A Range Rover which was stolen in Harrogate has been tracked down 5,000 miles away in Pakistan. The black Range Rover Sport was taken from the North Yorkshire town in November 2022.
The SUV’s onboard tracker briefly showed its location as Karachi, a city in Pakistan, to British officers earlier this year, before Interpol asked for assistance from police in the country. A request for an international investigation into how the car was smuggled abroad has been submitted.
Expensive cars stolen in the UK by organised gangs are often shipped to Pakistan, and usually hidden inside containers with ‘used car parts’ or ‘household goods’ labels on them. Once taken from their owners, the cars are often given fake chassis numbers and local number plates. A Karachi-based dealer with knowledge of the grey market said: ‘The demand for foreign luxury SUVs has surged.
‘In most cases the buyer doesn’t know it is stolen; others are simply looking for a good deal.’ In 2022 and 2023, the Range Rover Sport was the most type of vehicle to be stolen in the UK. As a result, the manufacturer upgraded its security systems, amending thousands of second-hand cars.
International trade law expert Osama Malik explained that even if recovered, the car stolen in Harrogate’s ownership may now be questioned by a local buyer. He told The Times : ‘Pakistan is bound to return the car. However, the current owner of the vehicle will most likely involve the Pakistani courts as a bona fide purchaser for value who has legally purchased this vehicle.’ In 2022, a luxury Bentley that was allegedly stolen in London was found 5,000 miles away in Pakistan, according to Pakistani police.
The Bentley Mulsanne V8 Automatic was recovered by Customs Enforcement agents following a tip-off which came from a ‘friendly nation’, the agency said, with local media suggesting it was British intelligence who helped. Customs agents requisitioned the car from outside a house in Defence Housing Authority (DHA), an affluent neighbourhood in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city. It’s long been known that gangs are stealing luxury cars from British driveways before whisking them abroad within hours for sale in the Middle East and Africa.
Other expensive vehicles, including Range Rovers and Rolls-Royces, are shipped to Eastern Europe and then smuggled into Russia for use by sanctions-dodging Kremlin elites. The highly sophisticated nature of the criminal gangs fuelling Britain’s £1.77billion-a-year car theft epidemic is shown by their use of £20,000 high-tech devices to trick keyless entry systems. Stolen cars are then rapidly driven to Dover and loaded onto ferries before victims, lenders or the police can react.
One police investigator said a car could be shipped abroad with cloned number plates before the owner had even been able to report it stolen. A report this year contrasted the professionalism of gangs overseeing this ‘comprehensive logistical process’ with the lax police response – which has seen charging rates drop to just 2.6 per cent in 2023/2024. Stolen cars are often broken into parts that end up in second-hand dealerships or scrapyards in Cyprus, the UAE and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they are sold into other Middle Eastern and North African countries. The illegal trade has driven an 82 per cent increase in car insurance premium quotes since 2021, according to the report, Organised Vehicle Theft in the UK: Trends and Challenges, by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
About 130,000 vehicles are stolen each year in the UK – many from driveways or on streets outside homes. One gang operating in Oldham, Greater Manchester were jailed last year after being linked to nearly 100 stolen cars. The group arranged for prestige cars including Range Rovers, Mercedes, Porsche and BMWs to be stolen to order before being shipped off to the Middle East, or broken down for parts. Ringleader Asif Hussain was jailed for 15 years after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to steal, conspiracy to handle stolen goods, conspiracy to export, and fraud.
The RUSI report says organised crime groups have ‘shopping lists’ of makes and models, indicating many are stolen to order. While manufacturers have made it harder to hack into keyless entry systems, criminals are beating them in a tech ‘arms race’ by using specialised devices costing as much as £20,000. These typically work by ‘relaying’ or amplifying the signal of the victim’s key fob, often located inside their home, to trick vehicles into believing the fob is nearby. Sellers in Bulgaria and Poland advertise devices designed for specific high-end models including Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Lamborghini, Lexus and Porsche.
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