An organized gang made up of just five members was capable of stealing vehicles, modifying all their identification and tracking components, re-registering them with false plates and putting them up for sale.
The plot used high-tech tools and devices that allowed them to pass off their merchandise as other cars of the same make, model and color that either arrived at a scrapyard after an accident or are still in circulation.
After a year of investigation, the Alicante Civil Guard has managed to identify the members of the criminal group, dismantle its entire infrastructure and return some of the stolen cars to their legitimate owners.
Four of them, including a father and his son, have been arrested, and the fifth has been declared under investigation, for the alleged crimes of motor vehicle theft, document falsification and membership in a criminal organization.
After being placed at the disposal of the Investigative Court 2 of Dénia (Alicante), those arrested have been released with charges.
The Pima-Kradsti operation began in April of last year, when agents from the armed institute detected the first signs that a highly sophisticated network dedicated to vehicle theft was operating in the north of the province of Alicante.
It was a well-structured group that did not need the intervention of third parties to steal the cars, preferably mid-range so that they would have an easy outlet on the market, manipulate their security and tracking components, make them up, as it is called in police jargon, to make them go through other identical cars and offer them on pages for the sale of second-hand vehicles, as explained in a press conference by Colonel José Hernández, head of the Alicante Command, and Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Darder, head of the Judicial Police Headquarters of Alicante, and Lieutenant Rubén Sanz, from the Heritage and Illicit Vehicle Traffic group of the Central Judicial Police unit.
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The cars were stolen in the provinces of Alicante, Madrid and Valencia, and even one of them, already identified by the Civil Guard, in the Netherlands, indicates Darder.
Afterwards, they would park them in a public place, with occasional transfers, to ensure that they did not have a GPS system with which the owners could track them.
After that period, they were taken to the criminal organization's workshops, located in the Alicante municipalities of Benissa and Xàbia, where they were manipulated.
To do this, they used machinery and tools to open vehicles and clone their keys and switchboards, laser cutters to manufacture license plates, frequency detectors and inhibitors, microcameras and even original stamped papers, with their corresponding stamps, to falsify documentation. .
Once the vehicle was in the workshop, the network completely disguised them to pass them off as legal cars.
To do this, Sanz says, they observed similar cars abroad, in countries such as Sweden, Denmark, Ukraine, Germany or Poland, or in Spain, from which they took note of their license plates.
Afterwards, they falsified the documentation and identifying elements, which the different manufacturer brands distribute throughout the vehicle, to pass them off as the damaged cars that the members of the gang had identified and purchased, with all the regulatory papers included, in scrapyards.
The frames, located on the engine, in the glove compartment, on the doors or under the seats, were filed to engrave new numbers or covered with stickers that were difficult to discover.
They also manufactured the license plates that belonged to other identical cars and thus inserted them into the legal circle of Spanish traffic.
Finally, they sold them.
The Civil Guard operation, in which agents from the Organized Crime Team and the Judicial Police from various districts have participated, with the collaboration of the police from Bulgaria, Sweden, Poland and Europol, lasted almost a year, it states. Hernandez.
Sources from the investigation assure that the surveillance of the suspects was very complicated, since the members of the gang took many security measures, always tried to confirm that no one was following them and used shuttle vehicles that made way for the recently stolen vehicles and in any time they were transferred.
On March 6, the agents carried out searches of the suspects' homes, located in Dénia, Xàbia, Teulada, Calp and the Valencian municipality of Gandía, and the organization's mechanical workshops.
Thirteen stolen vehicles have been recovered and there are another four that are being identified.
Investigators do not know the total number of cars the gang has traded.
Following police intervention, four people were arrested, aged between 19 and 50, all of them Bulgarian nationals, and one more is being investigated.
According to researchers, of all the criminal groups specialized in thefts of dismantled vehicles in Spain, this is the one that reached the highest levels of sophistication.
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