Hunting the thieves: Inside Victoria’s underground network where car theft victims fight back

Fed-up Victorians are turning detective to hunt down their own stolen cars – tracking thieves, trading intelligence online and offering thousands of dollars in cash rewards as vehicle crime fuels a booming underground recovery network.

Victims are flooding Melbourne Facebook groups with number plates, CCTV and tracking data, while strangers swap sightings, suspected dumping grounds and even addresses of alleged “chop shops”.

Some are offering eye-watering rewards.

One Melbourne woman is advertising $5000 cash for information directly leading to the recovery of a red Toyota Corolla stolen from outside a Balwyn home.

“We love this car so much,” she wrote. “The car has sentimental value to us. I want it back.”

She stressed the $5000 offer was genuine: “We will hand out the reward. I mean it.”

Another victim offered $2000 for help recovering a truck stolen from a Dandenong yard.

Others are taking matters even further.

Melbourne man Turay Teariki used live tracking from a phone left inside his stolen Subaru WRX to trace it after it disappeared from his Fitzroy apartment car park.

Mr Teariki said he followed the signal and, after initially waiting for police, decided to confront a group himself.

“I’ve had live tracking and my phone in the car and decided to go try get my car back,” he wrote in a stolen-car Facebook group.

“I went there by myself and confronted these people, they had about 20 phones in a plastic bag and one of them was mine.

“These people definitely know the person who has my car.”

He then enlisted a neighbour to watch the property, who later reported seeing and hearing his WRX inside a garage but could not obtain clear footage.

“(Police) said there’s not much they can do unless I have hard evidence of the car being in the garage, because the photo isn’t clear enough,” he wrote.

“After that my hope for it being found from the police really dimmed.”

But his account is far from an isolated example of frustrated owners attempting to recover stolen vehicles themselves.

Inside Facebook groups including Victorian Stolen Cars and Stolen Cars Melbourne, a parallel intelligence network has sprung up around Victoria’s car-theft problem.

One user this week simply asked other members: “Anyone know any addresses I should be looking at in Hastings?”

Others share locations where stolen vehicles have allegedly been found, addresses they claim are known “chop shops” – where stolen cars are stripped for parts – and photographs of vehicles they suspect have been dumped or abandoned.

The result is a sprawling, crowdsourced intelligence network operating in real time as victims race to find their vehicles.

Chelsey Darmanin, 27, turned to the network after waking on Saturday to find her car gone from her driveway.

Security footage supplied to The Nightly shows intruders on the property before the car was driven away about 6am – despite apparently knowing they were being filmed.

“They’ve seen the camera. They know that they’re on camera,” she said.

Exhausted after her young son spent almost a week in hospital, Ms Darmanin had accidentally left her purse and key fob in the unlocked car.

“I was just sleep deprived,” she said.

“I put my oldest to bed and then I’ve laid down with him and I’ve accidentally fallen asleep.”

The mother-of-three said one returned just 13 minutes later and tried unsuccessfully to take a second vehicle, belonging to a relative.

“They had balaclavas covering their face, gloves. You could only see their eyes,” she said.

Inside were three children’s car seats, medical prescriptions, her son’s treasured comfort toy and other family belongings.

There were also irreplaceable possessions belonging to her father, who died last year, including his glasses, photographs and funeral brochure.

“I can’t ever get my dad’s glasses back. He wore them every day,” she said.

“I will never get them back.”

Her father had bought the second-hand car for her and Ms Darmanin had been planning to insure it just days before it was stolen.

“I feel like our space has been invaded. Like they’ve stripped all our dignity,” she said.

“I’m now having to ask favours just to get my kids to school . . . and I can’t take my kids to their appointments because I don’t just have a spare car.

“It’s literally taken everything from us. We’re back to square one.”

Ms Darmanin reported the theft to police before turning to Facebook, where her appeal has been shared more than 100 times.

Yet for owners whose stolen cars are eventually recovered, getting the vehicle back can mark the beginning of another unforeseen ordeal.

Melbourne detailer Colin Crane now spends much of his working week cleaning methamphetamine contamination from stolen cars before they can be returned to their owners.

Crane, from AutoSmart Mobile Detailing and MethGo Australia, said his business cleans three to 10 meth-contaminated vehicles a week and has treated about 300 in less than two years.

Some are so badly contaminated they cannot be saved.

“They don’t have any other option but to crush them,” he said.

“We’ve found drugs in boots. We’ve found drugs in motors because they look for hiding spots.”

Some vehicles arrive relatively tidy despite recording high meth readings. Others have been trashed.

“They’re just full of debris. They’re full of dirt,” he said.

“They burn seats. They slash seats and door frames.”

Crane said some had even been sprayed throughout with fire extinguishers, which he believed was an attempt to interfere with forensic evidence.

“We treat the whole thing – we just assume meth is everywhere,” he said.

Meth remediation has now displaced much of his conventional detailing work.

The grim cottage industry has emerged against the backdrop of Victoria’s extraordinary volume of vehicle theft.

The latest Crime Statistics Agency data shows 31,851 vehicles were stolen in the past year – the highest figure since 2001-02 and more than double the number four years ago.

The Insurance Council of Australia said Victoria had become the “epicentre of Australia’s car theft problem”, with insurers receiving more than 12,500 theft claims worth $243 million in 2025 – more than half of all vehicle-theft losses nationally.

The council said other states had demonstrated car theft could be reduced and questioned why Victoria remained such an outlier.

“The Victorian Police are working very hard on trying to arrest these individuals, but it’s clear that they just get back out and repeat the crime,” an ICA spokesperson told The Nightly.

“Other states have demonstrated car theft can be reduced. The question for Victoria is why it remains a persistent challenge and what more can be done to reverse the trend.”

Stolen Cars Melbourne alone has more than 117,000 members, with a constant stream of appeals seeking cars, trucks, trailers and motorcycles.

New appeals are posted every few hours, often accompanied by CCTV, registration numbers, identifying features and pleas for members to keep watch.

The description of one Victorian stolen-car group bluntly tells users it exists so people can post photographs and registration details because, “if the police ain’t going to do anything about it, then we will”.

But police are warning frustrated victims not to become vigilantes.

Victoria Police this week launched an online tool allowing the public to check whether suspicious vehicles are listed as stolen and report their location – while explicitly warning: “Do not approach, stop, follow or interfere with the vehicle.”

People who identify a suspicious vehicle are instead advised to record whatever details they can safely observe and contact police.

For Ms Darmanin, neither police nor the online army has so far been able to locate her beloved Captiva.

“I don’t want to press charges. I don’t want any drama,” she said.

“Even if they just let someone know where it is and leave the keys in it I don’t even have to know who it is.

“I literally just want my car and my kids’ stuff back and my dad’s stuff back.”