The owner of a trucking company in China landed in hot water with law enforcement after she admitted to installing GPS tracking devices on police cars in her area to help her trucks avoid them.

A woman in Xiangyang, Hubei province can consider herself lucky to have been slapped with eight days of administrative detention and a 500 yuan ($70) fine for a very serious crime – tracking the movements of police cars with the help of hidden GPS devices. Her scheme was accidentally discovered during a routine checkup when the traffic law enforcement brigade in Xiangyang found a mysterious black box attached to the chassis of one of their patrol cars. Further inspection revealed that the box contained a GPS tracker, which was subsequently found on six of the brigade’s 11 vehicles. By following the trail of the SIM cards associated with the tracking devices, authorities were able to find the culprit, a local woman named Zhu who admitted to tracking the movements of the police cars.

Photo: Matt Popovich/Unsplash

As the owner of a trucking fleet, Zhu came up with the idea of tracking local traffic patrol vehicles in order to increase her drivers’ chances of avoiding being pulled over and potentially fined. She admitted to carrying out the installation of the GPS trackers herself, by taking advantage of the police vehicles’ late-night parking at a Xiangzhou station.

Zhu bought six magnetic GPS trackers online for 350 yuan in June of last year and used them to track the cars via an app on her phone until late last month. She was thus able to pinpoint the locations of traffic police cars and alert her drivers to avoid them.

Such bold actions would be considered serious crimes in the Western world, but according to China Daily, Zhu only received an eith-day administrative detention and a 500 yuan fine, which sounds disproportionately trivial…