Terri Miller, the executive director of an anti-car theft group called Help Eliminate Auto Thefts, or H.E.A.T., based in Michigan, said the Internet had greatly expanded the marketplace for small-time thieves.
“We see a lot of these vehicles that are carjacked ending up on Craigslist,” she said. “If the price is too good to be true, it probably is.”
Her group has focused its efforts on Detroit, where the problem is so endemic that the city’s police chief, James Craig, narrowly avoided becoming a victim himself, speeding away as assailants approached his unmarked police car.
In New Jersey, most carjackers are between the ages of 16 and 33, and often live in Essex County, Ms. Carter said.
Almost 90 percent of stolen cars are recovered, she said, though a small fraction of the perpetrators are arrested. The majority of cases do not involve luxury vehicles: Hondas are the most frequent targets of carjackers, followed by Nissans, BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes and Fords.
Only a small number of carjackings are tied to organized crime rings, Ms. Carter said, but for those enterprises, Newark’s location near two ports is a major attraction. One such ring was run by Hope Kantete, who was convicted in June for leading a group that shipped carjacked or stolen cars from New Jersey to Africa. Over 18 months, according to the authorities, Ms. Kantete orchestrated the illegal export of cars worth more than $1 million to countries like Nigeria, Liberia and Sierra Leone.