VINwiki found two stolen Lamborghinis!

he said well it sounds like it's probably a stolen car so for six years I was the director of sales for Lamborghini Atlanta and during that time I sold a few hundred Lamborghinis many of which stayed local and I think when I started one year we checked in there were 93 Lamborghinis registered in Georgia I certainly increased that during the time that I worked there and we had others were registered in Montana and elsewhere but over time I became pretty familiar with just about all the Lamborghinis that were in town and so not long after we launched Van Wyck II last summer probably sometime in July I was driving home from the office and I looked in a parking lot of the target near my house and I saw an orange 2008 Superleggera and I didn't think there were any orange oh wait Superleggera stirred in town and I was gonna post the car to VIN wiki-like a lot of exotic car spotters to do so I drove down into the parking lot and it was sprinkling rain so I snapped some pictures through my window but then I noticed that the car had a dealer tag on it a reasonable explanation why it had shown up and I didn't know anything about it but it meant that our plate to VIN system wouldn't decode the VIN from the license plate so I decided well I'll get out and I'll actually get it off the car so as I walked up to the car it was fascinating it was a normal option Superleggera but it had ceramic brakes which were about a $15,000 option back in 2008 it was a ran Co borealis the pearl orange color it had the large rear wing the extended interior carbon package the backup camera and presumably navigation those four options were pretty much Universal to Superleggera but when I looked at the VIN there was something peculiar about it and it was printed in the wrong font now most people wouldn't know the font that Lamborghini prints their vans in but I did and I knew it was wrong so that was a little bit strange and when I typed it into VIN wiki it didn't immediately validate the VIN so in the US ven's use a check digit so the vehicle identification number just like a credit card number has a check digit that you can run an algorithm through and it'll immediately tell you if it's a valid VIN now that doesn't work in some parts of Europe and in other parts of the world but in the u.s. it does it's a law that cars sold in the US have to have a mathematically validating VIN so that didn't validate but I stamped a few pictures walked around and got back in my car and went home but the next day when I was looking back through the pictures trying to figure out what was wrong I noticed why the van wasn't validating in fact it was only 16 digits so in the US a gyarados Superleggera van for 2008 would start CHW like any lamborghini then g4 Guyardo you for the US 43 is for Guyardo Superleggera coupe t for an e gear transmission then I'll have a check digit then I'll have an 8 for model year 2008 then it'll say la 0 and then I'll have 4 digits that are the build number and so in this cars case the you wasn't there so there was no country identifying character and that's why the van wasn't validating through our system so I thought that was pretty peculiar so I called a friend of mine who's the chief of police in a local town and told him about it he said well it sounds like it's probably a stolen cars well that's fascinating let's see what we can find out he said let me ask around to the auto theft unit see if anybody's looking for the car and we'll have somebody get back in touch with you so I thought we were onto something interesting and I wanted to keep digging through and it turned out that a couple other people had already spotted that same car around Atlanta and so we were able to sort of compile the history of winner did come in on a truck and what parts of town it had been seen driving in and we've been looking one of the interesting things you can do is build a list of cars so you can add all the examples of a certain car like 2008 Superleggera z-- in the US and in one VIN wiki user who aspires to one day own one of these cars had gone through and done just that so pretty much all the US Superleggera z-- were in Van Wyck II already and we could browse through and see which ones made sense which ones didn't have ceramic brakes which ones were orange because in 2008 they didn't allow any ad personam orders they were all standard range colors they were either white black grey orange or yellow obviously in their Italian names so we ruled out all the cars that weren't on we ruled out cars with cosmetic modifications and we rolled out cars that had been exported and we ruled out cars that didn't have ceramic brakes so we got down to about 25 cars that this one could be assuming that its VIN was wrong and we knew it's that the even the suffix the build number of the VIN was wrong because it wasn't in the range of Superleggera vens so after that we went through and I ran the car faxes and looked across all the information that I could gather on each one and we found out that only one of these cars had ever been reported stolen and it was then I think six six six eight a few days later I got a call from an officer with the Department of Revenue and they had been looking into this car and I told them that we had done some digging and we thought that the car was probably six six six eight and he said yeah that we think that too but we were a little surprised that you were able to figure that out I said yeah and I told him how we'd done it stuff like that and he said he didn't really know much about it but it wasn't stolen strictly speaking but it was probably misrepresented to an insurance company not a wildly uncommon thing particularly back in 2008 and 2009 because at the time these cars were just depreciating catastrophic ly and prior to that banks had been financing way over sticker so it's not uncommon for the owner of one of these cars to be a hundred one hundred fifty thousand dollars upside down in equity so it was a hard thing for them to get rid of and the most convenient solution it seemed at times was just to call their insurance and say it had been stolen and collect on their insurance and potentially gap coverage as well so he didn't have a whole lot more he said they were gonna continue looking for it but that wasn't really good enough for me I wanted to find out more about the car so I went down to our local tag office and I said that I had found this car with a dealer tag on it that I wanted to buy not untrue I'm always interested in buying a cheap guy or dope and so I gave her the dealer tag number and I asked if she would just give me the dealer's name so that I could contact them and see because obviously the car wasn't listed for sale online or anything like that and she was very reluctant but I convinced her to let me know what the name of the dealership was and I found out that it wasn't terribly far from where I live so I drove by the place where it was and walked up and knocked on the door and I I said hey do you guys have an orange Superleggera for sale and the guy who owned the place wasn't there there was a guy subletting some part of the building for detailing and he said oh yeah it's right back here and you want to come and take a look at it and absolutely so I walked back there and got to have a little bit more of a look around the car and the guy didn't care he was happy to let somebody look he assumed the car was for sale because he knew that it was in the building owned by a dealership but next to the car was another 2008 Guyardo it was a spider and so we were looking around both I opened the car it had about 39,000 miles which I think it had been stolen with under two five thousand or under three thousand miles when it when it left California and so someone had put a lot of miles on the car it had cheap tires and some little scuffs around the carbon diffusers and things like that it wasn't in great shape but it was definitely a cool orange I weighed Superleggera so I looked on the door jamb where there's the VIN sticker with all the manufacturer data on it and it had also been altered you could kind of see where someone had gone in and changed it put on that one they had put that you so it was seventeen digits and wouldn't mathematically valid a because the check digit was wrong but it was a full seventeen digit Lamborghini looking VIN that was probably passable to all but maybe me I can't imagine anybody else in the state would have ever taken the time to look or have any about uh knowledge to be able to say that it it didn't make sense for the car to be as it was but I get to looking around the car and I knew there's no real other place for me to find the cars real then without getting it up on a lift and looking at the frame rail but I look in the glove box and the owner's manuals are there and whenever we got a new Lamborghini from the factory we would take out the owner's manual and there's a warranty and maintenance book and on it there's boxes seventeen of them to write in each character of the VIN and whoever had gotten this car purchased it as a stolen car and was using it hadn't bothered to throw that away so I opened it up and look and lo and behold that's exactly which car it was the one we thought the one the Department of Revenue thought it was and so I took a picture and told the guy hey you know have the owner call me I'd love to talk to him about buying the car stuff like that obviously I never heard from him but I followed back up with the Department of Revenue and gave them the information that they had and also told them about the other car which had an identically replicated VIN and some had really gone through some toe trouble here you'd have to have removed the windshields to install the new ven plates but they were thrilled with this silver platter case of auto theft and to discover and I guess they didn't have to worry about you know trying to corroborate any of the other information because it was all presented to them nicely packaged so I talked to a for another friend on the police force that was in that area because it was a different area than the Chief of Police that I knew and he said that they were gonna go in and and get him and so I tried to talk to them a few days later and they were obviously hugely grateful that van Wyk II had been such a help collectively to figure out what the plight was of these cars and I asked him you know did the guy tell you like how he came about them or what he had found or whatever the case may be because over the years I mean I'll be honest I've been offered to buy some stolen cars stolen exotics and they don't tend to bring much money because there's not that much you can do with them I remember I got offered a stolen oh three 360 spider it was when they were worth probably 130 grand and he said it was in South Georgia wrapped in aluminum foil because he wasn't sure if there was a tracking device that might have been telling the people where to come and find it it was exactly the same case as this where he had been upside down couldn't sell the car and rather than getting it repo'd he just reported it stolen got it paid off and then hid the car he said you know you can have it for 25 grand but you have to go and pick it up and obviously I always know it not interested in doing that but you know for plenty of people that might want to track car to export something or whatever the case may be there's a lot of fun to be had for 25 grand and that was certainly what had happened here but the guy who'd had the car for so long was in trouble for a lot more so in fact I don't even believe he was prosecuted for grand theft auto because the cops said that when they got there there were all these illegal drugs and weapons and other things like hidden in the walls of this car dealership lot unit whatever the case may be and so they didn't really bother too much with the Lamborghinis but I was curious who I could try to buy these things from because theoretically they were gonna be owned by insurance companies so I called Lamborghini Newport Beach and I asked them to run the the actual then and to see who the title owner was and they told me that it was titled to Manhattan leasing and that the second lien holder was all-points capital all points capital is one of these banks that does secondary lending through the different leasing companies like Manhattan leasing meant they'll do balloon loans with 35 to 55 percent residual in a sixty or forty eight month term and so I was familiar with them if we had someone with not quite good enough credit to go with any of the other banks we'd sometimes call Manhattan so I called them up and I talked to the president and I said hey are y'all miss it in orange 2008 Superleggera he said you know we're missing a few cars let me check is it yep that one's mine and so I explained him the circumstance said I'd found and he was extremely grateful he seemed and told me that you know he'd send me a $5,000 check for finding the car which I was thrilled with unfortunately he never did that I never heard another word from him and after following up he seems to have decided that it wasn't worth that to return his car but it was a cool experience it was a demonstration of the power of Van Wyck II the way we can crowdsource information to achieve an outcome that other platforms other sources of information never could the cops were grateful they've asked us to find other stolen cars and we've made progress to that since then but it was a great experience a great time and a fun little chase [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 2,934,712

Rating: 4.6790452 out of 5

Keywords: Lamborghini, Gallardo, Superleggera, Stolen, Grand Theft Auto, Insurance Fraud, Arancio Borealis, Orange, Car Spotting, Exotic Car Spotting, VINwiki, Ed Bolian, Car Stories, Storytime, V10, E-Gear, Paddle Shift, Spyder, Lamborghini Gallardo

Id: 09DTHmO6Dzc

Length: 12min 23sec (743 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/samsy2]

Just when you think you have every end buttoned up. Steve the detail guy, leasing 300 sq ft of your garage, ruins it all.

[u/Downvote_me_dumbass]

I’d still want my $5,000.

[u/pflanz]

I could listen to this guy read the phonebook and enjoy it. Also, a good story.

[u/eyeh8you2]

I hate nothing about this

[u/edbolian]

Thank you guys so much for the kind words. Glad you enjoyed the story. It was a crazy thing to see come together.