Recently, CTV News Investigates found out that a car stolen from an Ontario street was tracked to Nigeria.
The car owner is Ahmad Abdullah, whose 2017 Toyota 4Runner SUV disappeared from his street in September 2021. According to Ahmad, he thought he would never see the car again.
He told CTV News Investigates that he looked for clues in surveillance videos to track the thieves unlocking his car and driving in seconds but concluded that it was an organized and professional crime because he couldn’t track them. More than six months later, his car has been tracked to Lagos, Nigeria, where it’s parked in the lot of a suburb in Lagos for sale.
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He tells CTV News Investigates, “I got a call from you. You sent me a picture of my car. It blew my mind. This is a big operation. There should be more people looking into it. We’re talking millions of dollars. This has to be taken seriously.”
According to Michael Slack of Equity Association, an agency in Canada that seeks to clamp down on insurance fraud, he said, “there’s an ever-expanding global market around the world for stolen vehicles to be sold, and there is an ease of smuggling the vehicles out of the country and to other continents.”
The 2017 Toyota 4Runner SUV stolen from Ahmad is worth 18,4 million naira in Canada, and there’s the possibility it’d be sold for up to 23 million naira in Nigeria.
Since the car spotted in Lagos looked like Ahmad’s, CTV News hired a team of Nigerian journalists to look into the situation. In mid-April, the team arranged to meet the car vendor at Amuwo Odofon, Lagos. The seller brought them to examine the Toyota Forerunner and claimed it was imported legally from the United States. When the Nigerian journalists asked for the car’s paperwork, he wouldn’t share it.
The seller also refused to share the VIN. But, all the identifying marks within the car indicates that it indeed belongs to Ahmad.
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