Britain | Grand Theft Global Inc The new geography of stolen goods Cars, phones, tractors: how high-end products are increasingly stolen to serve distant markets
T he MSC Ruby is almost ready to leave Felixstowe. Seven remote-controlled gantry cranes are still at work, stacking containers in the ship’s bays. Some 11,000 containers pass through this port each day, making it Britain’s primary conduit to the arteries of global trade. The Ruby’s next call is Gran Canaria—then, the long run down the coast of Africa. Watching the scene, Adam Gibson, the lone police officer at the port whose job is finding stolen cars, sounds rueful: “There’s no way in hell I can search even a small fraction of them. We could be standing here now and there could be three or four boxes of stolen cars just there in those stacks. They could be manifested as teddy bears.”
Without many people noticing Britain has become a leading exporter of stolen goods. In the past decade the number of vehicles stolen in the country has risen by 75%. Most end up on container ships; the top destination is west Africa. More recently London has become known as the “phone-snatching capital of Europe”. If the victims manage to track their devices, the goods are most likely to turn up in China. British farmers are plagued by raiding gangs. Their tractors and GPS kits usually head east, to Russia or eastern Europe.
For centuries criminals have nicked valuable products and smuggled them across borders, beyond the reach of the law. Britain today shows how this model has evolved in new and alarming ways. Encrypted communications have enabled criminal gangs to operate and co-operate more freely than ever before, and establish global supply chains. As countries in Africa and Asia have become richer, demand for the products common on the streets of the rich world is growing. This combination has spawned a flourishing criminal enterprise. Call it Grand Theft Global Inc.
Engines, body parts and a motorbike recovered by the police
Britain is a “perfect place” for this business, says Elijah Glantz of RUSI , a think-tank, because of its saturated consumer market and weak export controls. There are lots of expensive cars and phones to steal, and it is easy to get them away. There is also almost no deterrent: Britain’s police solve only 5% of crimes (and 2% of vehicle thefts). In continental Europe and America such criminal enterprise is growing, too, though America has stronger scrutiny of exports due to fear of fraud and tax evasion. Canada has been hit by a rash of vanishing vehicles. But for now, Britain has the dubious title of world leader. “The UK sees itself as a recipient of criminality, not an exporter,” says Mr Glantz.
Cars show how the model has evolved. Like other rich countries, Britain experienced a sharp drop in vehicle crime in the 1990s, thanks to immobilisers and other technology. In 2013 Britain had only 2.7 thefts for every 1,000 privately owned cars, according to RUSI . Now it is 4.4. Thefts have risen from 90,000 in 2020 to 130,000 last year. That has fed into a 45% real-terms rise in the cost of car insurance (in the EU it has risen only in line with inflation). Vehicle crime is “my number-one issue”, says Dan Tomlinson, the Labour MP for Chipping Barnet, a leafy north London suburb.
A police officer and a port worker open up a suspicious container
The method is typically as follows. To defeat sophisticated security systems, thieves use specialised equipment. Once in, they mask the car with fake number plates and use jammers to override GPS tracking. Then they move it, usually across county lines (collaboration between police forces is often poor), where it will be sold to a group that handles logistics. Sometimes the car is hidden in a shipment of other goods, under a false manifest. More often, the gang employs a third group to give the car a “new identity”—not only paperwork but markers including the vehicle identification number, a unique code stamped on the chassis.
Uncontained
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