Hooky cars.

[dipsydoodle]

Stolen Cars En Route to Tajikistan Stopped by Uzbek Customs.

TASHKENT, January 5 (RIA Novosti) – Uzbekistan’s customs officers stopped some 20 luxury vehicles stolen in the EU countries from entering Tajikistan last year, local media reported Sunday.

All the cars, worth an estimated $1.5 million, were traveling to Tajikistan from the Baltic states, particularly Latvia and Lithuania, where the plate numbers as well as the documents were changed.

The vehicles, including high-end BMWs and Range Rovers, were transported to Tajikistan by rail. Checks conducted by Interpol found that the vehicles had been stolen in the EU.

The German tabloid newspaper Bild claimed that some of 200 vehicles stolen in Germany and located on GPS trackers as being in Tajikistan could now be in the use in the entourage of President Emomali Rakhmon.

The Tajik government said it would look into the matter but called the report “provocative and untrue.”

http://en.ria.ru/world/20140105/186259914/Stolen-Cars-En-Route-to-Tajikistan-Stopped-by-Uzbek-Customs.html

[DetlefK]

1. Here's a trick car-smugglers use:

They keep a huge file on cars they can copy: There exists a car of that model with that color and that plate-number.

When they steal a car of that model, they repaint it to that color and craft a counterfeit plate with those numbers. At the border, the frontier-guards most of the time only check those three attributes model, color and number. And they all match, so the car is deemed not stolen.

(I read a story about a guy who saw somebody else driving his wife's car. He followed him and called the police. It turned out that it wasn't his wife's car: It was a stolen car made to look like it.)