Car Rental Agency Was Renting Stolen Cars, Then Stealing Them From Customers

Never, ever have we heard of a car rental agency intentionally putting stolen vehicles in its fleet. But Peel Regional Police in Ontario, Canada claim that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the schemes a local rental company was running.

Learn how thieves are stealing Turo rental cars.

The Mississauga car rental company was re-vinning stolen cars, or in other words putting legitimate VINs on the stolen rides to make them appear like they were another vehicle. That’s serious enough, but the scheme goes even deeper.

Allegedly, the company was also registering these cars through false entities, we assume to throw the authorities off the trail if anyone started digging into what was going on. Obviously, that didn’t work.

After renting the re-vinned cars to clients, the company would then go steal the vehicles from residential driveways. This would then allow the rental agency to collect money from the customer’s insurance.

Once that scheme was done with a vehicle, the rental agency then reportedly would re-vin it once again, then register it under a false company and rent it out. Then the company would steal it while it was rented.

While at first the scheme seems a little complicated, once you wrap your head around it the whole thing is actually quite simple. We assume registering the cars under different company names was also to not throw up any red flags about the rental agency having so many cars stolen in a short period of time.

Police say they recovered 22 stolen cars which had been re-vinned. The estimated value of those rides is $1.6 million CAD. Two people were arrested as part of the investigation.

Authorities aren’t disclosing how they figured out this re-vinning and insurance fraud operation.

Image via Peel Regional Police/Facebook

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