The curious case of the disappearing Lamborghinis

MIT Technology Review · Feb 17, 2026 · Collected from RSS

Full Article

When Sam Zahr first saw the gray Rolls-Royce Dawn convertible with orange interior and orange roof, he knew he’d found a perfect addition to his fleet. “It was very appealing to our clientele,” he told me. As the director of operations at Dream Luxury Rental, he outfits customers in the Detroit area looking to ride in style to a wedding, a graduation, or any other event with high-end vehicles—Rolls-Royces, Lamborghinis, Bentleys, Mercedes G-Wagons, and more. But before he could rent out the Rolls, Zahr needed to get the car to Detroit from Miami, where he bought it from a used-car dealer. His team posted the convertible on Central Dispatch, an online marketplace that’s popular among car dealers, manufacturers, and owners who want to arrange vehicle shipments. It’s not too complicated, at least in theory: A typical listing includes the type of vehicle, zip codes of the origin and destination, dates for pickup and delivery, and the fee. Anyone with a Central Dispatch account can see the job, and an individual carrier or transport broker who wants it can call the number on the listing.Zahr’s team got a call from a transport company that wanted the job. They agreed on the price and scheduled pickup for January 17, 2025. Zahr watched from a few feet away as the car was loaded into an enclosed trailer. He expected the vehicle to arrive in Detroit just a few days later—by January 21. But it never showed up. Zahr called a contact at the transport company to ask what happened. “He’s like, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Zahr told me his contact angrily told him they mostly ship Coca-Cola products, not luxury cars. “He was yelling and screaming about it,” Zahr said. Over the years, people have broken into his business to steal cars, or they’ve rented them out and never come back. But until this day, he’d never had a car simply disappear during shipping. He’d expected no trouble this time around, especially since he’d used Central Dispatch—“a legit platform that everyone uses to transport cars,” he said. “That’s the scary part about it, you know?” Wreaking havoc Zahr had unwittingly been caught up in a new and growing type of organized criminal enterprise: vehicle transport fraud and theft. Crooks use email phishing, fraudulent paperwork, and other tactics to impersonate legitimate transport companies and get hired to deliver a luxury vehicle. They divert the shipment away from its intended destination and then use a mix of technology, computer skills, and old-school chop shop techniques to erase traces of the vehicle’s original ownership and registration. These vehicles can be retitled and resold in the US or loaded into a shipping container and sent to an overseas buyer. In some cases, the car has been resold or is out of the country by the time the rightful owner even realizes it’s missing. “Criminals have learned that stealing cars via the web portals has become extremely easy, and when I say easy—it’s become seamless,” says Steven Yariv, the CEO of Dealers Choice Auto Transport of West Palm Beach, Florida, one of the country’s largest luxury-vehicle transport brokers. Individual cases have received media coverage thanks to the high value of the stolen cars and the fact that some belong to professional athletes and other celebrities. In late 2024, a Lamborghini Huracán belonging to Colorado Rockies third baseman Kris Bryant went missing en route to his home in Las Vegas; R&B singer Ray J told TMZ the same year that two Mercedes Maybachs never arrived in New York as planned; and last fall, NBA Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal had a $180,000 custom Range Rover stolen when the transport company hired to move the vehicle was hacked. “They’re saying they think it’s probably in Dubai by now, to be honest,” an employee of the company that customized the SUV told Shaq in a YouTube video. “Criminals have learned that stealing cars via the web portals has become extremely easy, and when I say easy—it’s become seamless.” Steven Yariv, CEO, Dealers Choice Auto Transport of West Palm Beach, Florida But the nationwide epidemic of vehicle transport fraud and theft has remained under the radar, even as it’s rocked the industry over the past two years. MIT Technology Review identified more than a dozen cases involving high-end vehicles, obtained court records, and spoke to law enforcement, brokers, drivers, and victims in multiple states to reveal how transport fraud is wreaking havoc across the country. RICHARD CHANCE It’s challenging to quantify the scale of this type of crime, since there isn’t a single entity or association that tracks it. Still, these law enforcement officials and brokers, as well as the country’s biggest online car-transport marketplaces, acknowledge that fraud and theft are on the rise. When I spoke with him in August, Yariv estimated that around 8,000 exotic and high-end cars had been stolen since the spring of 2024, resulting in over $1 billion in losses. “You’re talking 30 cars a day [on] average is gone,” he said. Multiple state and local law enforcement officials told MIT Technology Review that the number is plausible. (The FBI did not respond to a request for an interview.) “It doesn’t surprise me,” said J.D. Decker, chief of the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles’ police division and chair of the fraud subcommittee for the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators. “It’s a huge business.” Data from the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB), a nonprofit that works with law enforcement and the insurance industry to investigate insurance fraud and related crimes, provides further evidence of this crime wave. NICB tracks both car theft and cargo theft, a broad category that refers to goods, money, or baggage that is stolen while part of a commercial shipment; the category also covers cases in which a vehicle is stolen via a diverted transport truck or a purloined car is loaded into a shipping container. NICB’s statistics about car theft show that it has declined following an increase during the pandemic—but over the same period cargo theft has dramatically increased, to an estimated $35 billion annually. The group projected in June that it was expected to rise 22% in 2025. NICB doesn’t break out data for vehicles as opposed to other types of stolen cargo. But Bill Woolf, a regional director for the organization, said an antifraud initiative at the Port of Baltimore experienced a 200% increase from 2023 to 2024 in the number of stolen vehicles recovered. He said the jump could be due to the increased effort to identify stolen cars moving through the port, but he noted that earlier the day we spoke, agents had recovered two high-end stolen vehicles bound for overseas. “One day, one container—a million dollars,” he said. Many other vehicles are never recovered—perhaps a result of the speed with which they’re shipped off or sold. Travis Payne, an exotic-car dealer in Atlanta, told me that transport thieves often have buyers lined up before they take a car: “When they steal them, they have a plan.” In 2024, Payne spent months trying to locate a Rolls-Royce he’d purchased after it was stolen via transport fraud. It eventually turned up in the Instagram feed of a Mexican pop star, he says. He never got the car back. The criminals are “gonna keep doing it,” he says, “because they make a couple phone calls, make a couple email accounts, and they get a $400,000 car for free. I mean, it makes them God, you know?” Out-innovating the industry The explosion of vehicle transport fraud follows a pattern that has played out across the economy over the past roughly two decades: A business that once ran on phones, faxes, and personal relationships shifted to online marketplaces that increased efficiency and brought down costs—but the reduction in human-to-human interaction introduced security vulnerabilities that allowed organized and often international fraudsters to enter the industry. In the case of vehicle transport, the marketplaces are online “load boards” where car owners, dealerships, and manufacturers post about vehicles that need to be shipped from one location to another. Central Dispatch claims to be the largest vehicle load board and says on its website that thousands of vehicles are posted on its platform each day. It’s part of Cox Automotive, an industry juggernaut that owns major vehicle auctions, Autotrader, Kelley Blue Book, and other businesses that work with auto dealers, lenders, and buyers. The system worked pretty well until roughly two years ago, when organized fraud rings began compromising broker and carrier accounts and exploiting loopholes in government licensing to steal loads with surprising ease and alarming frequency. A theft can start with a phishing email that appears to come from a legitimate load board. The recipient, a broker or carrier, clicks a link in the message, which appears to go to the real site—but logging in sends the victim’s username and password to a criminal. The crook logs in as the victim, changes the account’s email and phone number to reroute all communications, and begins claiming loads of high-end vehicles. Cox Automotive declined an interview request but said in a statement that the “load board system still works well” and that “fraud impacts a very small portion” of listings. “Every time we come up with a security measure to prevent the fraudster, they come up with a countermeasure.” Bill Woolf, a regional director, National Insurance Crime Bureau Criminals also gain access to online marketplaces by exploiting a lax regulatory environment. While a valid US Department of Transportation registration is required to access online marketplaces, it’s not hard for bad actors to register sham transport companies and obtain a USDOT number from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the agency that regulates commercial motor vehicles. In other cases, criminals compromise the FMCSA accounts of legitimate companies and change their phone numbers and