Ilia Dimitrova in Sofia, on the crime rings that move stolen cars across borders.
Car thieves in Europe are using ever more sophisticated techniques to sneak thousands of vehicles out of western Europe for resale as far away as the Middle East, an international conference on car crime heard last week.
Each year some 500,000 to 800,000 cars are stolen by multinational criminal networks in western Europe, according to Serafino Santilli, a car crime expert from Rome's branch of Interpol.
"Thieves adapt very quickly to new methods we introduce - they always find some weakness to attack," added Gilbert Jooris, a Belgian customs inspector.
Italy, with 300,000 car thefts each year, and Germany, with more than 60,000, are the countries hardest hit by car crime, experts said.
An idiosyncrasy in German law - ownership documents are separate from vehicle licence documents - has been used to register in Belgium cars stolen after they are leased in Germany, Jooris said.
At Belgian customs, the thief shows a German licence document as well as a forged proof of purchase, hiding the property deed which shows that the luxury car has not yet been paid for.
Because the first few months' lease has been paid, the car is not registered stolen for some time, making it easy for the thief to sell it on, Jooris explained.
In Austria, where nearly 4,000 cars were stolen last year, car rental firms are often tricked by stolen or forged credit cards. Another frequent ruse is to hire expensive cars using identity documents of Yugoslav soldiers killed in the wars of the 1990s, said Herbert Bauer, an expert from Austria's interior ministry.
In a different scam, US and Canadian citizens arrive in Austria with false credit cards, they hire cars and then drive them to the country's eastern neighbours in return for a free airline ticket and €3,000 payment. Last year nearly 2,000 Austrian cars were stolen abroad, notably in neighbouring eastern European countries where Austrians travel for short breaks. A total 489 Austrian cars were stolen in Hungary last year, 299 in Slovakia, and 232 in the Czech Republic.
In the Czech Republic people who do not own cars are surprised to find they have one registered with the police by an unknown person, said Renata Vrtichkova, a criminal expert with the Czech police.
"The quality of faked identifying signs on a car and forged documents is so high that it is difficult to spot a fraud during a routine inquiry," she added.
In Bulgaria, thieves steal cars and then demand a ransom to return them, as medium and low class cars are often not insured, according to interior ministry secretary general Boiko Borissov.
Police have also seized electronic implements, some tiny enough to be hidden "even in mobile telephones", that can neutralise sophisticated computerized anti-theft and alarm systems on late-model cars, he added.
Tracing routes along which stolen cars are transported, Bauer said that expensive cars stolen in Italy often passed first through Austria to Hungary and the Balkans.
Medium-class vehicles, meanwhile, often went through the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary via Austria to Slovenia and the Balkans. Stolen cars can travel as far as the Middle East.
German police have detected a channel from Germany via Austria, Hungary and Romania to ex-Soviet countries.
Italy is becoming more and more a transit route for cars stolen in France and Spain travelling to Greece and the Balkans, said Santilli.
(- AFP)