A fleet of 30 luxury cars worth £6.5m whisked out of the UK to Thailand after being fraudulently bought on finance have been recovered and returned, police have said.
The haul of vehicles included a £220,000 Lamborghini Huracán Spyder – a car described by the maker as “the pinnacle of Italian taste and hand craftsmanship” – along with Porsches, Mercedes and a Ford Mustang.
Detectives from the National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service (Navcis) said the cars were obtained from dealerships in England and from a company that hires out high-end vehicles in 2016 and 2017.
They were shipped to Thailand by sea and air, where they were sold on via legitimate dealerships by members of the gang, which allegedly included Thai and British people.
The operation to find and recover the cars, codenamed Titanium, was launched after an inspection of a container at the Port of Southampton found four Mercedes.
This prompted a wider search and it was established that other UK vehicles stolen via finance fraud had been shipped to Bangkok.
Sharon Naughton, the head of Navcis, said of the Southampton search: “This was the pivot point that led us to working with the Thai authorities and national crime agencies to uncover a whole criminal enterprise. We identified a number of these vehicles had been transported to Bangkok via air freight.”
Police said a Thai man was in custody awaiting trial. Four arrests were made in the UK but no charges brought. All 30 vehicles were returned to the UK by sea, bringing the eight- year investigation to an end.
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The Lamborghini Huracán Spyder is being reunited with its owner, who runs a company renting out supercars. Naughton said: “The person was a private individual who was renting cars. To lose a valuable asset really hurt him and his business personally. This is not a victimless crime.”
The remainder are being returned to the respective dealerships they were taken from. Police believe they have recovered all the cars that were taken in the scam.
Intranee Sumawong, a senior public prosecutor at Thailand’s international affairs department, said Thai nationals especially liked cars from the UK as they drive on the same side of the road. “They love to own high-value cars,” she said. “It’s a very big market in Thailand for these cars.”
Earlier this year 16 people were sentenced in the UK for taking part in a £2m fraud conspiracy that targeted high-value cars. Seventy five cars including Porsches, Mercedes and BMWs were stolen. An organised crime group had made fraudulent credit agreements using stolen information.