Scout® Helps Crack OCG Vehicle Theft Ring
The challenge before Scout®
An OCG were stealing high value vehicles, removing identification marks and re-selling them across the Midlands and beyond.
Investigators were having to identify the network of individuals involved in this conspiracy and follow the money trail linked to their criminality. However, the OCG were well organised in covering their tracks. Manually having to research and draw links across disparate data sources such as the DVLA, the internet and commercial data sources was incredibly time-consuming. Proactively investigating this offence was impossible and months had passed before potential arrests were possible.
How Scout® helped:
A Scout® user was presented with the original lines of enquiry relating to a garage and several missing vehicle registration plates.
The operator then used Scout® to concurrently interrogate the web, a range of commercial data sources, the DVLA and the DVSA database.
Within 18 minutes Scout®:
- Identified the conspirators,
- Identified where the OCG were advertising their “services” and vehicles on the web,
- Located the relevant locations (garages) linked to the wider offending
- Found the commercial network which was used to launder the proceeds of the conspiracy.
Officers commented that Scout had found, “in the time it takes to make a coffee”, the evidence they had spent three months obtaining through manual investigation of those data sets.