Indiana State Police: Stolen car bought from dealership possibly tied to organized crime
A Princeton, Indiana, man had to surrender his car to Indiana State Police last week after an investigation determined it had been stolen in New York, even though he'd bought the vehicle legally at an Evansville dealership.
As it turns out, the stolen car may have ties to organized crime.
Brandon Farias, an Indiana State Police detective that works in the agency's Indianapolis-based vehicle crimes unit, said the car, a 2019 Honda Accord, came from a "series" of vehicles that had been stolen in New York in 2020 and retrofitted with new VINs so they could be sold without alerting authorities.
The act of counterfeiting VINs, also known as "re-tagging" or "cloning," is a common occurrence in Farias' field, he said, but this instance was different because it was much more professionally done.
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He said the professional nature of the VIN manipulation, plus the fact that several of the vehicles involved in a New York State Police investigation had been re-tagged in a similar way, suggested that it was "probable" the crimes had ties to organized crime.
"I believe it would be safe to assume that a sophisticated crime organization was doing this because (the re-tagging) was very, very convincing," Farias said.
Farias was alerted of the possibility that the car was one of the vehicles stolen out of New York when the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles notified him that there was a discrepancy with the vehicle's title. Farias, along with an agent from the National Insurance Crime Bureau, had the car's manufacturer, Honda, run its VIN through their database.
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Honda reported back that the company had never produced such a vehicle. Farias got a search warrant for the car and located a confidential VIN on it that's used only for police purposes that identified it as stolen out of New York in 2020.
"This one had just slipped through the cracks," Farias said.
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The car had been sold legally multiple times before ending up in the lot at D-Patrick Honda in Evansville, Farias said, and he doesn't believe the dealership had any knowledge it was stolen before selling it to the man in Princeton.
Neither the Honda's former owner nor the dealership responded to Courier & Press messages seeking comment before publication.
For anyone looking for a car worried about potentially buying a "hot" vehicle, Farias suggested asking the dealership to run the car's VIN through its database to determine if it's authentic.
Contact Ray Couture at rcouture@courierpress.com or on Twitter @raybc94.
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Honda bought from Evansville car dealership have organized crime ties?
