How vehicles are broken up for parts or sent abroad
STEALING a car electronically means the thief will have started it without the owner’s key.
Once inside, the criminal drives to a busy car park or respectable neighbourhood with on-street parking.
The car will stay there for up to a week ‘soaking’ – slang for waiting to see if the vehicle is tracked by the police. After it’s been safely ‘soaked’, it is usually then taken to an illegal ‘chop shop’, where cars are broken up for parts.
As well as driving the cars themselves, thieves often brazenly transport stolen vehicles using recovery tow-trucks. One police officer at a recent summit held to tackle car crime admitted: ‘The police almost never intercept recovery trucks because we all presume they’re legitimately doing their job.’
There are dozens of chop shops across Britain, but particular hotspots include Essex, Greater Manchester and Birmingham.
Stolen cars are dismantled, with the individual parts sold for profit at auction and on sites including Amazon and eBay. Chop shops can also serve to create a new identity for vehicles that are sold on.
Cars not taken to chop shops, especially BMWs and Mercedes, are driven straight to areas close to ferry ports where they will ‘soak’ for a couple of days, before criminals waiting at the ports see that they are loaded into ferry containers.
Ports most frequently used to ship vehicles abroad are Tilbury in Essex, Southampton and Portsmouth. Other lesser-known points of exit include Hull, and Grangemouth and Cairnryan in Scotland.
Andy Barrs, head of police liaison at Tracker, a stolen vehicle recovery service that works with police forces, said it was difficult for police to intercept every shipping container.
‘Due to limited resources, the NCA and police forces are only skimming the surface,’ he said. ‘I’d say they only manage to check 1 per cent of what’s going out.’
He added: ‘Beyond that, cars in ferry containers are very well hidden. We’ve seen Range Rovers, big four-wheel drives which have been completely hidden by a wall of washing machines in front of them’.
Once at sea, the stolen vehicles follow routes across the world, including down to Africa where they have been tracked as far as Nairobi and the Congo.
Mr Barrs said: ‘We’ve tracked cars from France, to Germany, across Europe, then Turkey, then Northern Cyprus, before they disappear off the radar. And cars from the UK can travel across Europe through Schengen borders into Eastern Europe.
‘There, there are unmanned borders through the forests and into places like the Balkan states.’
Resourceful thieves also forge paperwork to steal rental cars and transport them off the British mainland via passenger ferries.
Peter Thompson, of CanTrack Global, said: ‘You’ve got people who steal the cars, you’ve got people who remove technology. Most low-level people, the ones stealing them, get anywhere between £300 to £3,000.
‘If it’s serious enough to export and have ways out of the country, that is when it will qualify as a serious organised crime gang … very dangerous and powerful organisations’.
‘Dangerous and powerful’