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Comment by avidiax | Hacker News Reader

Wondering how theives can sell a stolen car. Do they have fake paperwork?

Yes, the term is strykers. Which can refer to the person that does it, or the actual stolen car that has been legitimized.

The stryker will find or buy from somewhere, a pool of unissued VINs that don't flag anything in the state registration system and match various vehicles (Dodge Chargers, Kias, Hyundais). Then when someone comes with that vehicle, they will strike a new Vin plate. Sometimes if they buy the VINs it will come in a package with plates. From there it's possible to get the vehicle registered, most likely under someone else's name that has no idea and they will sell / rent the car with tag etc. Though sometimes they will just make a fake plate too and then steal a real plate, swap it with the fake plate and put the real plate on the stolen car and sell it like that. In some cases / states they can actually get a title reissued.

Boats are even better, but much smaller market, just look up coast guard plates on Amazon.

Stiker vs Styker, is regional.

For Reference: Striker Music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaTxkD5JFpg

Usually in the sophisticated thieves, it's the case that they buy a VIN from a car that was exported and not recorded as such. They then get a new copy of the title for a car that is no longer in the country and can request new factory stamped vin parts such as the suspension pillar. The car looks completely legitimate to your average person with matching VINs it's just there are now two cars in two different places

Exported but not recorded, wouldn’t that be a stolen car? If so the VIN prolly can’t be reused. Or is there a legit way this would happen?

Who else exports their car, doesn’t report it and then offers their VIN?

I happened to see a video yesterday, unsourced though, which said that for cars that fetch a high premium overseas, exporters hire "straw buyers" to buy the cars and register them, then immediately take them to the port to be exported.

So, those seem like they'd be pretty good ones to use, as the straw buyer would certainly not report it as stolen. Though I bet they don't renew the tags, so you might owe a couple years of back registration depending on how old the 'source' car is.

Plenty of brands sell vehicles for less in some markets than others.

They get all cranky about people arbitraging it but it is blatant price discrimination.

Manufacturers were starting to require proof of insurance before handing over the keys and then people would get it and cancel+refund the insurance. Cat meet mouse.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/icbc-luxury-...

These aren't high end cars and essentially there is a formula for VINs but not all of them that get issued get used for various reasons so there are excess valid but not circulating VINs out there. It's just like social security and CPNs. Same people are sellers.

So the only way to know that this has been done is to read the OBD2 VIN or check all the resaleable parts for VINs?

It sounds like this scam would only get discovered when you go to the dealer for service, perhaps.

Yes and no. In a video I watched on YouTube the people fencing the car had scratched off VINs in the bonnet, door and windscreen, painted and re-etched the exported car's VIN and gone out of their way to find a reasonable fake V5 certificate (UK equivalent of a DMV cert I think) with similar specification as the stolen car (or found the docs first).

The car was sold on, eventually went to Copart with a blown engine and then the YouTuber found out through his videos that the car he owned was stolen and the original had been exported because the interior color was not the same as the decoded VIN. Only when he took the engine out of the car and compared the engine number with the one in BMW's database and the reported VIN in the infotainment was he confident that the car was stolen, same for Copart (who wouldn't entertain the car was stolen).

I think if it wasn't a famous YouTuber who bought the car, it's highly possible that the stolen car would go nu-noticed throughout its lifetime as stolen, even if taken to a main dealer. If I recall correctly the car reports he used (maybe car-vertical) also didn't pick up any discrepancy.

For the criminals its good business, you find a 30k plus car, pay for a clean VIN from cypress or somewhere and then do the damage to the car to re-new it as a different car, even if it costs 10k to do, its a lucrative 20k "profit" and thats on the high end, seems like cars can be stolen overnight, especially ones the criminals specialize in.

edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI4S2LT_ntE

Just to add to this, the "clean" exported car's VINs were bought off snapchat for ~4k per car. (for high end cars.)

You can buy a totaled car for cheap and use its VIN.

Are VINs not tied to the make, model, and year?

Ultimately they are tied to an individual vehicle in its original configuration in every way.

But thieves don't really really care about what it technically represents, they are more interested in what they can get away with. That would be solely dependent on how stringent the inspection is to get a rebuilt title.

Sure, but that's not that hard to find a match of. And if you cover all your bases, you can probably get away with a year or two plus or minus in most cases.

The easiest way is to sell it at a steep discount to a buyer willing to accept the lack of paperwork for a good deal.

In some cases the car is completely disassembled and the parts are sold.

from what I know they sell it to other criminals which use it to commit further crimes or ship it off the continent

most commonly it is used for drugs in canada since every case I hear about ends up in forensics

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