There is a scam running right now that most car owners do not know about. You stop paying your car finance. Instead of handing the keys back to the bank, you drive the car across the border. Sell it in Eswatini or Mozambique. Fly back to South Africa. Report it stolen. Claim insurance. The insurer pays off the finance. Everyone walks away clean except the insurer. This is not theory. BMA Commissioner Mike Masiapato said it out loud today at the launch of the Vehicle Targeting System at Lebombo border post in Komatipoort. "These are the realities," he said. And the cost does not land on the scammer. It lands on everyone else. Every unlawfully exported vehicle is effectively paid for twice. The fraud pushes insurance premiums up for every motorist. You are subsidising this without knowing it. There is another detail Masiapato mentioned that matters. When a vehicle gets reported stolen, it often takes around eight hours before it is properly flagged in the system. That delay is more than enough time to move the car across the border with false documents. By the time anyone hits send on the alert, the car is already gone. So the BMA is rolling out this Vehicle Targeting System. The idea is to catch vehicles leaving the country under suspicious circumstances. Flag them at the border. Stop them before they cross. Here is what this reveals though. The scam only works because the pieces do not talk to each other. The insurers, the banks, SAPS, Home Affairs, the border posts none of these systems are connected in real time. Eight hours is not a technical problem. It is an intelligence-sharing problem. And the fact that Masiapato had to say this out loud at a public launch tells you something else. This has been going on for a while. At scale. Every scam of this sort depends on the same thing. Not sophistication. Silence. As long as nobody connects the dots between a default, a border crossing, a stolen vehicle report, and an insurance payout, the pattern stays invisible. The VTS is one piece. But if the systems behind the border do not start talking faster than eight hours, the scammers will just find another gap.