“Criminals stealing vehicles and attempting to sell them on remains one of the most serious problems for used car buyers,” claims Daniel Burgess automotive director at HPI, or Hippy as their friends call them.
But regardless of where they were stolen, it seems, all these stolen vehicles gradually gravitate towards the so-called Midlands, where (up to 72 miles from the nearest large body of marine salt water) they lie in wait for some innocent passerby to purchase them.
Hippy have revealed that a shocking ‘nearly one in five’ second hand cars checked with them in the Midlands turn out to have been half inched – compared with just some other number somewhere else.
Neighbouring regions the North West and East Angular are also quite bad, with ratios of stolen to not stolen of one in six and one in seven respectively.
Thieves like new cars better than old ones, Daniel reveals. And sometimes, he warns, ”stolen vehicles are cloned, where its identity is changed to match that of a legitimate vehicle. This makes them appear legitimate, when in reality, they are anything but.” Deeply sinister.
