Why the Kia Boys Thefts Could Still Haunt Los Angeles in 2042

Los Angeles car theft data suggest thieves had cracked the Hyundai and Kia vulnerability more than a year before the “Kia Boys” trend ever went viral on TikTok. Weekly records show Hyundai Sonata thefts across the city started climbing sharply in February 2021, while the meme didn’t reach the national mainstream until the summer of 2022. A new study found something that flips the usual assumption on its head: spikes in LA Sonata thefts predicted national Google searches for “Kia Boys,” not the other way around.

Researchers from UCLA, Boston College, USC, and the consulting firm Justice & Security Strategies dug into Los Angeles Police Department theft records going back to 2000 to pin down when the city’s car thieves likely discovered the weakness, and how much credit or blame social media really deserves.

Writing in the International Journal of Forecasting, the team reframes one of the decade’s most talked-about crime stories. Viral videos may have poured fuel on the fire, but in Los Angeles the fire was already burning, lit by ordinary word of mouth during the chaos of the pandemic.

A Hyundai and Kia Flaw Hiding in Plain Sight

Roots of the problem go back more than a decade. Beginning with the 2011 model year, Hyundai and Kia sold 11 Hyundai models and nine Kia models in the U.S. without engine immobilizers, the anti-theft chips that stop a car from starting unless the correct key is present. On these vehicles, the exposed ignition switch was a small metal post shaped almost exactly like the female end of a USB-B cable, which made the cars easy to start with little more than a phone charger. Hyundai and Kia didn’t close the gap until the 2022 model year.

For nearly a decade, casual thieves barely touched the flaw. Local reporting suggests it first surfaced in Milwaukee around mid-2020, and the oldest surviving “Kia Boys” YouTube video dates to June 5, 2021, a full year before national news coverage pushed the trend into the mainstream in June 2022.

Los Angeles Cracked the ‘Kia Boys’ Trick First

Here’s where Los Angeles stands apart. Sonata thefts in the city jumped in February 2021 and hit 94 in a single week that April, long before most Americans had heard the phrase “Kia Boys.” Using a statistical test of whether one trend helps predict another, the researchers found that rising Sonata thefts in LA came first and national searches for “Kia Boys” followed, with no evidence that the searches predicted the thefts.

That timing points away from TikTok. It fits a picture of Los Angeles thieves discovering the trick on their own during the disruption of COVID-19 lockdowns, with word of the flaw then spreading largely offline, person to person, well before the viral clips took off.

By the time the trend peaked online in the summer of 2022, the damage in Los Angeles was already done. Sonata thefts had climbed from a pre-pandemic average near 37 a week to a single-week high of 134 in August 2022, then settled into a new baseline of roughly 91 a week. Whatever extra push social media added had already been folded into ordinary, offline theft patterns.

Kia Boys’ Damage Could Linger Until 2042

To see what comes next, the team looked backward. They studied two cars that were once notoriously easy to steal before automakers added anti-theft chips: the Honda Civic, fixed in 2001, and the Toyota Camry, fixed in 1992. In both cases, the vulnerable older models stayed popular with thieves for 20 to 30 years after the fix, simply because those cars kept circulating in the used-car market until they were finally scrapped.

Applied to Hyundai Sonatas, that pattern suggests thefts of the vulnerable 2011–2019 models peaked around 2024 and will stay elevated until about 2042, fading to negligible levels only between 2043 and 2050. All told, the model projects nearly 16,000 thefts of vulnerable Sonatas between 2024 and 2042.

Not every neighborhood will feel it equally. In wealthier areas, owners tend to trade in older cars quickly, so the risk fades fast. In lower-income neighborhoods, vulnerable used cars keep changing hands, meaning theft hotspots will linger and gradually shift toward poorer parts of Los Angeles, a migration researchers previously observed in Vancouver, British Columbia, between 2003 and 2013.

Recent legal action could soften the blow. A 2022 class-action lawsuit already offers free security software updates, and a multi-state settlement announced in December 2025 will require Hyundai and Kia to replace ignition cylinders in affected cars. If manufacturers finish those recalls at typical historical rates, the study estimates total thefts of vulnerable Sonatas could be cut nearly in half, though the long tail of elevated risk would shrink by only about a year.

Bigger Lesson Behind the ‘Kia Boys’ Saga

For the authors, the real story isn’t TikTok. It’s basic car-safety regulation. Unlike the UK and Australia, U.S. law never required automakers to build in engine immobilizers as standard equipment, leaving a gap that an opportunistic crime market was bound to find.

Social media gave the “Kia Boys” their name and their reach, but Los Angeles proves the thefts didn’t need a hashtag to spread. Requiring engine immobilizers years earlier could have prevented much of what followed.