They bought a car from a dealership but it turned out to be stolen. This is how it happened.

W5’s John Woodward investigates how an Ontario family’s car, purchased from a dealership, turned out to be a stolen car ‘re-vinned’ and resold.

This is the first part of a five-part series into re-vinning, a lucrative tactic by car thieves to disguise stolen cars for sale to unwitting drivers.

A 2019 Porsche Cayenne was a dream vehicle for Frank Rizqo’s relative when they bought it from a Toronto dealership in 2023, he recalled.

But when it was stolen a few months later from a mall parking lot, their insurance company refused to cover the losses, leaving them on the hook for more than $100,000 in car payments.

And the car became a nightmarish window into a cunning tactic by thieves that can disguise stolen cars as legitimate – one that appears to be happening more than everbefore.

“They’re thinking of getting a second mortgage to pay for all this. Like, it’s just insane,” Rizqo said in an interview with CTV W5.

The first clue that something was wrong was the length of time their insurer, TD Insurance, was taking to process the claim.

“They went through the process, as usual. They got the car insurance. They bought it from a dealership, by the way, so assuming it’s safer and more legit,” Rizqo recalled.

“A few weeks go by. No answer. That drags into a couple of months, and finally TD rejects the claim altogether,” Rizqo said.

In a letter, TD Insurance told the family it had found a problem with the Vehicle Identification Number, or VIN, which is supposed to uniquely identify the car.

“Our investigation has concluded that the VIN is fictitious and registered to another vehicle. Therefore, there will be no coverage for the loss,” the letter said.

Rizqo had no idea what that meant. All he knew was that all the car payments – totalling more than $100,000 – were still due.

“The whole thing was very complicated and stress-invoking,” Rizqo said.

What is re-vinning?

But that “fictitious VIN” would be a window for a W5 investigation into the astonishingly lucrative tactic of re-vinning, that thieves use to disguise stolen cars for resale, one worth tens of thousands of dollars per vehicle.

Our investigation shows how greater enforcement at Canada’s ports and borders is leading car thieves to turn inwards and market stolen cars here.

We see how a Toronto-area car dealership unwittingly became a hub for stolen vehicle sales, and explore how people employed at private agencies contracted by Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation are a crucial part of this.

The VIN can usually be found behind the windshield on the driver’s side of the car, and often other places scattered through the vehicle. It’s usually one number, one car.

Those VINs are tracked closely by Carfax, a company that sells vehicle history reports, the company’s president, Shawn Vording, said.

He says the company has been seeing a huge increase in re-vinning. The number of complaints that his company has received on that tactic has quadrupled, he said.

“A re-vin is taking the 17-digit character of a vehicle identification number and applying that to, in most cases, a stolen vehicle,” Vording said in an interview.

• New tool will alert Ontario auto dealer to VIN fraud amid spike in auto thefts: Carfax

We asked Vording to take a look at the VIN records for Rizqo’s car through a Carfax report.

“Something doesn’t add up about the history of this vehicle,” Vording said as he went through the records.

The record shows the car was serviced in B.C. and Alberta, with a mileage in October 2023 of around 29,000 km. At that time, its colour was grey.

Then, in November 2023, the vehicle was registered in Ontario, with a new owner reported. The vehicle’s colour was noted as white.

In January 2024, the Ontario vehicle’s odometer read as 67,000 km. That’s about when Rizqo’s family reported it stolen.

But then, in May 2024, the vehicle is back in Alberta, its colour is grey, and it has a mileage of about 30,000 km.

While sometimes Carfax reports can point to odometer fraud, the appearance of two sets of car activity on two sides of the country even after the car is reported stolen points to an even more surprising explanation.

The simplest explanation for this record is that the report doesn’t refer to one car, but two: One in Alberta that’s grey, and another in Ontario that’s white.

Both are sharing the same VIN, but one of them came by it honestly, and the other has used it to be disguised.

“If there’s ever a vehicle that looks like it’s a fraudulent VIN, this one meets the mark,” Vording said.

How can you tell if a car has been re-vinned?

W5 traced the second car to a Porsche dealership in Calgary. They said they believed their vehicle was legitimate – which supports the theory that it was Rizqo’s family member’s car that was disguised.

Vording urged potential customers to get vehicle reports to find irregularities that can be a sign of a cloned or fictitious VIN, as that can lead to many problems for the buyer, including voided insurance.

And he said there are several reasons re-vinning is on the rise.

“One, the increase in the number of stolen vehicles in Canada, of course. Number two is, that as the federal government has done an exceptional job of tightening up the ports, where a lot of these stolen vehicles were leaving. These vehicles now need a home because of the organized crime groups that are stealing them are still looking for a way to sell them,” he said.

• Auto theft probe leads to recovery of more than 300 stolen vehicles in Toronto

Carfax has also introduced new tools that make it easier to search for a car’s history at the dealership level, and has other projects in the works that could make it harder to disguise a stolen car.

Rizqo’s family is considering suing the dealership to make up for their losses.

“My family members have to pay this for the next six years,” Rizqo said.

More from this series

• 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
• Part five: Ontario premier vows action on inspecting possibly stolen vehicles after W5 investigation