South Africa went on full lock-down on the 27th of March 2020, meaning people were meant to stay at home and the SAPS and SANDF were out patrolling the streets to ensure that people follow the lock-down regulations.
This caused a massive drop in criminal activities, since criminals were probably unsure of where the SAPS and SANDF will be patrolling and that there would be a big chance that any vehicles found on the roads would be stopped in roadblocks.
We normally add about 130 - 150 stolen vehicles to our database on a monthly basis. This is still much lower than what is actually stolen in South Africa since we only import publicly available data found on social media. In April we only added the data of 22 stolen vehicles. Vehicle owners had a pretty good month...
Since then, crime has started to pick up again and in May 2020 the number of vehicle thefts increased close to pre-lockdown levels. In the first 10 days of June 2020 we have already recorded 54 stolen vehicles, so we are looking at roughly 150+ which will be added by the end of the month. This would suggest that we are back to "normal" and vehicle owners out there need to be extra careful.
While Toyota's are still high in demand, this year we noticed that the Nissan NP200 has come up often on the list of stolen vehicles.
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