Having a car stolen can be a nightmare ordeal for any driver, prompting months of misery and legal headaches.
It’s a woe thousands have to endure annually, with one car snatched by thieves every nine minutes across the UK last year – with a total of 61,343 vehicles reported stolen.
In London, one of the hardest hit areas plagued by carjackers, the blight has become so extreme it’s led to claims car theft has been virtually ‘decriminalised’, with nine out of 10 thefts reported to the Metropolitan Police going unsolved.
Gangs of thieves are seemingly acting with impunity across the capital, brazenly snatching luxury motors or rare vehicles from driveways, garages and off the street.
Victims, exasperated by the crimewave, now appear to be taking the law into their own hands by hunting down and ‘stealing back’ their pinched motors.
Increasingly, Britons are turning to private companies and installing tracking devices on the cherished cars, which they then use to find their vehicles after they’re stolen.
The devices ranging from high-end, specialist trackers that emit a radio frequency, to more basic pieces of kit like Apple AirTags, which uses Bluetooth to signal where it is.
Now MailOnline looks at all the ways people are recovering their stolen vehicles – and what people should do if they fall victim to car thieves…
Thieves stole a car once every eight-and-a-half minutes across the UK in 2024, the DVLA said
Pictured is an Apple AirTag device which some victims are using to help find and recover their stolen cars
How tracking devices work
The rise of commercial tracking devices has made it easier than ever before for victims to find out where their stolen belonging are.
Simple devices like Apple AirTags, which look like tiny buttons, are increasingly being used by vehicle owners.
AirTags work by emitting a Bluetooth signal, which nearby Apple devices in the brand’s ‘Find My network’ can detect.
The trackers anonymously then ‘ping’ the AirTag’s location to iCloud allowing owners to see, in real-time, where their missing property is.
The devices have been used by some people to find their stolen cars – with extraordinary results.
Last month a father-of-three whose Range Rover was stolen from his driveway revealed how he was ‘gob-smacked’ to see one of the trackers in his car placing it 5,000 miles away in Tanzania months after it was stolen.
James Munday, 44, said he had expected never to see the £13,000 2014 Range Rover Vogue again after thieves used an electronic ‘key’ to open it outside his house in South Woodham Ferrers, near Chelmsford, Essex last November.
It wasn’t until two months later in February that James idly checked the tag on his computer and to his astonishment, saw that it had somehow reactivated.
‘I was absolutely gob-smacked, just staring at the screen in disbelief,’ said James, who operates boats in the River Crouch near his home.
James Munday (with his wife Claire) said he had expected never to see the £13,000 2014 Range Rover Vogue again after thieves used an electronic ‘key’ to open it
The thieves took his black Range Rover (above) from his driveway outside his house in South Woodham Ferrers, near Chelmsford, Essex, last November
A tracker on the car two months later placing it 5,000 miles away in Africa where Mr Munday says he believes that his vehicle is now for sale in a garage there
‘I could see in the intervening couple of months, the car had gone through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea and into the Indian Ocean, crossing the Equator and ending up at the docks in [Tanzanian capital] Dar-Es-Salam.
‘I called my wife Claire and said “you remember when you climbed Mount Kilimanjaro? Well, my car’s pretty much ended up there”.’
Mia Forbes Pirie and Mark Simpson were more fortunate, and managed to recover their stolen Jaguar E-Pace with their help of their AirTags.
The couple discovered their £46,000 motor had been snatched from near their west London home in Brook Green on Wednesday morning.
The pair tracked the vehicle to a quiet back street about four miles away, with its interior and carpets ripped apart by thieves who had attempted to access its wiring.
In a post to LinkedIn, Ms Forbes Pirie admitted it was ‘kind of fun’ stealing back the car but questioned ‘why we should have had to do that’.
She added: ‘The police are under-resourced and it’s a shame. But if there aren’t any consequences to people stealing cars or a lot of the other crimes where there aren’t any consequences, then I don’t really see what the deterrent is to stop people from doing it more.’
However, other high-end trackers emit a radio signal that is picked up by receivers – which are often installed in police cruisers and can alert officers to the location of a nearby stolen car.
Mia Forbes Pirie shared an image to social media of the car and her husband accompanied with an explanation of what had happened
The pair had the car fitted with an AirTag locator meaning they were able to track the vehicle to an updated location in Chiswick at 10.30am. Pictured: Mr Simpson with the Jaguar
What if you’re car’s stolen without a tracker in?
This is when it can become a real headache for motorists.
Organised crime gangs often steal high-end, luxury cars to order before stashing them in a street on false number plates for several days.
The tactic, known by crooks as ‘soaking’, is to see if the cars have hidden trackers inside.
If the cars aren’t recovered within a couple of days, the motors are then either taken to a ‘chop shop’ and ripped apart or smuggled into shipping containers and sent abroad.
For victims, the advice is to call 101 and give a description of the vehicle – its registration number, make and model and colour – in the hope officers can find it.
However, recent figures have laid bare the grim prospect of recovering a stolen vehicle in London.
Data, compiled by the Liberal Democrats earlier this year, revealed The Met failed to solve nine out of 10 cases of auto theft in the capital.
Only 0.9 per cent of investigations into car theft resulted in a charge against the perpetrator – the lowest figure of any regional police force in England, according to The Telegraph.
Between April and June 2024, the Met ended 7,996 out of 8,861 car theft investigations (90.24 per cent) without identifying a suspect – an increase from 88.7 per cent for the previous three months and the highest rate in two years.
George Nicolas had his Maserati Levante (pictured) stolen from outside his home in May 2024 after the thieves removed his steering lock with an angle grinder
Shocking pictures show his steering lock bar cut clean in two and dumped in the back of the car along with several interior carpet panels being ripped up and scratches on the exterior
Lisa Smart, Liberal Democrat MP for Hazel Grove, called the figures ‘staggering’ and said that while the statistics applied to the period when the Conservatives were in power, Labour had not done enough to rectify the problem since coming to power.
‘These shocking figures will leave people wondering if car theft has been decriminalised in this country,’ Ms Smart.
‘Tens of thousands of victims across England and Wales are being left without the justice they deserve, with a staggeringly high number of car thefts going unsolved, and thieves getting away scot free.’
Stolen cars that are recovered, are normally taken to a secure police impound where they are kept until the rightful owners can collect them.
The firms who will help ‘steal’ your car back for you
There are companies out there who specialise in recovering stolen vehicles for victims.
Among them is Tracker. The firm, which has been operating for more than 30 years, uses sophisticated VHF radios hidden in cars to help locate them.
The tech is immune to GPS jamming kits used by sophisticated car crime crooks, which can block satellite signals, effectively hiding the vehicle.
The tracking devices are reportedly visible even when cars are parked underground, in shipping containers or overseas in Europe.
They can also be seen by police forces, who can then recover them.
So far the company has boasted of recovering almost 29,700 with the tech leading to more than 3,150 arrests.
Its latest set of figures show that in April, 150 vehicles were recovered – including a £28,000 Lexus that had been hidden in a shipping container at Felixstowe Port.
And a £22,000 Toyota Rav4, fitted with the kit, was reportedly found in a Salford ‘chop shop’ garage on false plates just five hours after being stolen.
All in all, a staggering £3.36m of vehicles were recovered in April alone.
Glen Campbell, director of Preston Caravans and Motorhomes, had one of his Tracker-fitted vehicles stolen.
‘It was a huge relief when the caravan was found and back at the dealership within five hours. If it wasn’t for the Tracker unit, that caravan could have been lost for good,’ he claimed in a testimonial on the tracking company’s website.
There has been a surge in criminal gangs targeting vehicles and taking them to shipping containers. Mother-of-two Sarah has told MailOnline how her £35,000 Toyota RAV4 was stolen during a 4am raid (pictured)
A Range Rover is discovered in the nick of time before it could be shipped out of the country
What the law says you’re allowed to do
Police and authorities insist they should be the first port of call for anyone who has been a victim of crime.
Experts say those seeking to go out and hunt for their missing motors, for instance, could be putting themselves at risk.
However, there is nothing in the law technically stopping someone from searching for their stolen goods.
But should someone use force and assault a person, then they could be at risk of facing a criminal charge.
What do the experts have to say?
Leading vehicle crime experts have insisted police are doing all they can to tackle the gangs.
However, they last night warned that sophisticated organised gangs of crooks were likely behind many of the thefts.
Steve Whittaker works at vehicle recovery firm Tracker as the company’s police liaison manager and said the scale of the thefts was alarming.
‘Vehicle crime has moved on from the youths who would steal a car from the estate and then dump it… it’s organised crime at an industrial level,’ he warned.
‘Lots of vehicles are taken to chop shops or hidden in containers and being shipped abroad.’
Former police officer Mr Whittaker insisted it was incredibly rare for victims of crime to have to recover their own vehicles without police support.
Steve Whittaker works at vehicle recovery firm Tracker as the company’s police liaison manager and said the scale of the thefts was alarming. He is a former police officer
Criminal gangs are packing in stolen vehicles into shipping containers and hiding them behind furniture
Sofas and mattresses are found surrounding a Toyota during a raid in Essex last month
‘This is very few and far between, it’s extremely rare,’ he added. ‘I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but at Tracker we have a 95 per cent recovery rate.
‘I’m not saying police don’t send them them out. But police know the risks of that. You could be sending someone to the deepest darkest south London at the middle of the night. There’s all sorts of risks with that.
‘What members of the public have to be aware of is that there are a lot of competing demands facing the police.
‘If there are 20 phone calls about a firearms incident, collecting your own car will be bottom of the list.’
Many vehicles are snatched and shipped out of the country before the owners even wake up, with Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East common final destinations.
Since the war in Ukraine, Russia has also been flooded with Western cars as the country battles with strict sanctions.
Mike Briggs, an insurance industry veteran who is now UK executive director of the International Association of Auto Theft Investigators (IAATI), said: ‘The organised crime gangs are pushing ahead here in the UK. Not just here in the UK, it’s now a global phenomena.
‘Everything is being shipped wherever money can be made or the vehicles can be exchanged for drugs, weapons or used in human trafficking and things of that nature.
‘It’s really increased and the more we get into this century, the bigger the change to organised crime and the more developed they’re becoming.’
