The migration (illicit or otherwise) of vehicles from wealthy western countries to developing ones is fascinating. My old line of work had me crossing paths and sometimes making friendly acquaintances with groups of men from Guatemala, Honduras, and other Central American nationals who would scrape together enough money to buy as many Toyota's and Honda's as they can get their hands on at auctions here in the US. Using ingenuity that would MacGyver blush, they piece together running and "driving" cars.

They'd hitch a wrecked Corolla to a borderline drivable Rav-4 and road train all the way to the border with Mexico, cross, and continue on to their destination. Stuffed inside the cars are whatever products these groups can find cheap in the US and sell for more elsewhere. I've seen the cars filled to the brim with inexpensive down jackets, all manner of clothes, chemicals -- anything that's a "cheap" in the US. Many of them claimed they were robbed on the way and shrug it off as the cost of doing business.

I also used to see tons of cars bought and exported to West Africa, Czech Republic (before it was EU) and elsewhere. Toyota's are perennially popular, but so were flashy things: I saw lots of Hummer H2's get exported, lots of high-trim Pickups (King Ranch, etc). Everyone wants a slice of the pie.

So, why no focus on the Port of Montreal? Seems to me like why the cars are disappearing from Canada is because that port is a very easy point of exit for the stolen goods. There's probably a big organized crime syndicate bribing/controlling the authorities there.

Edit: then again, it's the major port of Eastern Canada, so, I suppose, where else would it go through?

Because of corruption at the port; from the dock worker to the super, to the politicians and everyone in between. Everyone gets a little slice.

I remember a couple years ago seeing some writeup on hacking cars via CAN Bus by pulling out a headlight/ taillight, and a chorus of people here saying how it's not a feasible way to steal a car because you'd get noticed, it takes too long, blah blah blah. According to this article, that's exactly what they're doing

You were right. We were wrong. If we could only roll back time…

In the only cited instance in the article, the car wasn't stolen in the attempt because the criminals got noticed, it took too long, blah blah blah.

When my friend's car was stolen in LA it was later found in the Philippines.

How was your friend able to locate the car ?

I guess PKI not used between fob and car?

Sounds to me there's less verification between fob and car, than contactless EMV card and reader. How is this possible? Is it an industry wide practice?

One technique apparently used is signal-boosting. PKI wouldn't fix this. You'd need to do one of three things:

1) Stop fobs from automatically sending out signals without user intervention (but people like convenience)

2) Put fobs in a Faraday cage

3) Add some sort of geolocation to fobs that will stop the car from starting if the key is too far away