Logan LaFornia, a resident of Canada, woke up one morning in October 2022 to find his driveway, or parking space, empty. His brand new ‘Ram Rebel’ car was parked there.
He immediately pulled out the footage captured on his security camera. There, two men wearing hoodies climbed into the pickup parked outside his Ontario home in the middle of the night. Then they easily drove that car away.
Just a few months after this incident. An advertisement for the sale of the same car was circulating on a website where vehicles are bought and sold. It will be sold in Ghana, about eight and a half thousand kilometers away on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Logan LaFornia told the BBC that the laptop holder clearly shows ownership of the car. I put it behind the driver’s seat of the car for our son and in the holder he (the son) threw garbage, considering the fact that the car was his.
He said that the same random scene appeared in every picture of the car provided on the website. “There was no doubt in my mind that it was my car,” Logan said.
Logan is not the only person who has to go through such a situation. According to the BBC report, 150,000 cars were stolen in Canada that year. That is, every five minutes a car is stolen in the country.
According to the BBC, Canada’s federal law minister is among the victims. Car thieves made away with his official car, a Toyota Highlander XLE, twice.
The International Criminal Police Organization, Interpol for short, compiled a list of stolen cars from 137 countries around the world earlier this summer. According to that list, Canada is among the top 10 countries in the world in terms of car theft.
Canada began providing data on stolen vehicles to Interpol last February. A spokesman for the country’s government identified this as a significant achievement.
After being stolen, authorities say the cars are either used in a crime, or the cars are sold to unsuspecting people in the area. Again, sometimes those cars are also sent abroad for resale.
Interpol says it has identified more than 1,500 cars worldwide that were actually stolen from Canada since last February. Also, the agency is detecting about two hundred stolen vehicles from ports in different countries every week.
Car theft has become such an epidemic problem in Canada that the Insurance Bureau of Canada has declared it a national crisis. The company said the car thefts cost insurers more than 1.5 billion Canadian dollars last year.
Due to this ongoing problem, the country’s police have been forced to issue warning public bulletins across the country.
