stolen

If you're going to drive a stolen car in a town of roughly 77,000 people – about the same size as Scranton, Pennsylvania or Ogden, Utah – you want to be very careful about where you drive that stolen car to eat. That's the lesson Katherine York of Kennewick, Washington learned when ...

A man visiting the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn from California was introduced to the city's less pleasant side recently. The Detroit News reports thieves made off with his 2001 Ford F-250 pickup truck. That would be bad enough by itself, but the truck was hooked to an enclosed trailer, which ...

The 2011 Detroit Auto Show is proving to be more eventful for BMW than the automaker had originally intended. As workers were preparing to load a BMW 7 Series onto a transport truck near Detroit's Westin Book Cadillac hotel, a pair of ...

Christmas day is not just for giving, it's also for not stealing. According to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, December 25th is the day many thieves take a break from stealing cars. Very kind of them, no? But here's the bad news: those thieves are just postponing their nefarious ways for a ...

Police in Seattle have turned to social media in an effort to help recover stolen vehicles. By sending out a Tweet that describes the liberated vehicle, authorities are hoping someone in the network of followers will spot it and report the vehicle's location. The Twitter account being used by the ...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation reports that car thefts in 2009 were at their lowest level in 20 years. Last year, a total of 794,616 vehicles were stolen from their owners – a 17 percent drop compared to 2008. Without a doubt, those numbers are good news for car owners across the ...

According to HomeSecurity.net, one million vehicles (worth a total of $7.5 billion) were stolen in the United States last year. If you don't want to join a top ten list of vehicles dominated by Honda and Toyota, ...

They're called owner "give-ups," and their rise is a sign of the tough economic times. Despondent over being financially strapped and unable to cover car payments, vehicle owners are ditching, sinking, or torching their vehicles and reporting the loss to collect insurance payoffs. According to ...

The Federal Bureau of Investigations has shut down a car theft ring operating in the U.S. for more than 20 years, causing in excess of $25 million in losses to owners and banks. According to CNN, the ring would clone cars, swiping the legal identity of one car – VIN numbers, tags, stickers -- ...

Perhaps it began as an innocent experiment among dealer personnel: what would happen if three dealership executives all disappeared on the same day and 81 of the dealership's cars showed up at auto auctions in two other states? The answer to that question is that the FBI went bird-dogging on the ...

Recently, a Cadillac once owned by Steve McQueen was caught up in a theft ring in Colorado that stole the car from a rental company, "sold" it to a new owner - one of the theft ring members - and then re-stole it to claim the insurance. They might have got the idea from London's Nokhiaz Khan, a man ...

A busted car theft ring has turned up a vintage Cadillac once owned by one of the Magnificent Seven. The five-finger-discount drivers out of Colorado, headed by Jeffrey Earle Piper, would steal expensive rental cars, change their VIN numbers and "sell" them. The new "owner", who was in on the whole ...

Vehicle owners behind in their payments and faced with mounting debts have begun taking matches to their cars and trucks in an effort to stop their payments and collect the insurance settlements. Unfortunately, in most cases the attempts backfire (pun intended). According to police, when ...

Finding a stash of vehicles left to rot can be exciting, like if they're in a barn and they're vintage and would have some high collectible value once fixed up. Finding a stash of cars left to rot at the bottom of a lake, well, that's a downer for everyone. Authorities in Camas, Washington (the ...

In yet another indication that thieves may boast more skill and luck than overall intelligence, a 22-year-old Somers, Connecticut, resident in possession of a stolen Cadillac STS complained to authorities that someone had broken the window on "his" car. Of course, it took the police just a few ...

This one may seem like a no-brainer, but it's probably not a good idea to hide the spare keys for your first and second car inside your... uh, car. Perhaps you can already tell where we're going with this... for the sake of the story, though, we'll continue. What might happen if your car were ...

Bulging in the exhaust system like a rabbit deep in the belly of a boa, the catalytic converter cleans engine fumes before they are released into the air. To the inexperienced, the oversized metal cylinder looks rather uninteresting. To a thief, it is a pod of precious metal worth nearly $200 on ...

The Catch-22 with advertising these days is that someone will undoubtedly be offended if your campaign is clever enough to be memorable. Ford of Canada came up with such an effort for the Escape, showing the CUV wearing a bumper sticker with the phrase "drive it like you stole it," and the tagline ...

Here's a familiar morning routine now that the weather's turning colder: start car, set heat on high, retreat inside to finish coffee. There's plenty of debate for and against the practice of warming up by idling, but the unfortunate story of this ZJ could bolster the argument for just getting in ...

LoJack's international recovery network makes it increasingly difficult to escape its satellite eyes. Here's the best example yet. Two Albanian thieves broke into the Italian vacation of home of a Frenchman and knocked him out with sleeping gas. They then stole his French-registered Gallardo. When ...