Police in Nairobi have revealed a new trick car thieves are using to advance their criminal activities around the city.
According to police, car thieves are partnering with rogue car dealers to steal from Kenyans who own cars.
This is how the trick works.
Once a car is stolen, it is ‘cloned’ and made to look like another legally existing car or vehicle. The Illegal car is even given similar number plate with common features as compared to he original registered car.
This trick is equally meant to conceal the true identity of the stolen car by creating confusion with another existing car, this leaves the innocent owner of the legal car in trouble and long police cases.
One such victim is Dr Dennis Kinyua who said that when he was driving on Thika Road, he spotted a similar lookalike car to his, bearing everything including its number plate.
Efforts to chase it did not bear fruits, he later reported the case to police.
“I was shocked to see a car that looks just like mine from the colors to the number plate. It is then that I opted to call the police who acted swiftly and arrested the occupants,” he said.
The police acted first and nabbed the alleged driver in Juja, both drivers were asked to driver their cars to police station.
Dr. Kinyua also noted that he had problems with accessing the National Transport Safety Authority (NTSA) web portal because of the duplicate registration.
“I go there they make my portal and after a month or two I start facing similar problems of not being able to access the portal,” Dr Kinyua said
Police noted that Dr. Kinyua is not the only victim since they have handled similar cases amounting to more than 10 this year alone.
Recently cars with similar plates were also nabbed for having duplicate plates. In the same breathe Mr Elias Shikuku an ex-police officer was also arrested after he was accused of stealing a police car and managed to change its plate number illegally.
