Ontario premier vows action on inspecting possibly stolen vehicles after W5 investigation

W5’s Jon Woodward investigates what provinces are doing to ensure vehicle registration systems can catch stolen and re-vinned cars before they’re sold.

This is the final instalment of a five-part CTV W5 series on re-vinning, a lucrative tactic by car thieves to disguise stolen cars for sale to unwitting drivers.

In the wake of a CTV W5 investigation into thieves who disguise stolen cars in order to sell them to unwitting customers, Premier Doug Ford promised Ontario would do a better job tracking physical inspections of vehicles deemed to be suspicious.

W5 shed light on the need to better secure vehicle registration systems across the country and to put measures in place to help expose suspicious vehicles that are slipping past overworked staffers or, in some cases, being aided through by corrupt officials.

“You’re bang on,” Ford said in response to a question from W5 at a recent news conference, where he was asked about the need to improve tracking of vehicles suspected of being registered fraudulently.

“You can’t manage anything unless you measure it. I promise you, they’re going to be measured. And throw these guys in jail, too, for a few years. Teach them a lesson,” he said.

Ford had his own brush with the stolen car epidemic earlier this week: Four masked men tried to steal one of his cars in his driveway. Toronto Police charged four people with possessing an electronic device for motor vehicle theft and unlawfully purchasing an automobile master key.

W5’s investigation focused on how, in the wake of better controls at the nation’s ports, more thieves are finding ways to disguise stolen vehicles locally for re-sale or for insurance scams.

Such a disguise involves changing the vehicle identification number, or VIN, of the car. It’s a 17-digit number that is most visible on the driver’s side behind the windshield, though it is often hidden throughout the vehicle.

• More W5 investigations

When the VIN is changed, or re-vinned, the stolen car won’t be linked to its past in digital searches, and instead will appear to be a car without any suspicious history. That makes it a lot easier to sell or insure.

However these disguises are often not perfect. In one case, a family who bought a 2019 Porsche Cayenne got a letter from their insurance company saying the car could not be insured because it had a “fictitious VIN”.

W5 tracked down the other car to Alberta. On the Carfax reports, data from the two cars were intermingled: A white car in Ontario with about 67,000 km. on its odometer was serviced along with a grey car in Alberta with only about 29,000 km.

Uncovering the true past of these cars can be a specialized job, and for a long time, that was a job that Mike Fehr did as part of the Edmonton Police’s auto theft unit.

In a visit to that police department’s seizure lot, Fehr showed W5 a Dodge Ram truck that was actually made from material from two trucks spliced together – a “franken-car.”

The truck was seized as stolen property, and the unsuspecting buyers were on the hook for car payments, Fehr said, adding it’s just one example of how more stolen cars are being mixed in with the legitimate supply.

“It’s incredibly high reward to be able to take a wrecked vehicle, put stolen parts on it, and then sell it to some victim,” he said. “It’s tens of thousands of dollars per truck.”

Not enough provinces are doing their job: expert

Government agencies are supposed to check these cars match their VINs. But too many provinces are failing to catch them, said Dan Service of VIN Verification Services, which inspects vehicles for the governments of Saskatchewan and Alberta.

The problem: they’re not checking VINs against other databases, and then physically inspecting vehicles.

“Those provinces create the opportunity for criminals to create full VINs or use vehicles from salvaged vehicles, or used VINs from cars that they’ve seen in a parking lot,” Service said.

Sometimes, the registry employees may themselves be part of the problem: One Service Ontario worker was convicted of registering fake VINs on stolen vehicles. She was even arrested while driving one of them.

W5 asked each province how often they flag suspicious VINs for physical inspection. Many said they do check against police databases, but only Quebec was able to say a specific number: 225.

In Ontario, where the bulk of cars are stolen, the answer was: “The Ministry of Transportation does not have that information.”

That’s an “honest response,” said Service, but it’s a problem: “If you don’t have someone going out to look, the criminals have essentially carte blanche.”

A study by Carfax suggested that there may be as many as 140,000 re-vinned cars on Canadian roads right now.

More from this series:

• Part one: They bought a car from a dealership but it turned out to be stolen. This is how it happened.
• Part two: ‘It’s crippled me’: How a car dealer discovered stolen cars being sold out of his shop
• Part three: ‘It never comes back to you’: Corrupt Service Ontario worker brags about her role in a scheme to sell stolen cars
• Part four: A $1M Ferrari – or is it? Insurance investigators face rising fraud claims