To the untrained eye, the red shipping container at Felixstowe looked no different to the thousands of others stacked up at Britain’s busiest seaport.
Destined for Africa, its contents were listed as “household goods,” but to police officer Adam Gibson, something didn’t add up. So workers broke into the container.
Gibson was right. Inside were four sport utility vehicles—three Toyota RAV4s and a Lexus RX 450h. Two were on the ground and the others were dangling from the roof, squeezed in like Tetris blocks.
A London ambulance is found crammed into a shipping container. Photo credit: Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg
After they were lifted out on a forklift, Gibson ran checks. The cars were all stolen and their license plates had been changed.
Car theft is a growing problem in the UK. Almost 130,000 vehicles were stolen in the year ending March 2024—near a 15-year high—costing insurers £640 million ($867 million), according to the most recent data. And at least some of them are ending up overseas. As one of t…