DVLA make it easy for car thieves

Surely it’s time for the DVLA to severely tighten up their act. Apparently they have been inadvertently assisting the sons of incarcerated, hook handed, one eyed, radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza, in a luxury car scam! The fact that the thieves targeted luxury cars at long stay car parks (surely an inside job) and were able to obtain registration documents at their chosen addresses with relative ease after just 14 days shows that it must be time for a radical overhaul of how someone goes about obtaining a log book for a car. Basically the scam relies on the fact that the owners are parted from their vehicles for a long time, giving the thieves the opportunity to carry out their dastardly work. Using the relevant form they would simply instruct the DVLA to change the address on the registration document. The DVLA would then write to the actual registered keeper to inform them that this was happening and obviously, with the owner being out of the country long term, they could not respond so after 14 days the DVLA would send out a new logbook to an alias at a front address. Voila! The gang would then have a V5C registration document for a car they don’t own. They will then be able to use the amended documents to obtain a new set of keys for the car and sell or raise finance against it, thus making themselves thousands of pounds in the process and it was estimated that the value of the vehicles, if they had been sold as new, would have exceeded £1m.

Wouldn’t it be far safer, when dealing with a car which could be worth an awful lot of money, to not send out a registration document of any sort until they have had confirmation from the owner about a change of details? This may cause a bit of bother occasionally but with forms to be filled in for virtually everything else we do in this world surely it would be safer, and as the DVLA are quite happy to stick rigidly to most of their other rules and regulations around documentation, then surely they would be wise to have better systems when it really matters?

Abu Hamza sons jailed over luxury car scam (Guardian)