Vegetable vendors by day, sellers of stolen SUVs at night: Delhi cops bust auto-lifter gang

Indian Express

27-05-2025

They sold vegetables by day and sold stolen luxury cars by night. This inter-state auto-lifting racket was running smoothly till the Delhi Police Crime Branch swooped in.
They arrested four Punjab-based receivers and recovered 21 high-end vehicles — including Fortuners, Thars, and Cretas — all bearing fake number plates, forged registration certificates, and tampered chassis and engine numbers, police said Tuesday.
The crackdown followed weeks of surveillance and pattern analysis, said police. Investigators noticed that the gang's operations were well-oiled and peaked around midnight, targeting luxury vehicles, which were stolen in a matter of minutes and moved to Punjab, especially its border districts.
On May 7, based on a tip-off, a police team intercepted a stolen blue Baleno on the DND Flyway en route to the KMP expressway. The vehicle, bearing fake plates, was reported stolen from South Delhi's Saket. The two men inside — Avtar Singh (40) and Harpreet Singh (32) — were nabbed. A forged registration certificate was also seized from them, said police.
During questioning, the duo admitted to being long-time receivers of stolen vehicles, which they sold across Amritsar and Ludhiana after modifying the cars and forging documents.
They named their suppliers and admitted to involvement in 15-20 similar transactions. Police subsequently took them on a 10-day remand and launched raids in Punjab's Amritsar and Tarn Taran districts, leading to the arrest of two more accused — Paramdeep of Ludhiana and Manpreet of Ferozepur.
Police said their probe revealed a consistent modus operandi: the gang purchased stolen high-end vehicles for Rs 4-5 lakh each, tampered with identification numbers, generated fake registration papers, and resold the cars as legitimate all over Punjab.
The accused came from varied backgrounds.
Avtar Singh, a former property dealer turned vegetable vendor, had previously been arrested in Amritsar and was linked to over 10 vehicle recoveries.
Harpreet Singh, a BCA graduate with a stint in Cyprus as a pig farmer, turned to auto theft after returning to India.
Paramdeep once ran an auto-parts factory that collapsed during the pandemic, pushing him into illegal vehicle trading.
Manpreet, a civil engineer and former driver, also had two past arrests and a pending divorce case.
The recovered vehicles span across multiple police jurisdictions in Delhi and beyond, including Saket, Shalimar Bagh, Tilak Nagar, Khyala, Dwarka, Keshav Puram, Vasant Vihar, and even Ghaziabad and Gurgaon.