Luxury car thefts, gang of airtags placed in bumpers broken up in Naples

The airtag gang, which specialised in stealing luxury cars, has been broken up in Naples. The gang followed the vehicles to be stolen by placing GPS in the bumpers and rear-view mirrors. The Carabinieri reconstructed 22 thefts, 4 people were targeted in the measure signed by the Neapolitan court. The suspects were also identified thanks to biological traces sampled by the RIS.

Military officers from the Vomero company executed a house arrest order issued by the Court of Naples at the request of the local Public Prosecutor's Office. The four recipients of the measure are seriously suspected, for various reasons, of criminal conspiracy aimed at the theft of cars and motorbikes, which occurred in Naples and in several municipalities of Campania - on public roads or in homes - as well as robbery against one of the owners who had noticed the theft in progress.

The investigation, coordinated by the 7th 'Urban Security' section of the Neapolitan Public Prosecutor's Office, was conducted by the Carabinieri station of Naples Marianella, through dynamic activities, analysis of the mobile phone devices used by the perpetrators and of private or city video surveillance systems and supplemented with technical-scientific investigations carried out on biological traces by the Scientific Investigations Section of the Naples CC Provincial Command and the R.I.S. of Rome.

It was thus possible to gather evidence against the suspects and to reveal the operation of a criminal association that, based in the Scampia district, committed crimes throughout the Campania region.

In particular, the activities made it possible to outline the modus operandi of the gang, within which the role of the leader and promoter - who planned the thefts in detail, kept in touch with the fences with whom he negotiated the sale price of the stolen vehicles and supervised the distribution of the profits - and of the participants was well defined. The members of the group, using rented cars that were periodically replaced, after locating the vehicles of interest - often cars of great economic value - placed GPS tracking devices in the rear-view mirrors or in the bumpers, with the aim of monitoring them, in order to then carry out the criminal action on the most favourable occasions.