Cloned in a couple of clicks
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www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,588-957438,00.html
Cloned in a couple of clicks
by nicholas rufford of the sunday times
Want a hot motor, squire? Then just look in the classified ads. Police are warning of a new scam that makes it much easier for thieves to disguise stolen cars as genuine.
Criminal gangs use the internet to help them match the stolen motor with a similar car sitting in a scrapyard thousands of miles away. They create a new identity for the vehicle that can fool even professionals. The technique is so straightforward that last week a Sunday Times journalist was able to obtain all the details needed to clone a BMW and a Mercedes with just a few mouse clicks and a brief e-mail exchange.
The “cloned” cars appear to have all the right documentation from the DVLA and the cars’ histories seem to check out. Buyers realise their car is stolen only when police swoop and take the vehicle away.
“The worst part of my job is having to knock on someone’s door to tell them that the Mercedes or Audi they’ve just paid £30,000 for is stolen and that they’ll have to give it back,” said Detective Inspector Steve Lodge, of Scotland Yard’s stolen motor vehicle unit.
Any thief will admit that actually taking away a car is the easy part of the crime; the hard part is disguising it and selling it on. Today most second-hand buyers have learnt to ask to see a log book and inspect the car’s vehicle identification number (VIN), so the thieves have had to get cleverer.
Their new best friends are the auto-salvage websites that have grown up in America to enable drivers who have written off their cars to sell them on for scrap or parts. A British car thief who has stolen a luxury car, or has an order to steal a particular model, will log on and use the websites to find an identical model.
The thief then either buys the wreck for a few hundred dollars simply to obtain its documents, or just asks for details of registration, previous owner and VIN number.
The wreck itself seldom leaves the scrapyard but the crook now has enough data to apply to the DVLA for a British registration number and log book, as would any private buyer importing a legitimate car. The increase in the number of privately imported vehicles has created the ideal cover for such a crime. This type of scam was possible before the internet, but finding an identical car to clone was much harder.
Once the official documentation, including the V5 registration document, has been provided by the DVLA, the thief must remove all physical trace of the stolen vehicle’s original identity. Scotland Yard reports that gangs are now using advanced tools such as plasma cutters to remove the genuine VIN number from the chassis and engine bay, and laser welders to fit the newly acquired VIN number. Resprayed, it is almost impossible to tell it has been tampered with. Finally, the old registration plate is switched for the new number issued by the DVLA, and the transformation is complete.
The American car may well be left-hand drive, while the stolen British car is right-hand drive, but police say this difference is rarely spotted and thieves can always claim to have had the car converted.
The Sunday Times carried out a simple experiment to prove how easy cloning has become. We have omitted some details to avoid providing a handy guide to villains. We used the internet to obtain every detail we needed to construct a “clone”, although we stopped short of applying to the DVLA for documentation. On our first attempt, using a salvage website, we contacted the Los Angeles owner of a BMW 325i that had been in a collision. Helpfully, the owner sent us the licence number and VIN by e-mail and even a picture of the wreck.
A second attempt saw us being offered full documentation for a wrecked Mercedes ML320 in an auto salvage yard in Portland, Oregon. By showing how easy it is to pull off the scam, Scotland Yard said The Sunday Times was not revealing anything the thieves did not already know.
The results are clear to see. A multi-storey garage at Chalk Farm, the headquarters of the Yard’s stolen motor squad, resembles a car showroom packed with 150 cars — most of them expensive marques such as Porsche, Audi, BMW, even Ferrari. There are at least two similar garages operated by police in Strathclyde and Manchester. “Two or three years ago we would catch a gang that had nicked perhaps 20 or 30 cars,” said Lodge, “but nowadays they are stealing hundreds.”
And as cloning becomes more difficult to spot, so the thieves become more audacious, confident that they can disguise even the most conspicuous of cars. A few months ago police recovered a £140,000 Aston Martin V8 Vantage that an unsuspecting customer bought for £32,500. In another raid they seized three almost-new Ferraris.
To prove they were stolen, the cars had to be treated with paint stripper to expose the fine laser welding around the fake VIN plates. “I felt terrible attacking the paintwork,” said Detective Constable Ian Elliott, “it was like defacing a masterpiece.”
Cloned in a couple of clicks
by nicholas rufford of the sunday times
Want a hot motor, squire? Then just look in the classified ads. Police are warning of a new scam that makes it much easier for thieves to disguise stolen cars as genuine.
Criminal gangs use the internet to help them match the stolen motor with a similar car sitting in a scrapyard thousands of miles away. They create a new identity for the vehicle that can fool even professionals. The technique is so straightforward that last week a Sunday Times journalist was able to obtain all the details needed to clone a BMW and a Mercedes with just a few mouse clicks and a brief e-mail exchange.
The “cloned” cars appear to have all the right documentation from the DVLA and the cars’ histories seem to check out. Buyers realise their car is stolen only when police swoop and take the vehicle away.
“The worst part of my job is having to knock on someone’s door to tell them that the Mercedes or Audi they’ve just paid £30,000 for is stolen and that they’ll have to give it back,” said Detective Inspector Steve Lodge, of Scotland Yard’s stolen motor vehicle unit.
Any thief will admit that actually taking away a car is the easy part of the crime; the hard part is disguising it and selling it on. Today most second-hand buyers have learnt to ask to see a log book and inspect the car’s vehicle identification number (VIN), so the thieves have had to get cleverer.
Their new best friends are the auto-salvage websites that have grown up in America to enable drivers who have written off their cars to sell them on for scrap or parts. A British car thief who has stolen a luxury car, or has an order to steal a particular model, will log on and use the websites to find an identical model.
The thief then either buys the wreck for a few hundred dollars simply to obtain its documents, or just asks for details of registration, previous owner and VIN number.
The wreck itself seldom leaves the scrapyard but the crook now has enough data to apply to the DVLA for a British registration number and log book, as would any private buyer importing a legitimate car. The increase in the number of privately imported vehicles has created the ideal cover for such a crime. This type of scam was possible before the internet, but finding an identical car to clone was much harder.
Once the official documentation, including the V5 registration document, has been provided by the DVLA, the thief must remove all physical trace of the stolen vehicle’s original identity. Scotland Yard reports that gangs are now using advanced tools such as plasma cutters to remove the genuine VIN number from the chassis and engine bay, and laser welders to fit the newly acquired VIN number. Resprayed, it is almost impossible to tell it has been tampered with. Finally, the old registration plate is switched for the new number issued by the DVLA, and the transformation is complete.
The American car may well be left-hand drive, while the stolen British car is right-hand drive, but police say this difference is rarely spotted and thieves can always claim to have had the car converted.
The Sunday Times carried out a simple experiment to prove how easy cloning has become. We have omitted some details to avoid providing a handy guide to villains. We used the internet to obtain every detail we needed to construct a “clone”, although we stopped short of applying to the DVLA for documentation. On our first attempt, using a salvage website, we contacted the Los Angeles owner of a BMW 325i that had been in a collision. Helpfully, the owner sent us the licence number and VIN by e-mail and even a picture of the wreck.
A second attempt saw us being offered full documentation for a wrecked Mercedes ML320 in an auto salvage yard in Portland, Oregon. By showing how easy it is to pull off the scam, Scotland Yard said The Sunday Times was not revealing anything the thieves did not already know.
The results are clear to see. A multi-storey garage at Chalk Farm, the headquarters of the Yard’s stolen motor squad, resembles a car showroom packed with 150 cars — most of them expensive marques such as Porsche, Audi, BMW, even Ferrari. There are at least two similar garages operated by police in Strathclyde and Manchester. “Two or three years ago we would catch a gang that had nicked perhaps 20 or 30 cars,” said Lodge, “but nowadays they are stealing hundreds.”
And as cloning becomes more difficult to spot, so the thieves become more audacious, confident that they can disguise even the most conspicuous of cars. A few months ago police recovered a £140,000 Aston Martin V8 Vantage that an unsuspecting customer bought for £32,500. In another raid they seized three almost-new Ferraris.
To prove they were stolen, the cars had to be treated with paint stripper to expose the fine laser welding around the fake VIN plates. “I felt terrible attacking the paintwork,” said Detective Constable Ian Elliott, “it was like defacing a masterpiece.”
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