The lucrative business of the ‘eco-thieves’ who stole more than 200 hybrid cars

They mainly stole high-end vehicles in black, white or blue. They looked for specific models from an Asian brand and, if possible, recently purchased. But, above all, they looked for hybrids, that is, those that combined gasoline and electric motors, up to 40% less polluting than traditional ones. What motivated these thieves was not, by any means, to combat climate change, but simply profit: these cars can double their price in Mauritania, Senegal or Poland, where most were sent, given the high demand in these countries.

The Central Operative Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard dismantled on February 13 the international network that it considers responsible for the theft of at least 217 vehicles with these characteristics in the last three years, although the armed institute has not reported this until this Tuesday as the case has remained secret in a Madrid court. There are 23 men and two women arrested (19 of them in Spain, some with more than 50 previous convictions for similar acts). Among those arrested are some of the leaders of the organization who operated from Madrid and Malaga, and 18 stolen cars have been recovered. Last year, 32,820 vehicles were stolen in Spain, according to crime statistics from the Ministry of the Interior. In the first quarter of 2024, there are 8,031. Many are never located.

The operation, dubbed Z-Babylon, began in November 2021, when agents from the UCO’s Automobile Crime Section detected the shipment by road from Spain to the port of Le Havre (France) of four vehicles that had been stolen in different locations in Madrid. They all had in common that they were of a specific make and model, SUV type (cars with a body similar to off-road vehicles but without four-wheel drive), had a hybrid engine, had falsified French license plates installed and showed no signs that the lock or ignition device had been forced. The investigations initiated then together with the French Office for the Fight against Itinerant Crime and the EU Agency for Police Cooperation (Europol) gradually made it possible to identify the alleged members of the complex plot, which had international ramifications that extended to Poland, Senegal, Mauritania, Austria and Ukraine.

Investigators place a Mauritanian citizen at the top of the organisation, who lived between Paris and his country, but who also spent time in Spain, where he entered through Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. He was in charge of giving instructions to other members of the criminal organisation to falsify French car documents and to take out insurance that gave the stolen vehicles an appearance of legality. His lieutenant was a second individual, originally from Morocco, who lived in Brussels and who in turn transmitted these orders to two of his compatriots settled in Madrid and Malaga. They were in turn in charge of giving instructions to the people who stole the cars – many of them Polish – and then manipulating them to make them appear as legal vehicles and send them to France by road.

The monitoring of the alleged perpetrators revealed a studied modus operandi with strong self-protection measures to avoid being arrested. The first step was to go around different towns in Madrid, Segovia and Guadalajara looking for vehicles with the required characteristics. The next step was the robbery, which they carried out mainly in the early hours of the morning between Sunday and Thursday, when there are fewer people on the street. They had detected a security breach in certain car models to open the door without forcing the lock and, once inside, they used an old Nokia mobile phone to which they had installed a software which allowed them to start the vehicle in a matter of seconds.

The car was then taken to a public car park where it would go unnoticed, or to residential areas with little traffic, where it remained for several days, to ensure that it was not carrying any geolocation device. After that time, the thieves took the car to isolated, wooded areas of Chiloeches (Guadalajara), the towns of Redueña and Santos de la Humosa in Madrid, or to a chalet on the outskirts of Borox (Toledo), where they proceeded to modify the chassis number and place the identification stickers to make them match those of a legal vehicle registered in France.

Once the false number plates were installed, the network hired the services of a roadside assistance crane to transport the vehicles to a repair shop in Fuensalida (Toledo) or to private car parks in Esquivias (Toledo) and Ciempozuelos (Madrid) to, again, leave them for a few days awaiting the next step. This consisted of transporting the car to French ports, where they were shipped to Mauritania and Senegal, countries where people pay up to 80,000 euros for cars bought in Europe for half that price, according to sources involved in the investigation. “The fact that there is no register of the vehicle fleet in these countries makes recovering them an almost impossible mission,” they add.

Another part of the vehicles was transported by road to Poland, where it was introduced into the legal market through companies that sell used cars. Between the theft of the car and its sale at the destination could take between two and three months. eco-thieves they were in no hurry.

_