Thieves in Madrid used a laptop to wirelessly hack into footballer (that's "soccer player" to us Yanks) David Beckham' BMW X5 and make off with it. Twice, as a matter of fact, in the past year.

Here's how this high-tech car thievery works: Most high-end cars (actually, most current-model cars) have remote locking and unlocking. Some go a step further with a feature called "keyless go," which allows the car to start when the key is in the proximity of the car—or when the car gets a wireless signal indicating the key is nearby. So a thief can pull up alongside a desirable car with a laptop and a wireless transmitter, and broadcast thousands of key codes, until one of them unlocks and then starts the car. It takes about 20 minutes to run through all the possible codes, police say.

Beckham, the world's second-highest-paid soccer player, lost his car in a Madrid shopping center where he was lunching with his two sons. (Thieves like shopping centers because it's easy to find a high-end car and make entry at their leisure.) Beckham had lost another BMW six months earlier in a Madrid parking garage.

England's The Mercury reported Beckham is fourth player on the Real Madrid soccer club to have his car stolen in the past three years, along with Zinedine Zidane, Luis Figo, and Roberto Carlos. At least in Beckham's case, the theft was probably organized by a high-tech ring that grabs cars and resells them in Eastern Europe. His car is especially valuable, reportedly, because it has "armor plating," layers of Kevlar fiber in the doors and extra-thick glass to stop garden-variety carjackings in which the thieves have handguns but no serious weapons.

Could automakers prevent this kind of theft? Most likely. As with online passwords that lock you out for a couple minutes after three bad logon attempts, automakers might disable the car after a dozen bad attempts within 5 minutes, with a 15-minute cooling off period, but still allow the rightful owner immediate access with the physical key.

The Star reported that Audi offered to replace Beckham's Bimmer with a new Audi Q7SUV "worth an estimated $125,000, for one year, on the condition that he drive it to soccer practice every day." We'd like to see that Q7, because stateside we couldn't option one out for more than $70,000.

This isn't Beckham's first brush with BMW/technology celebrity. In late 2004, his 1996 M3 Evolution convertible, the one he drove while wooing Posh Spice (with difficulty, perhaps, considering the size of the backseat on a BMW cabriolet), was sold on eBay for more than $170,000. The car had 70,000 miles on it, and an intermediary let it go for a reported $20,000 to the eventual reseller. If you haven't seen that story before, just search the phrase "auction it like Beckham" on Google.

To read our review of the Audi Q7, click here.