Albertan insurers are feeling the pinch after vehicle theft claims in the resource-rich province leapt 60 per cent in the span of a year, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

For the calendar year 2014, 2,600 insurance claims for missing vehicles were filed; last year that number came in at 4,200.

Dan Service, the bureau’s lead investigator, puts forward the possibility that some of the increase is due to the prairie province’s current economic woes, with some fraudulent claims being due to a desire on the part of the owner to stop making payments.

“In those instances where fraud is suspected, there’s a number of red flags that insurance companies look at. If we generally see a trend where this type of event is increasing it’ll get looked at very seriously and the consequences for engaging in insurance fraud generally are criminal.”

Service says two motives for vehicle theft are most common: joyriders engaging in “crimes of convenience,” or organized crime rings who boost cars for profit.

“One is an opportunistic event where someone needs to get from point A to point B, or they’re going to commit a crime, and they’ll steal a vehicle, and then we’ll find it again.”

 “The other kind are vehicles that are stolen for profit, generally by an organized crime group, and those ones, they disappear.”