Stolen trucks tracked down to Montreal parking garage

CORNWALL Despite being stolen Sunday, Todd Thompson’s flashy red 2017 Toyota Tacoma truck will soon be back in his driveway.

The truck was stolen at about 9 p.m., shortly before Thompson took out the weekly recycling to the end of the driveway.

Thompson believes the thieves rolled the truck to the street before taking off.

“We were home and we didn’t hear anything, we didn’t hear the truck being started,” he said.

It’s believed that the thieves, who have yet to be caught, reprogrammed the truck’s keyless push start ignition. Keyless ignition systems come with a fob that can be tucked away anywhere close to the receiver inside the vehicle. The fob transmits a low-frequency signal to the vehicle’s computer system, which validates the correct signal has been sent and allows the owner to push a button to start the engine.

Thompson said he and his wife had the two fobs at the time of the theft. “They (the thieves) managed to block our fobs out and reprogram the system to be able to start the truck themselves.”

Cornwall police reached out to the OPP and the Sûreté du Québec. Police told Thompson the chances were slim that his truck would be found. “They told me it was probably already gone.”

But, unknown to Thompson, another Toyota Tacoma had been stolen minutes after his truck disappeared. The 2020 model possessed one feature Thompson’s truck didn’t — a built-in GPS tracking device.

“It’s because of that tracking device that we were eventually able to find the trucks,” Thompson said.

Three hours after his truck had been stolen, Thompson received a phone call he didn’t expect to get.

A police officer “told me he had good news for me,” said Thompson. “He told me that they had found my truck.”

The two Tacomas, along with a Toyota 4Runner, were found in the Montreal Forum mall’s parking garage. All three were neatly parked on the third storey of the garage.

The Cornwall thefts were similar to the method used by car thief rings broken up last month.

In December, a joint police task force arrested 20 Montreal residents and recovered 97 stolen cars.

The car theft gangs had allegedly stolen an estimated 500 vehicles, 106 of them from Ottawa and hundreds more from Eastern Ontario and the Toronto and Montreal areas.

Almost all of the vehicles were stolen using the same technique: First, the thief manually breaks through the locked door and then connects a computer application to the port that a mechanic normally uses to diagnose possible problems. This allows the car’s computer to be reprogrammed, making it forget the key fob and recognize a new one instead.

The high-end cars were whisked off to the Port of Montreal, loaded into containers, and shipped to the Middle East and Africa, where these models are not available, OPP Supt. Bryan MacKillop said.

The thieves favoured Toyota Highlanders and 4Runners, the Lexus RX 350, with some Honda SUVs and Ford F-series trucks as well, he said. They are worth as much as $100,000 in Canada, but may sell for twice that in Africa.

Police laid 350 criminal charges related to the thefts, and expect to lay drug charges.