UK Police Already Intercepted 50 Shipping Containers Full Of Stolen Luxury Cars This Year

UK Police says it has already intercepted 50 shipping containers full of stolen luxury vehicles and car parts this year.

The unit said it has already recovered $15.2m worth of stolen luxury vehicles this year and has dismantled 15 chop shops.

Says it has recovered and returned luxury cars like Bentley Bentayga, Range Rovers and Rolls-Royce Cullinan to their owners.

The unit says criminals use a device sold online for around £1,300 to unlock and drive away any car in less than 90 seconds.

An Essex-based specialist police unit says it has intensified its efforts to combat criminal organisations that specialises in stealing expensive luxury and sports cars.

Speaking with the Mail, specialist officer PC Paul Gerrish:

“Our work is dedicated to the disruption of organised criminal gangs and we make sure car thieves are never comfortable in Essex.

“We aim to make this a hostile county for car thieves to operate in.

“Our work stretches beyond recovering individual stolen cars and encompasses the wider network of criminality behind each theft.

“Every year, we track down more stolen vehicles, and as we do, we build up a bigger and better intelligence picture.”

In the last few months, cops in UK says it has located, recovered and managed to return several luxury cars to their owners, including a Bentley Bentayga, several Range Rovers, and a Rolls-Royce Cullinan worth $450,000.

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Speaking further, the unit said it has already recovered £12 million ($15.2 million) worth of stolen luxury vehicles this year and has dismantled 15 chop shops.

Gerrish revealed that they had intercepted almost 50 shipping containers full of stolen vehicles and parts ready to leave the UK in the last six months.

According to the unit, criminals usually buy a device online for around £1,300 that allows to unlock and drive away any car in less than 90 seconds.

Ken Munro of Pen Test Partners, a security firm, said:

“I think they underestimated the ability of technologists to weaponise these attacks.

“Typically, each vehicle brand will have a different flavour network on the car. They are not massively different, but a little, with different components on the cars that talk in slightly different ways.

“So each attack has to be customised to the particular vehicle. What we are seeing is that someone finds a weakness in x brand and x vehicle, recognised it, ‘productised’ it and then sold it.

“Then all of a sudden, you see a spike in thefts of a particular type of vehicle.”

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