U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers used the vehicle identification numbers in two cars to determine they were stolen and prevent them from leaving the Port of Baltimore, potentially preventing what experts call a homeland security threat.
“The person who stole the cars could have shipped them for someone to operate over in West Africa, or that person could have sold the stolen cars unwittingly to someone for export out of the country,” said Steve Sapp, director of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Baltimore office, about the recent incident.
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The cars were turned over to Baltimore City police, but he “was not aware of any homeland security or terrorist threat,” he said.
However, Baltimore’s port is one of the largest in the nation for exporting automobiles, Sapp said, requiring customs officers to check the cars for any export law violations or threats to homeland security, such as terrorist activity.
A recent phenomena in automobile thefts, referred to as VIN cloning, has prompted a global market for stolen vehicles.
Car thieves copy the VIN, which is an algorithm that identifies the car, off a new car. The thief then steals an identical car and replaces
its VIN number with the copied number.
With the legitimate paperwork, the stolen cars can be used to smuggle drugs, undocumented aliens and weapons across borders, or may be shipped out of the country for use as car bombs in terrorist activity, according to Maryland Auto Theft Authority experts.
“We don’t typically go by just the VIN number on the windshield,” Sapp said.
“Most cars also have the VIN stamped on the engine block or the door, so we check the hidden VIN to make sure the documentation is correct.”
In the recent case, the officers entered the VINs into a law enforcement database, showing the 1997 Ford F-350 was reported stolen from Prince William County, Va., and the 1996 Honda Accord from Harvey, Ill., Sapp said.
City police spokesman Sterling Clifford said the police could not speak to this specific investigation.
The cars marked the seventh and eighth stolen vehicles recovered at the port in 2008. The annual average is about a dozen at the Baltimore seaport, but 23 were recovered in 2007, Sapp said.
