VINwiki found 2 STOLEN Lamborghinis & the thieves got away with it!

over the years we've shared well over a thousand stories here on the channel but the one that had the greatest impact on vinwicki as a company was the story of us recovering two stolen lamborghinis that had been missing for over six years at the time it helped us to really showcase exactly what we wanted the vinwicki app to be about and it helped us to cement some amazing relationships with sponsors like premier financial services but at the time there were some legal details that i simply couldn't reveal and since then there have been some updates with the cars some updates with the case and so i thought today i would retell the story with all the details that i couldn't reveal the first time we launched the vinwicki app in 2016 and we describe it as a crowdsourcing vehicle history reporting platform meaning anyone can post information to any car by its vent or by its license plate and that becomes very social timeline of that car's history so around that time i'm doing a lot of car shows and events and presentations just trying to evangelize the concept that if you tell your car story it can add value down the road and a couple of months after that i guess in august of 2016 one sunday evening i was driving home and out of the corner of my eye in the parking lot of a target near my house i saw an orancio borealis a pearl orange 2008 lamborghini gallardo superleggera now for the five years prior i had been the director of sales at lamborghini atlanta and i knew that at any moment there were between 100 and 150 lamborghinis registered in the state of georgia and at that time i had sold most of them and if not i'd seen them in service and i did not know of any orange08 superleggeras that were registered in georgia and so i was fascinated to go down there and post the car to our new app and so i pull in it's kind of a drizzly day and i notice that the car has a dealer tag on it now with dealer tags or manufacturer tags or transporter tags those aren't tied to the ven so when somebody makes a post through our plate to vin system we actually pull the vin from the license plate out of the state systems and then all the posts are referenced by the then since that doesn't change the license plates will come and go with different ownership transitions and so since it was on a dealer tag i couldn't just pull it up through our system i had to get out and actually take a picture of the vin in order to post it so i snap a few pictures around the car and it's a high option superleggero with carbon ceramic brakes and the high rear wing and backup camera and stuff like that but it's not in the nicest of shape it's got cheap tires on it some scratches and things and it's clearly been driven there's also a child seat in it which i thought was fascinating i had about a two-year-old son at the time and so the idea of somebody driving around in their lamborghini with their kid was something i was becoming more and more fascinated with and so obviously i can't post it right then i just snap some pictures but you know it's very peculiar there's a new car in town i'm excited about that so i go home and start looking at the pictures and immediately something stands out the vin that's on the windshield of the car is actually in the wrong font now of course who else is going to notice this but i'd sold a ton of lamborghinis at that point and i knew that the font they used for at least the north american cars looked different than what i saw and when i typed it into the venwiki app it wouldn't let me post and that's because it would not validate now post 1981 u.s fins use what's called a checksum in order to make sure that immediately it is a valid then it keeps people at service shops and things from mistyping a character and then it not referencing the right car and so you run a calculation against a check digit that's part of the vin and that will tell you immediately if it's a valid bin and this wasn't but it wasn't exactly because one of the digits was off it was because one of the digits was missing so as i counted them there were only 16 digits rather than the 17 that there should have been and that was strange but at the time we weren't as familiar with bin swapping and how prevalent that's obviously become since then with stolen cars and things like that so the next day i called a friend at the sandy springs police department and i said hey i know this isn't your jurisdiction your area but i came across this car and i don't really know what to make of it and he said well based on what you've described it sounds like it's probably a stolen car and somebody's put the wrong then on it he said let me dig into it a little bit with our auto theft division and if something turns up i'll give you a call back but i don't hear from him but in a couple of days later i do get a call from somebody with the department of revenue rather than the auto theft unit and they said they were looking for an orange gallardo in the atlanta area they'd heard it had kind of been around a few places and actually when i had posted to the wrong then in the vinwicki app we can do that as saying it's like a non-us vend to get around our validation other people had spotted that car actually once on a truck outside of atlanta tech village where i was almost every week at that point for different meetings and things like that once around buckhead and stuff like so people had seen this car and they'd actually gotten close enough obviously to write down the shown then and post to it in that way through the app and so they knew that the car was in the area but they didn't know much more than that and so i told him that i thought that the car was probably then 6668 and he was kind of confused because like that's what we think it is as well but how would you possibly know that and i explained that in the two days prior i'd been talking to my developers and the people who were helping us to build up the vinwicki app and we had found a list of all of the us superleggeras from 2008 in the app so one of the features that people like to use is building lists of cars in the vinwicki app it can be all the cars that you've ever owned it can be all of a certain type of car in this case it was and lamborghini only imported about 100 2008 superleggers and they were only in five colors orange yellow black gray and white and if i eliminated the other colors and the cars that were significantly modified and the cars that didn't have carbon ceramic brakes fairly quickly we narrowed it down to about 20 cars that this one could have been and so i went through and pulled all the car faxes and literally only one had ever been reported stolen and that was ven6668 so the car had the zhw gu us prefix for a lamborghini gallardo and then it was a superleggera but then the last build sequence was actually i think like almost 8 000 which would have been well beyond the sequencing for a superleggera so in addition to the fact that the vin was not in the right font didn't have the right number of characters i knew that it had been sort of fabricated by someone who didn't know the right range of vins to put on a superleggera so they said yes we do think it's that car but we haven't had a whole lot of luck in tracking it down any further but we really appreciate the pictures that you sent us and you know if anything pops up we will be happy to share more now my interest in the car was honestly i thought who in the world is going to be the buyer whenever this goes back to an insurance company or a lien holder or whoever owns this car legally right now it's got to be cheap and i always want to buy a cheap gallardo and so i was really hopeful that we'd be able to you know get this thing back and either buy it through the police auction or somehow buy this cheap orange superleggera because they are phenomenal cars and at the time i just had the green lp 640 which was such low miles such a nice car i was honestly starting to feel guilty about it and i couldn't get tires for it pirelli only manufactures them every few years there weren't any available for the right cars that wouldn't harm the diff in the clutch and so i wanted another car to drive and so this seemed like the perfect candidate needed a little bit of reconditioning needed the vins put back onto it that would be right but we seemed to have a case for that so i was hoping that we'd be able to find it but they really didn't have anything however i did have obviously the picture of the dealer tag that was on the car and so i thought since that was in gwinnett county i could go to the gwinnett county tag office and ask the representatives there who owns this dealer tag because obviously they would believe that this car is for sale i want to buy this car i'll go talk to them and maybe they'll tell me so i go in and i wait my turn and the lady that picks my number is not having a great day and she immediately tells me that she's not allowed to share that kind of information with me but through some sweet talking and some say shrewd negotiation she eventually agrees to just tell me the name of the dealership and i thank her profusely i go home and obviously then i can google it look through the state records and i can find an address and in fact there was also a phone number of course nobody answers this phone number and so i decide well the only thing left to do is drive over and see it now it was not like a normal car dealership lot it was part of a you know strip of warehouse units that was not facing the street was not really the kind of place that you'd normally want to have a car dealership and so i knock on the door and this kid comes and answers and says you know how can i help you and i said do you guys have an orange guyardo superleggera here for sale he says well we do but the owner of the dealership's not here so i can show you the car but i can't do anything beyond that you'll just have to talk to him if you want to buy it i said man that would be amazing so he walks us back through a couple of hallways and we wind up in this you know fairly small warehouse has room for four five six cars and in fact there is the 2008 orange superleggera and there's also another gallardo spider right next to it and kind of a silvery blue i think it's a zero fetish and so it had the exact same wrong font it put in exactly the same way under the windshield and so somebody had gone through a lot of trouble in trying to swap the vins on these cars but you know what can you really do with a stolen car i mean over the years i've been offered several stolen exotic cars and very interesting circumstances but they're always very very inexpensive because there's again not that much you can do with them you can't legally register them and if you drive them around too much you're bound to get into some trouble and so i actually opened the door and the door jamb plaque had also been remanufactured and fabricated in order to show this wrong then it was also only 16 digits and so just a very very strange thing so i'm looking around the car and since the windshield and the door jams are showing the wrong thing without getting the car up in the air i'm not going to see the frame rail i'm not going to have a really really easy way to find the actual vin for this car but he lets us start it up get in it i take some more pictures and it's showing almost 40 000 miles and so it's been driven a lot and as i recall having looked at the carfax i think it was stolen with very very few miles when it was fairly new in fact and so you know nobody had taken this car to an authorized service center they because they might have reported the vin at that point that would have been flagged as incorrect and so i don't know who had been taking care of this car but it hadn't been driven terribly affectionately some curved wheels and stuff like that but as i opened the glove box there's the owner's manual and i knew that when a new lamborghini got delivered the owner's manual had boxes blanks where we had to hand write in the vin and as i open it up on the first page there it is the vin4668 and so i took a picture of that took some more pictures of the cars left the guy in my contact information i said hey if you don't mind when he gets back in tell him i'm interested in buying the car and i'll be happy to come back and we could take it for a drive and so obviously i never hear from the guy but i go back home and i send all that information to the people at the department of revenue and the cops and everything and they're like wow it's all just kind of served up to us on a silver platter and so i'm excited maybe one day soon i'm going to get the chance to bid at a police auction and maybe buy this car but obviously the possibility remained that it might go back to the lien holder and i had noticed that both of the cars had been stolen out of the state of california and even though carfax didn't show this big stolen brand on a summary page it did show an entry that said each car had been stolen and when i had talked to the department of revenue officer he said it wasn't exactly that this was like a grand theft auto situation it seemed like the guy just owed too much money on the cars and probably said they were stolen in order to get his insurance to buy the things out and it's also possible that the insurance companies had never really paid so i called a friend that was a california dealer and i said hey can you look in your system and see who the lien holders are or who's titled to these two cars and he said that one of them was to a dealership it was to oguera that was the spider and the superleggera was to all points capital now i had already contacted the usual suspects of exotic car lenders that were really really active in 2008 people like premier financial services that were kind of the go-to outlets for exotic car financing and none of them recognized the van none of them were missing either of the cars however all points was kind of like a secondary lender and they would buy groups of loans from these smaller leasing companies that would then kind of replenish their cash and make new deals and so i knew a few of them that used all points i'd actually had a lease through a different company that used all points back when i had the exotic car rental company and so it wasn't through that company but i called another one manhattan leasing i got in touch with the president and he said wow yes i am missing for six years now this orange guyardo superleggera how did you find it and i explained it to him he was very impressed he said actually i'll send you a five thousand dollar finders fee for locating the car for me and so i put him in touch with the cops and they were obviously at that time the local cops to where the dealership was were going to set up a sting or a repossession or whatever you'd call it when they were going to go in and get the cars so i didn't hear much else from the cops for a week or so i did get in touch with the guys from ogura they were excited to be able to recover their car and it was odd for a dealership to kind of be the lean holder in a situation like that but what happens many times is that if somebody doesn't make their first payment or their first three payments in many cases the legal verbiage and the contracts between the lien holders and the dealerships mean that the dealer actually has to buy out the loan and they have to then go about repossessing the car that happened to us a few times while i was working at the dealership and so clearly that's what had happened with the spider so the superleggera would eventually go back to manhattan leasing oguera would get the spider bank as soon as the cops could go get the cars and i actually had a friend in the alpharetta police department that had gone in with everybody to try to get the cars back and again i didn't hear from him for like a week after i knew they were going to try to go and get them and so i called him and i said hey what happened and he said oh man i'm so sorry i meant to call you everything worked great obviously we found the cars and i'm like what did he say how did he get them what did he pay for how much were they worth stolen and he's like you know what we really didn't get into that because in addition to the cars stuff that you obviously didn't see in the walls and around there was a ton of drugs and illegal firearms he was in so much trouble for all of that obviously we were going to arrest him dealing with stolen cars was such a low criminal offense we didn't really worry about it obviously we've got them they're in our impound lot we'll get in touch with these guys and get them their cars back but this guy's going to go away for a very very long time so obviously i've just learned that i've gotten a much more serious criminal into some trouble trying to buy these two cars and i didn't really know what to expect but he assured me that i would be okay and that everything was all right and whatever and so obviously a year or so goes by we start the vinwicki youtube channel the next summer in june of 2017 and one of the first stories that i tell is about recovering these cars and so after i release it i send it to him and he immediately calls me this is my friend in the alpharetta police department he says ed did you follow the way that case went i was like no i don't spend a lot of time looking into such things he said well he's out and i'm like what do you mean he's out you arrested him for all this stuff he said well because we had relied on your information to go in obviously we used the dealership address for the warrants and somebody just didn't do enough diligence and didn't do enough research and didn't fill things out appropriately and so the warrants that we used to collect everything were for that unit but in fact as you'll recall you went through some hallways and things and you actually were in a different unit in this complex a different address when you saw the lamborghinis and that's where everything else was and so we executed a search warrant on a property and walking through open areas we ended up on another property and so when we seized all the stuff and when we arrested this guy we were not where we were supposed to be according to the warrant and so all of the evidence got thrown out and the guy walked and i'm like what so he's out there and obviously many people had commented like oh ed you snitch you just got this guy in trouble but in fact it would appear that i got the guy out of trouble because i did all the police work for these guys and i told them where stuff was and it was when you walked through the door of that address but apparently it was somewhere else and so even though they got everything they were looking for and a whole lot more them relying on what i told them is what got this guy off now i've never heard from this guy i've talked to other people that knew him that kind of recognized the details of the story and obviously recognized some of the cars and they said after that day he never came back they'd heard he moved somewhere out west or something like that so since then obviously i've shared the story with about four million people and i've never heard anything from this guy so i assume that i'm not going to get killed over my involvement in this whole thing but the cars did go back to the lien holders the superleggera went to manhattan leasing the spyder went to oguera i tried to buy both of them but both of them thought the cars were worth about a hundred thousand dollars which i didn't think with the wrong vins and all the miles and no service and everything that that was fair so i think i offered 45 or 50 grand on each of them but they didn't decide to take my offer so i didn't get to buy either of the cars since then they've gone around they've been posted on vinwiki each sold a couple of times the superleggera is quite visually modified new front bumpers and graphics and stuff like that the spyder now has huracan wheels on it of all things but it's so cool to see them out but these guys probably have no idea unless they watch vinwicki exactly how crazy the past of these cars are because on carfax it clearly shows that the titles were not branded in the new states where these cars were sold and it's very possible that used car dealers are not properly representing the exact history of these cars that's what we want the venwiki app to do now unfortunately manhattan leasing decided my participation in this was not worth five thousand dollars to get their hundred thousand dollar car back and so they've never paid me my five grand and i called them out for that in this video and i also called them out for it in a video i made a few months later just kind of detailing all the different options for exotic car financing the leasing companies the finance companies that you might want to use and i told people don't use manhattan leasing because they'll tell you one thing and then they won't do it and in seeing that and obviously the quality of the content around exotic car financing the people at premier financial services contacted me and said hey have they gotten like mad at you or tried to get you to take the video down i was like no i mean what i said is all true they didn't pay me they said they were going to pay me i have emails that said they were going to pay me and they're like wow that seems like really bad marketing we'd like to do the opposite we'd like to sponsor your channel now i'd use premiere many many times at the dealership they do have a great simple lease program and we've spent the last four years telling you about it in our audience and it's a great way to buy a car it minimizes your down payment it minimizes your monthly payments it gives you a lot more buying power and they're just great people to deal with so we appreciate them for that and since they sponsored us earlier this year they were actually acquired so now they have even more lending power even more strategic partnerships and they are even better than ever so we love premier financial services for their continued support of benwicke and every time they've said they would send us money they have [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 265,023

Rating: 4.9525585 out of 5

Keywords: Ed Bolian, VINwiki, Car Stories, Lamborghini, Vehicle History, Carfax, app, business, entrepreneur, investment, roi, stolen, recovery, marketing, technology, development, detective

Id: Wop7pzkE3_A

Length: 18min 42sec (1122 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021