NARITA, Chiba Prefecture – Employees of a paid parking lot near Narita Airport took on the role of detectives after nine luxury cars were stolen while they were on surveillance, and through solid detective work were able to recover all of the vehicles.
The Super Parking team launched a tireless search for the cars stolen overnight, combing more than 500 coin-operated parking spaces in three prefectures near Tokyo.
Police have recorded a number of car thefts in private parking lots near the international airport and urged motorists to be extra vigilant during the summer holiday season, when cars are often parked for long periods.
Super Parking is conveniently located a three-minute walk from Terminal 3 of Narita Airport.
The first theft occurred on June 26, approximately 30 minutes after midnight, and was recorded by several surveillance cameras.
The footage shows three people climbing over a fence and breaking into the premises about ten minutes after manager Kyosuke Chikai closed the building following the end of his shift.
One of the gang members, a man, broke a window to gain access to the office and cut the cables of a surveillance camera.
Armed with a key they took from the office, they got into a car and drove away.
Two hours later, the gang returned to the parking lot and then again 30 minutes later to steal more cars.
As morning broke, the manager and other employees noticed that nine vehicles were missing, including a Lexus RX SUV and a Mercedes-Benz.
Their first task was to apologize to the owners of the stolen cars, and they were shocked by the audacity of the thefts. They decided to find the missing vehicles after learning that signals from GPS trackers attached to three of the cars had been detected in Noda, also in Chiba Prefecture.
Employees immediately rushed to the source of each signal and found the cars in three different coin-operated parking lots.
Chikai, 39, was determined to make amends, so he and his associates decided to take matters into their own hands and find the remaining six cars.
An investigator from the Chiba Prefectural Police gave them a useful tip: Stolen cars are usually found in coin-operated parking lots near train stations.
Since the third theft took place only half an hour after the second, the intrepid group initially concentrated on locations along the railway lines that were within a 30-minute round trip.
The next day, June 27, Chikai spotted a familiar-looking car in a paid parking lot near JR Narita Station.
To his surprise, it was a BMW that had been stolen from his company.
Chikai and his staff focused their search on the area around the station and found a Mercedes-Benz and a Toyota Voxy.
Footage from a dashboard camera installed in one of the cars found in Noda showed that the vehicle had previously been parked in Toride, Ibaraki Prefecture.
Chikai and his team assumed that the thieves drove the cars from one location to another after stealing them, so they expanded their search to northern Chiba Prefecture, southern Ibaraki Prefecture and Saitama Prefecture.
Just after 1 a.m. on June 29, they found two Lexus RXs and a Toyota Harrier SUV in a coin-operated parking lot in Moriya, Ibaraki Prefecture, thus recovering all nine stolen vehicles.
“They could have been moved again if we had arrived there a little later,” Chikai said.
Dashboard camera footage from one of the stolen vehicles captured a conversation in Vietnamese in which the perpetrators talked about how much the cars would fetch if sold through an app.
As a result of the thefts, Super Parking is now considering a number of measures to prevent a repeat, including entering into a contract with a security company and obtaining customers’ permission to fit a GPS tracker to their cars.
“It is difficult to maintain a balance (between fees and additional costs for the steps), but we have no choice but to do this to prevent a recurrence,” Chikai said.
80% of stolen cars are locked
At Super Parking, employees keep the keys of parked cars in the office.
In 2023, the number of car thefts in Japan rose for the second consecutive year since 2021, reaching 5,762, according to the National Police Agency and Chiba Prefectural Police.
By the end of May this year, there were 2,515 cases.
Chiba Prefecture recorded the highest number of car thefts in the country, with 746 car thefts in 2023.
This year, 334 cases were reported by the end of May, 56 more than last year.
The thieves focused on cars in monthly parking lots and parking lots at private homes. However, several vehicles were also stolen from another privately operated parking lot near Narita Airport on June 10.
About 80 percent of the vehicles were locked at the time of the theft.
Thieves use the “CAN Invader” device, which forces open doors and starts the engine, “relay attacks” that intercept radio waves emitted by smart keys, and other means to steal cars.
Although surveillance cameras and GPS devices provide investigators with clues, they are often destroyed by perpetrators while committing their crimes.
“It is effective to use devices whose location can be monitored after theft, as well as additional GPS devices,” said a senior investigator.
