Surging car theft in the UK is being driven by organised crime gangs targeting vehicles to be smuggled out and resold in countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo and Russia, a study said Thursday.

Criminals were increasingly using vehicle theft technology to enable a fast and well-organised “stolen to order” model especially of high-end cars, the report by the Royal United Services Institue think-tank said.

Vehicle thefts have risen by 75 percent in a decade, according to government figures, a reversal of the trend seen over the previous two decades.

The thieves use modern vehicle theft devices, often costing over £20,000 ($27,000), with the market for the gadgets “rapidly adapting amid high criminal demand”.

“The trend towards sophistication affects more than just how vehicles are stolen. Increasingly, the speed at which vehicles can be taken, their identities masked or changed and subsequently sold… speaks to a more streamlined criminal landscape,” the report said.

A vehicle could be stolen in one county and “be in another county –- with cloned plates – before anyone has been able to report the vehicle as stolen”, one police officer was quoted as saying.

“Many vehicles were stolen, loaded and out of the UK within a day,” the report added.

Destinations included Cyprus, Georgia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

“Vehicles often arrive at second-hand dealerships or scrapyards where they are sold into other Middle Eastern and North African countries, and as far as Russia,” the report said.

“Examples have emerged of vehicles vanishing from UK streets and reappearing in Moscow.”

The number of domestic vehicles stolen in the UK rose to 136,396 in 2022-3, a 75 percent rise on 2013-14, with the proportion leading to a criminal charge dropping from 9.2 percent to 2.6 percent over the same period.

The trend coincided with funding shortfalls faced by police forces resulting in fewer vehicle crime units.

Forces such as London’s Metropolitan Police, “which once possessed an almost triple-digit vehicle-crime investigative team, have seen their numbers dwindle to only a handful of officers”, the report said.

Policing authorities had also left the international dimension to car theft “largely unchecked with minimal attention paid to outgoing cargo from the UK”, it added. (AFP)