Police suspect auto thefts linked to organized crime
In the early hours of July 31, Eric Sousa walked out of his Orléans home and saw an empty driveway, which was odd.
He had returned from the family cottage the night before and parked his newly purchased Toyota Tacoma in its usual spot, but now it wasn't there.
“At first I thought somebody had played a joke on me or something, or my wife was in on it,” Sousa said in an interview. “So I went back in and just asked her, `You know where the truck is?' and she had no idea either, she was just as surprised as me. I never thought that with today's modern vehicles it would be so easy for somebody to steal it.”
Sousa's truck had been taken right out of his driveway in suburban Ottawa. It is a crime police say is becoming increasingly common in the city: Thieves are scooping up automobiles, usually Toyota or Lexus sport utility vehicles and trucks, and, investigators believe, funnelling them into an international smuggling operation run by organized criminals.
“The volume is definitely going up and that's been true for a few years,” said Const. Douglas Belanger, who works in the Ottawa Police Service's investigation directorate and has expertise in auto theft.
The OPS has already tallied nearly 150 Toyota and Lexus thefts in 2021, on track to break last year's record of just over 200, most of them taken right from their owners' driveways. Ottawa police responded to 815 motor-vehicle thefts of all makes in 2020, with a 16-per-cent clearance rate, down from the 891 thefts reported in 2019, though the clearance rate for that year was slightly higher, at 18 per cent.
The thefts are easy, Belanger said, because the computers in modern vehicles can be exploited. Thieves amplify the signal of a key fob left inside a home, or they can plug directly into a car's on-board diagnostics port and reprogram the vehicle — hacking it, basically, so that it responds to a thief 's key and not the owner's.
This is likely what happened with Sousa's Tacoma. When he reviewed his security footage after the theft, he saw his car unlock. Then two people walked up to the car and one got in. About a minute later, the truck pulled out of the driveway.
Usually, that's the last an owner sees of their vehicle. Most of the trucks and SUVs taken in Ottawa are bound for the port in Montreal, where they will be shipped to overseas markets, Belanger said. International clients value the most commonly stolen cars, the Toyotas and the Lexus, for their reliability, their luxury options, and especially the ease with which they can be maintained and repaired anywhere in the world.
It's hard to investigate such thefts because the vehicles are moved and shipped so quickly.
“This, by its very nature, is multi-jurisdictional, not just within the province but between provinces and then with the export, of course, you've got the international angle,” Belanger said. “The ability for any law-enforcement agency to police overseas becomes really time-consuming and very limited in terms of what we're able to do.”
There is also a view among some law enforcement officials and in the general public that auto theft is a simple property crime, and as such doesn't warrant the same investigative resources as violent crimes. The OPS used to have an organized auto-theft investigations division, Belanger said, but it was disbanded in 2017. Now, investigators who look into stolen cars also work on a much wider variety of crimes.
But vehicle theft is often more than just a simple robbery. The scale and the logistics necessary to co-ordinate transporting hundreds of stolen vehicles across provincial lines and then onto freight vessels indicate it's an important source of income for organized criminals.
“The revenue-generating potential for organized crime is in the multimillions of dollars,” Belanger said, “and ultimately that cost gets passed on in a certain degree to the public, whether it's through insurance costs, replacement costs, or enforcement costs.”
Sousa's truck, it would appear, was headed for the same fate as the hundreds of other vehicles taken in Ottawa: It was being driven down backroads to Montreal, likely bound for a shipping container and an international customer.
But before it got there, an OPP officer pulled it over in Hawkesbury, believing that an impaired driver was behind the wheel. A check of the vehicle revealed it had been reported stolen two days earlier in Ottawa.
A detective called Sousa and told him his truck had been found.
His keys no longer work on it and he has yet to get it back because it is being inspected for hidden damage, but it appears to be in fine shape, and the camping gear and belongings that the family had left in the truck are all accounted for. The only things missing are a pair of sunglasses and the memory card from Sousa's dashcam.
Now, Sousa says he'll invest in anti-theft devices, like a faraday box — a special container that prevents thieves from picking up the signal from a modern car key.
“It could have been a lot worse,” he said. “It turned out well.”
The ability for any lawenforcement agency to police overseas becomes really time-consuming and very limited.