General Secretary's - Queensland Police Union

Queensland Police Union Journal Apr 10 Car Theft • 25
after VCU detectives raided his Byron Bay home. Det-Sgt
Ziser said car owners who commit insurance fraud by falsely
claiming their car had been stolen risked being sued by the
companies. “This investigation has highlighted the high level
of theft and fraud which has gone through the roof during the
global economic crisis.”
Operation Hotel Raptor ran for two months, resulting in 17
people being charged with 36 offences. Last month,
Det-Sgt Ziser was presented with an award for Data Dot
Investigation of The Year at the annual conference of the
International Association of Auto Theft Investigators.
The investigation also discovered another scam in which car
thieves were selling their vehicles with a secretly installed
tracking device.
“They would sell the vehicle and then steal them back using
the tracking devices and a spare key they had not passed on
to the new owner. They would then rebirth the vehicle and
sell it again.” This scam turned the VCU focus back to
rebirthing, with detectives launching Project TREX.
“As a result of Hotel Raptor we also identified a group of
people involved in the stealing and rebirthing of vehicles.
They were targeting wrecks that were not on the Written-Off
Vehicle Register (WOVR) as the insurance on the vehicles was
void through actions such as drink driving or drag racing.
Whenever a car has crashed and there is an insurance claim,
it must go through an inspection process to ensure that it is
the same vehicle that was written off and not one rebuilt with
stolen parts.”
“We found people in the motor industry would approach car
owners with vehicles not likely to be paid out through
insurance and say ‘I know someone who will pay for your car
wreck’. They then pass it back to the criminals who take the
VIN numbers off the wrecks and put them on stolen cars and
rebirth them.”
“If you search websites such as Ebay you will see car wrecks
with high price tags because you are not paying for the car
itself, you are paying for its identity.” Det-Sgt Ziser said the
rebirthing scam was a national problem and the VCU had
identified several rackets operating in southeast Queensland.