Eight years ago, law enforcement based in the United Kingdom and Thailand began working together on a wide-ranging investigation. Their quarry was tracking down dozens of luxury vehicles that had been stolen and shipped overseas. If you were a car owner affected by these thefts, you may well have written off your car as gone for good. But this week, the U.K.’s National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service announced the return of 35 cars seized as part of Operation Titanium.
According to the agency, the vehicles had a combined value of more than $7.7 million. “These were obtained on fraudulent finance and within a few days were shipped to Bangkok,” the NaVCIS wrote on Twitter/X. Returning them “took years of work and fantastic assistance from Thai authorities,” the agency added.
In a subsequent post, the agency described the process of returning the cars to their owners. They mentioned in particular one man who had his Lamborghini Huracán Spyder stolen; he “runs a vehicle hire company which nearly folded due to the loss,” the NaVCIS said.
How did the car thieves pull off their heist? A BBC article on the case explained that many of the vehicles affected were stolen using “hire-purchase agreements” and subsequently shipped overseas. Five cars remain missing.
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Police found dozens of cars in a storage spaceBesides the Lamborghini, the thieves also made off with multiple vehicles from BMW, Porsche and Mercedes-Benz. Law enforcement searched a total of nine spaces within Bangkok as they recovered the luxury vehicles. High-end cars, international cooperation and an epic timeframe — if this doesn’t turn into a movie or television project before long, I’ll be shocked.
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