A 2024 Lamborghini Urus worth $269,885 got stopped in Norfolk, Virginia last year before it could reach the United Arab Emirates. That’s the seizure that makes headlines. It is not, according to Customs and Border Protection’s own fiscal year 2025 numbers, what this business actually runs on.
CBP’s Baltimore Field Office, which covers seaports from Trenton, New Jersey down to the Virginia–North Carolina line, published its annual stolen vehicle export recovery data this summer, and the detail buried well past the exotic-car photos is the one that matters. The single most recovered model at those ports in fiscal 2025 was the Honda CR-V, with 44 examples pulled off outbound containers. The Toyota Highlander was next at 24. The Dodge Durango took third with 19. A Range Rover Sport rounded out the top four with 11. None of those numbers are supercars. They’re the SUVs parked in driveways from Trenton to Newport News.
The scale is bigger than one photogenic Ferrari. Baltimore’s officers recovered 307 stolen vehicles across those ports in fiscal 2025, a 23 percent jump over the prior year, with a combined value of $14.5 million. The Area Port of Norfolk-Newport News alone accounted for 163 of them, worth about $8.8 million, ranking second nationally behind only the New York Field Office’s territory. The Port of Baltimore added another 122 recoveries worth roughly $5.2 million, and Philadelphia and Wilmington combined for 22 more near $500,000. Nationally, CBP officers intercepted 1,251 stolen vehicle export attempts in fiscal 2025, barely up from 1,244 the year before.
Sixty-five percent of Baltimore’s recoveries, 201 vehicles, were headed to West Africa: Ghana took the largest share at 102, followed by Nigeria (39), Togo (27), Guinea (9), Benin (8), Liberia (7), Ivory Coast (6), and Senegal (3). Another 20 percent, 61 vehicles, were bound for Southwest Asia, led by Iraq (23) and Turkey (22), with the United Arab Emirates (15) and Lebanon (1) rounding it out. CBP flagged Southwest Asia specifically as a growing destination market. None of this cargo is headed for a chop shop. Ghana and Nigeria drive on the right side of the road, same as the United States, so a stolen Highlander doesn’t need to be cut up for parts, it needs to be re-registered and driven, which is exactly why an intact, low-mileage SUV is worth more to this pipeline than its parts ever would be.
That same West African pipeline isn’t limited to family trucksters, either. A stolen Lamborghini Huracan and a Rolls-Royce Dawn convertible were among the exotics recovered in Nigeria earlier this year, proof the same shipping lanes carry both ends of the market at once.
The Baltimore data backs up the trend: SUVs made up 73 percent of Baltimore’s recoveries, 224 of 307 vehicles, and 84 percent, 258 vehicles, were 2020 through 2025 model years. That’s not a coincidence, it’s economics. A three-year-old CR-V has essentially the same drivetrain as a new one, Honda and Toyota parts networks are already established across West Africa because those brands are common there, and a thief’s acquisition cost is zero. Compare that to a Lamborghini Urus, which is rare enough that moving it quietly is harder and the buyer pool is tiny. The exotic seizures are the anomaly. The Highlanders and CR-Vs are the business model.
That business model is also increasingly out of step with car theft overall. The National Insurance Crime Bureau reported that vehicle theft nationwide fell 23.2 percent in 2025, to 659,880 thefts, the lowest total in decades, though that still works out to a car stolen roughly every 48 seconds. Meanwhile, CBP’s export recovery numbers stayed essentially flat. The two trends read like they’re describing different crimes because they largely are. Opportunistic theft, the kind stopped cold by an immobilizer or a factory kill switch, has been getting harder to pull off as automakers lock down remote start and ignition systems. Export theft is a coordinated supply chain with its own buyers already lined up overseas, and that kind of operation doesn’t care how good your steering column lock is if the car gets stolen with a cloned key or towed straight off a driveway.
Catching them requires treating every outbound container like a potential crime scene. CBP officers run non-intrusive imaging on export containers to confirm the contents match the manifest, cross-reference VINs against law enforcement’s stolen vehicle databases before a box ever leaves the dock, and coordinate directly with owners and insurers once a vehicle is confirmed stolen. Matthew Suarez, CBP’s Acting Director of Field Operations in Baltimore, put it bluntly: “our seaports are not gateways for criminal organizations” looking to move stolen cars or anything else illicit.
The window for catching a stolen vehicle before it disappears is measured in days, not weeks. A vintage Mercedes recovered by San Francisco police earlier this year nearly made it onto a container ship before investigators intervened, and that near-miss illustrates the real stakes: once a container clears customs and crosses open water, the odds of ever seeing that vehicle again collapse.
For owners, that timeline is the practical takeaway. Comprehensive insurance will pay out on a stolen vehicle, but recovery rates drop toward zero once a car leaves U.S. waters, so the real defense happens before a thief ever gets the vehicle near a port: a visible steering wheel lock, an aftermarket GPS tracker that doesn’t rely on a system a thief can simply unplug, and not leaving a spare fob sitting by the front door where it can be grabbed along with the car. For used-car shoppers, the CBP list is basically a buyer’s checklist in disguise. If you’re looking at a used CR-V, Highlander, Durango, or Range Rover Sport, especially one priced a little too well for its mileage, run the VIN through the National Insurance Crime Bureau’s free VINCheck tool before handing over a deposit. Export theft rings and title-washing schemes are close cousins, and a re-VIN’d vehicle can just as easily end up back on a domestic used lot as inside a shipping container.
None of this means Lamborghini owners should stop worrying; a quarter-million-dollar Urus getting flagged in Norfolk is still real money and a real case. But if you’re trying to understand where the actual risk sits for the other 99 percent of drivers, skip the exotic-car headline and check the model list. The car worth stealing by the thousands has always been the one already sitting in everyone’s driveway.
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