Beware Of Nairobi Cartel Selling Written Off Cars To Unsuspecting Customers

Car cartels are overworking, buying a car in Nairobi has never been riskier. Cars stolen are now being resold with different parts from vehicles that have been damaged and deemed a total loss by insurance companies that paid a claim on it.

According to an expose on The Standard, cartel members fight for the salvaged cars, bribing agents selling the damaged cars upto Sh300,000 for these parts, the cartels use scrap yards and garages as a front while operating the theft business with the help of police officers on their payrolls. The multi-million racket has all kinds of partners, from security guards who spy on their bosses to beautiful girls recruited to spike the drinks of unsuspecting victims and lure them out and then there is the armed robbers.

Mostly winning all the auctions for the wreckages, the cartel which follows a chain of command and uses very heavy high tech gadgets to cover their tracks, then tracks similar models to the wreckages by use of the heavy manpower, bribing security guards upto sh40,000 where they then acquire the cars, dismantle and change up the parts. Using the high tech gadgets capable of overwriting on the old identity. The log book and identities of the written-off car are then used to legitimise the stolen cars. The cars are then sold off to unsuspecting customers in the country.

The Association of Kenya Insurers (AKI) says this is a new trend, explaining that in the past salvages were being used by criminals to lodge fraudulent insurance claims. “We have established fraud control measures where the data of all insured vehicles and policy holders is posted in a central platform managed by AKi. This ensures once an accident claim is paid, nobody can lodge a similar claim,”  AKI Chief Executive Officer Tom Gichuhi says.