The Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) has cautioned the public against a new trend of car theft.
Through their online platforms, the DCI revealed the operation of car theft syndicates that hoodwink unsuspecting victims into losing their hard-earned cash to hoodlums.
According to the DCI, the elaborate scheme involves a confidence trickster who goes out and hires a car from one of the mushrooming car hire service providers.
After hiring the car, they forge the documents of the car and police believe they work in cahoots with unscrupulous car hire agents to obtain the documents.
The thugs do not stop at that but proceed to fake the identity of the authentic car owners to avoid any events of a potential victim detecting discrepancies when conducting a search.
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Once they have produced the bogus documents, they advertise the cars for sale and then sell them to unsuspecting victims.
The grim reality settles in when the new ‘car owners’ want to have car logbook details be transferred into their own by which time they would have parted with some handsome amounts of money.
The above scenario only applies to the lucky victims because some find themselves in very compromising situations when the lease period of the cars elapse and the car hire service providers report the cars missing.
Upon tracking down the cars, police find the innocent victims with the cars and since they are reported stolen, it becomes a problem.
DCI reports the spike in such cases reported by victims in the recent past and have committed to work tirelessly to shatter the trend, bring the perpetrators to book.
DCI cautions the public to beware of the scheme reiterate the warning they earlier issued on the existence of fraudulent online vendors who operate without physical addresses.
The vendors in question deal in stolen or counterfeit items and, more often than not, get unsuspecting victims into serious trouble with the law.
