April 3, 2008
Auto Theft and Insurance Fraud on the Rise

Photo provided by Lincoln County Sheriffs Office Burned out Toyota Tundra pickup.

By Dave Maxwell, Staff Writer

Car thieves in Nevada are bold, stealing cars off the streets in Reno and Vegas just as portrayed in the Nicolas Cage movie “Gone in 60 seconds.” Recently another twist has been added to stolen cars and auto insurance. According to Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee, the game now involves taking your own car out to some remote place, burning it, claiming it was stolen and collecting the insurance money.

Lee said that on March 29 his office received a report of a burned out vehicle on Turtle Walk Road (a side road that goes to an old gravel pit), about 15 miles south of Alamo along U.S. Highway 93. The vehicle was a 2007 Toyota Tundra pickup with no license plates; a check of the VIN number showed it had been reported stolen on March 21 in Henderson. While it could be coincidental Lee said, “This is our third type of situation over the last couple of years. All three of them have been down in the Alamo area.” He said he had watched a report on one of the Las Vegas TV stations that this is becoming quite a problem in the metropolitan Clark County area. “With the financial crunch that people are getting themselves into, over-extending themselves, and the housing market, it is leading more people to not be able to afford their vehicles, so they are reporting them stolen and taking them out in the desert and burning them…It’s a very popular thing right now.” With many people not being able to afford the house they bought a few years ago due to interest rate increases “People are having to decide are they going to live in their house or keep driving their vehicle,” Lee said. “Burned vehicles are being found out in the Red Rock area, west of Las Vegas, on a regular basis now,” he said.

“The bigger jurisdictions are having a lot more problem with this,” Lee said, “but now they are coming to us and taking it into our jurisdiction, knowing that our manpower is a lot more limited. Because people know we don’t have the manpower to deal with things rapidly. Manpower and investigation is a huge issue on this and I think it’s going to become a bigger and bigger issue all the time,” Lee said. “I think these little jurisdictions (like Lincoln County and others) are going to get hit with this more and more all the time.”

News reports have stated that when a car is stolen it’s not just the owner who pays, everyone does. Nevada’s Governor, Jim Gibbons, has stated that car theft and vehicle insurance fraud is reaching epidemic proportions in Nevada, costing an average of $300 extra per year in insurance premiums. Last fall, Gibbons initiated an Auto Theft and Insurance Fraud Task Force to deal with the problem.

Las Vegas, North Las Vegas and Henderson Police have started using bait cars equipped with cameras and GPS; car thieves will be caught in the act. However, someone taking their own car out in the desert to burn it for the insurance money is another matter.

Lincoln County Sheriff's deputies are not trained in arson investigation Lee noted, and the State Fire Marshall doesn’t have the manpower to be sending someone up to Lincoln County when something like this happens.

“Arson is such a hard crime to prove,” Lee said. “To have suspicions that it may be happening is one thing, but the problem is, most of your evidence is burned up and the vehicles may be undiscovered for quite some time. It’s definitely a hard crime to be able to prove and something hard to stop.”