UK Police Recovered £14m Worth Of Stolen Cars/Parts Due To Be Shipped To Africa, UAE Last Year

Stolen Vehicle Intelligence Unit in UK seized £14m worth of stolen Cars and parts due to be shipped overseas last year.

A Range Rover and a Rolls-Royce Dawn were found on container bound for central Africa and Dubai respectively.

The SVIU team recovered a record 626 vehicles and parts in 2022, which was an increase of 30 per cent on 2021.

Intelligence Unit says many of the overseas-bound high end vehicles were ‘stolen to order’ and stripped for highly valuable parts.

The Stolen Vehicle Intelligence Unit (SVIU) in Essex Police said hundreds of overseas-bound high end cars and vehicle parts were recovered in 2022, many of which were ‘stolen to order’ and stripped for highly valuable parts

Many of the high-end vehicles, including a couple’s £100,000 Range Rover SUV and another £350,000 Rolls-Royce Dawn Convertible, were found on container bound for central Africa and Dubai respectively.

According to police, the extremely ‘lucrative’ market is only ‘getting hotter’ as the SVIU team recovered a record 626 vehicles and parts in 2022, which was an increase of 30 per cent on 2021.

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Images from investigations show more than 600 high-end vehicles chopped into overseas-bound shipping containers, many of which were crammed with bumpers, steering wheels and headlights.

PC Paul Gerrish from SVIU claims the record-breaking year is the result of a more ‘lucrative market’.

‘It’s getting hotter. It’s a lucrative market… We’ve done a few container interceptions where the front ends of the vehicles are being exported out to Dubai. In one container we found between eight to 10 stolen vehicles, some of them valued up to £100,000 a car.”

“The total haul of one of our jobs was well over a million pounds worth of stolen cars in one hit.”

PC Phil Pentelow from SVIU added:

“Even with an amount of panel damage [from the container] that car is still worth a hell of a lot of money.”

“It gives you an idea of the monetary value behind it and the efforts the criminals go to to export our victim’s cars to other parts of the world.”

Third SVIU team member, analyst Hannah Gerrish, said:

“Car thefts build into a bigger network of criminality. That’s we try to build a picture of what we’re seeing and hearing. It’s all about joining the dots.”

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