How car thieves are making a profit without actually stealing a vehicle

Car thieves carried out a successful heist at an Ontario car dealership, appearing to make a profit while the luxury vehicle was still in the dealer's showroom.

Car thieves carried out a successful heist at an Ontario car dealership in September of 2020, making off with what they needed despite leaving a luxury vehicle sitting in the showroom.

That’s because the target was never the black Mercedes G Squared SUV, but its unique vehicle identification number (VIN), according to the Oakville-based dealer, Doug, who was wary of using his last name in an interview with CTV News.

He said he found out when trying to transfer the vehicle into a customer’s name at a Service Ontario, only to find out that the thieves had already assumed ownership of the car—at least on paper.

“We go there to put in a transfer,” Doug said. “They say, ‘Sorry, this car doesn’t belong to you.’ Meanwhile, it’s been sitting in our showroom for quite a while.”

Documents showed the car had been transferred to another company in 2020—documents that were obviously forged, Doug said.

“There’s 35,000 kilometres on it, which for sure is not our car, because our car had no kilometres on it,” he said.

Doug believes at some point thieves entered the showroom just to write down the car’s VIN, so they could use it to register a similar car that had been stolen.

“They took our car’s serial number, and put it on a stolen car,” he said.

Each car has its own 17 digit VIN, which can usually be found behind the windshield on the driver’s side of the vehicle. It’s used as a way to track the history of that specific car.

But, fraudsters can apply a legitimate car’s VIN to a stolen car in an attempt to disguise it and sell it in a process called re-vinning.

While that means a sale can go through, it usually causes headaches for the buyer and the owner of the vehicle.

New tools aim to help victims of VIN fraud

Complaints of re-vinning are on the rise, according to Carfax, a company that sells vehicle history reports.

“It’s definitely a scenario where one VIN is living two lives,” Carfax president Shawn Vording told CTV News.

He said in some cases, innocent consumers have had their VIN used as a donor to register a stolen vehicle, which is often exported, though sometimes continues to be driven around the country.

The company has estimated that there are more than 140,000 potentially cloned VINs driving Canadian streets, many of them likely stolen cars that have been sold, with the profits often going to organized criminals.

Carfax has launched new monitoring tools that can alert a customer if there is any activity on their VIN, and if the customer doesn’t recognize it, they can investigate.

Vording says he hopes that the tool can detect any potential VIN fraud early, before any sales or transfers are disrupted.

Carfax is also putting export data from the Canada Border Services Agency into its reports to watch for cars that have been disguised and then exported, while the donor VIN remains in the country.

“VIN fraud costs consumers a lot of money. We’re hoping we can make a difference by mitigating the amount of fraud that happens. And if we can do something as a business to help defund organized crime, that’s good for society overall,” Vording said.

The provincial government has tightened up the system to register a car in the wake of a wave of an increase in car theft that has swept the nation. Around 69,000 cars were stolen across Canada in 2024, leading to more than a billion dollars in insurance losses.

Police also laid several charges against Service Ontario workers earlier this year. One worker, Tonisha Baird, was convicted for trafficking in stolen vehicles, including one she was arrested while driving.

But critics worry that despite recent changes, there aren’t enough barriers to prevent thieves from using the province’s car registration system to their advantage.

“It shouldn’t be so easy for people to be able to steal a car, get it registered, and supposedly legitimized and then get it sold on our streets,” said NDP MPP Jennifer French.

Documents involved in the transfer of the Mercedes G Squared from Doug’s dealership led to a company whose director was initially charged in a shooting in Yorkville in 2016.

Those charges were dropped, and in response to a subsequent lawsuit, Toronto Police Service admitted in legal filings there were problems in the investigation.

CTV News tried the man at several different addresses, but couldn’t reach him. His lawyer wasn’t available for comment.

The forgeries were obvious enough that Doug doubts that the Service Ontario employee made a mistake.

“You’ll never stop this if they have someone crooked working in the license bureau, and that’s what they’ve been combatting,” he said.

With the help of Toronto police, an inspection of the G Squared SUV showed that it was the true vehicle that was tied to the VIN in question, and the transfer to the customer eventually went through.