Car theft has declined in Canada, but the country still loses a large number of vehicles to theft every month, according to Shawn Vording (pictured), president of CARFAX Canada.
"As much as there's been improvement in the number of thefts, an average of 3,500 per month makes vehicle theft still a material issue in Canada. A very large number of cars are still being stolen on a monthly basis," Vording said.
Vehicle history checks are surfacing a meaningful share of that activity, according to Vording, who said the two most common patterns are clones (a stolen vehicle given a false identity) and donors (the legitimate car that identity was stolen from).
"The frequency is quite high, we flag on average 100+ VINs per month that have been used to create a clone," Vording said, pointing to how extensively vehicle history data gets used across dealers, consumers, insurance companies, and law enforcement to catch cars with a clone or donor history before a transaction goes through.
The source material criminals use to build cloned vehicles has shifted, according to Vording. Before what he called Canada's theft epidemic, VINs were typically pulled from salvage or flood-damaged vehicles.
"The VINs from these vehicles are still used to create a clone, they're off the road so it's a 'safe' VIN to use. There won't be a second vehicle generating history or getting registered because it's in a scrapyard or it's been salvaged," Vording said.
That's no longer the whole picture, Vording said.
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Bad actors now also lift VINs directly off legitimate, undamaged vehicles, Vording said, simply by walking through parking lots and copying numbers off cars that were never in an accident. He called it a dual problem: some vehicles used in cloning have genuinely been written off through fire, flood, or theft, while others belong to innocent owners whose cars were never damaged at all.
"Criminals source VINs online, in parking lots, wherever they can find a VIN from a similar year/make/model," Vording said.
How heavily insurers lean on vehicle history data when pricing a policy or assessing a vehicle for purchase varies by carrier, Vording said.
"Every insurer has their own approach, and their operational policy that they use within claims, underwriting, and risk," he added.
That information, he added, can prove critical for insurers both before they bind a policy and while working a claim, helping confirm there's no fraud tied to it.
That can mean confirming a vehicle isn't a clone, or catching odometer discrepancies and rollbacks used to inflate a car's value, Vording said. Beyond CARFAX's standard history report, insurers also use a product called VINScan across underwriting, claims, and special investigations units to surface that kind of fraud.
CARFAX Canada's own annual data gives a sense of how widespread the underlying problem actually is. The company estimates more than 372,000 vehicles in Canada currently carry potentially cloned VINs, according to its most recent Year in Rear View report. Vording, in that report, pointed to VIN fraud as an issue touching the entire industry, "from used car buyers to vehicle owners, dealerships, and insurance providers."
The same report found more than 600,000 vehicles carried accident history, with total accident claim damage surpassing $9.2 billion, up 21% from the year before. Severe weather added more than 50,000 vehicles with damage on record, led by Alberta's $454 million in weather-related claims, 91% of it tied to hail.
That data lands against a broader theft picture that's improving on paper but still costly in practice. National theft fell 10.1% in the first half of 2026, according to Équité Association, following an even steeper decline of roughly 18% to 19% in 2025, putting theft levels close to what the industry saw before the pandemic-era surge. But premiums haven't followed the trend down. Repair costs have risen 22% since the pandemic began, and theft-related claim losses still totalled an estimated $900 million in 2025, the first year since 2021 that losses stayed under $1 billion, but still a high floor.
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Part of what's keeping pressure on that figure is how theft itself has evolved. Bryan Gast, national vice president of intelligence and investigations at Équité Association, has said criminals have moved beyond older relay-attack methods toward CAN bus intrusions, which let thieves access a vehicle's electronics directly and start it without a key at all.
"Right now, new vehicles can be stolen in 20 seconds with the right individual, with the right tool," Gast said.
Gast has also tied theft proceeds directly to organized crime, saying stolen vehicles and related insurance fraud help finance broader criminal activity, including drug and weapons trafficking. That framing puts VIN cloning in a wider context: it isn't just a fraud problem insurers manage transaction by transaction, but one piece of a larger financial pipeline that theft, fraud, and organized crime all feed into together.
