Police put brakes on car gang who made millions

Two men from South Yorkshire have been jailed for their part in the major car cloning and vehicle theft network which spread across the UK.

Detectives say the true scale of the conspiracy may never be known but they believe the total value of the fraud came to several millions of pounds.

Police estimate high-value vehicle theft, car ringing and crime relating to motoring documents costs more than 26m a year in the Yorkshire region alone.

The leader of the gang, John White, 22, of Thorne, Doncaster, was sentenced to two and a half years in jail by a judge at Preston Crown Court.

His accomplice, Shane Deere, 24, of Bessacar, Doncaster, was given a 21-month jail term yesterday at Doncaster Crown Court.

They were caught after a wide-ranging police operation involving Yorkshire's regional intelligence unit (RIU), which seeks to disrupt gangs who commit crimes in more than one county, and officers from Leicestershire, Lancashire and South Yorkshire police forces.

The investigation was also supported by Auto Trader, which worked with other online car sales outlets like eBay, Piston Heads and Exchange & Mart to monitor suspicious transactions.

Customers who bought cars from the gang would find either that the buyer's contact details were false or that documents that came with the vehicle were forged or stolen.

Many of the frauds were believed to involve a man nicknamed "Doncaster John", a suspect police later identified as being White. As the investigation widened White's involvement in the conspiracy became clearer and he was arrested at his girlfriend's house.

Police then investigated his associates and made six more arrests.

Twelve vehicles were recovered and returned to owners or insurers, including a Land Rover found on the driveway when White was arrested.

Superintendent Mark Wilkie, of Yorkshire RIU, said the investigation had achieved a "fantastic result".

White's gang was initially able to thrive because police had treated each theft as an isolated incident rather than as part of an organised conspiracy.

"The gang had been able to operate under the radar by exploiting cross-border offences which were seen at a local level as single offences," Supt Wilkie added.

"By taking a strategic perspective, we were able to pull all of the disparate strands together and in doing so, a very clear pattern emerged, which pointed to John White as the key suspect, and we were able to help build a significant case."

Auto Trader's customer security and compliance director, Helena Fearon, said: "Auto Trader has led the way in working with police forces across the UK to stamp out trading stolen vehicles and other related crimes and fraud such as car cloning and odometer tampering.

"Using a combination of state-of-the-art software and our highly trained personnel, we were able to assist the RIU in highlighting suspicious car adverts and uncovering this criminal gang."

She added: "It is very important to us and to the hundreds of thousands of satisfied customers that use our service every year, to do so confident in the knowledge that we are proactively working with the police and other enforcement agencies to tackle the illegal trade in motor vehicles."

The RIU is one of several cross-border units set up by Yorkshire's four forces to tackle organised crime which spreads across the region and beyond.

A regional roads policing team has seized assets worth more than 6m from criminals in less than two years.