How CarFax is helping curb car theft

Lorraine Explains: More car thieves being thwarted by Carfax

Car theft is on the decline, but fraud prevention is now a major concern

By Lorraine Sommerfeld -- Driving.ca

The most recent best tool in combating auto theft in Canada may be coming from an unexpected place. Law enforcement, border controls, clubs, immobilizers, locating devices, boots and bollards are all making inroads. But as car thieves, often working for organized crime groups, quickly pivot their strategies to elude the amped up responses to foil them, the game of cat (car?)-and-mouse continues to evolve.

Équité Association recently announced a 19% drop for the first half of 2025 compared to the same time last year. In hotspots like Ontario and Quebec, the numbers are even better - down 25.9% and 22.2%, respectively. This is all encouraging, but as Bryan Gast, vice president of investigative services for Équité points out, there are trends that are still causing concern.

"Stepped up security at The Port of Montreal means fewer vehicles leaving through that access. But thieves will always come up with new ways to keep making money. Recovery rates have gone down. That signals to us that organized crime is using resources to make those cars disappear," he says.

The two most immediate ways for that to happen? "Chop shops and reVINing," says Gast. He says Canada continues to be a major donor country for stolen cars; we have highly populated regions, full of expensive vehicles that are highly coveted overseas. Increased law enforcement is resulting in the numbers heading down, but what thieves are doing inside the country continues to fuel theft.

What is reVINing?

Earlier this year, Aviva Insurance reported its reVINing investigations have gone up 338% between 2022 and 2024. Every car has a vehicle identification number (VIN) it receives at birth from the manufacturer. Thieves clone existing VINs or just invent new numbers to register stolen vehicles. Clones are taken from a vehicle that is close to the stolen one in terms of make, model, year and colour. Numbers are often taken from vehicles in parking lots across the U.S. Years can pass before the person who has passively had their VIN stolen even knows; it's usually when they go to sell, and a vehicle report pops.

OMVIC recently hosted a webinar focusing on fraud prevention with Gast and Sam Cosentino, director of enforcement at OMVIC. They covered a lot of ground and gave consumers more things to worry about. Odometer manipulation is gaining traction, sophisticated software can make ads and communications appear to be coming from a trusted source, and documentation can be created that fools even the pros.

Gast and Cosentino both emphasized the lack of coordination between provinces when it comes to vehicle registration. Gast has been advocating for a national database to thwart thieves, and pointed to changes happening in Alberta. "Per capita, Alberta has higher theft rates than Ontario and Quebec. Historically, those thefts were older pickups without antitheft systems; they were often abandoned after being used to commit another crime," says Gast. Now? The weakness in that province's vehicle registry system is being exploited by thieves who are stealing newer luxury vehicles, re-registering them with fraudulent VINs and exporting them to other provinces.

According to both Gast and Cosentino, Ontario is leading the way in tightening the registration process, and other provinces need to follow suit. Organized crime rings just seek out the weakest links in the system and keep stealing vehicles. I will always believe manufacturers could stop car theft in its tracks if they wanted to, but instead, we continue to pour millions of dollars of resources into cleaning up the mess after the fact.

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Source: More car thieves being thwarted by Carfax | Driving

 

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