A new Ford Bronco stolen directly from the Detroit factory was later sold openly for $75,000. It was only during the resale that it turned out that the car was stolen…
There are no fewer crooks in the United States than in Ukraine or somewhere in Italy or Brazil. The secondary car market is no exception. An Arizona resident saw an ad for a Bronco for sale on the online platform Craigslist. The man liked the car with Alaskan license plates. After contacting the vendors, Nick did his due diligence to make sure everything was up to par and clean.
The car passed the Carfax inspection sieve, and the result was satisfactory. He took the VIN number to a third-party vehicle department (MVD) in Phoenix, had it checked, and only after it was confirmed to be clean did he give his $75,000 to the seller.
Unfortunately, Nick didn’t know that he had been given the wrong VIN on purpose. Three weeks later, when he was exchanging the car he had bought for a pickup truck, a dealer employee noticed a discrepancy in the car’s VIN and called the police.
Now the Bronco has been confiscated. Nick gave the detectives all the relevant information, including some photos of the sellers, which could help in the search for the thieves. However, no one has returned the $75,000 to him: he lost both his money and his car in a legitimate purchase.
This is not an isolated case, including in Detroit. The story of the stolen Ford vehicles worth more than $1 million has not yet faded from memory. Back then, 14 Ford F-150 pickup trucks were stolen from the same area of the finished goods facility. There has been no inventory of finished products for months, and it is difficult to detect the loss of even a good dozen vehicles out of that large number of ready-to-show vehicles.
The fraudsters took the pickups from the open-air warehouse at the end of 2022. The cars were taken to Phoenix, where they were sold openly on the car market.
To make the sale look original, the thieves used documents from cars stolen in Georgia back in 2007. Then the cars passed through several hands, they were officially resold and exchanged, but recently the fake was discovered.
The investigation is ongoing. As it turned out, even two Ford dealerships in New Mexico and Texas bought pickup trucks that they believed to be in good working order, but later turned out to be stolen.
