediately notified AMI Group, as fortunately the 2CX Airmaster had been fitted with an AMI Nexis GPS (Global Positioning System) tracking system to help protect it against theft. AMI’s monitoring station immediately logged onto the company’s web-based Nexis software portal and was able to utilise the very latest Google mapping and GPS positional information to establish the exact time of theft, the route taken by the thieves and its current destination.
From Google mapping, AMI’s monitoring station could see that the stolen machine had been taken to a travellers’ site in Fogg Lane, Little Lever, Bolton, and was hidden in a far corner of the site. AMI Group advised the customer that they needed to act quickly and speed was of the essence, as it was likely that the machine would be transported elsewhere. The Police were notified and the customer headed to the GPS location, where the stolen JCB was found just 90 minutes after the customer notified AMI Group that it had been stolen.
Peter Stockton, Operations Director at AMI Group said: “This was a high value machine and using the AMI Nexis data platform we could track the exact route that the thieves had taken. We knew that the Backhoe Loader had been transported 35 miles away and we could pinpoint to our customer its exact location on the travellers’ site, as it was a large site with multiple caravans, mobile homes and vehicles. One distinct advantage of our tracking devices is that they are so small and covert, they can be very well hidden on plant machinery and thieves simply don’t realise they are there.”
