Ben Renfro is an Albuquerque resident who enjoys the low cost of living in New Mexico but is getting fed up with the crime. Last week, his car was stolen from his home near Central Tramway. It was the second car he had stolen in the past two years.
“We’re really just asking ourselves, yeah, there’s a low cost of living but can we afford the crime that happens in this city,” Renfro told KRQE.
Albuquerque police eventually found the second stolen car near Central, and San Pedro filled with drugs, stolen goods, and occupied by a 29-year-old man who was arrested, according to KRQE. The car was recovered after Renfro was nearly scammed out of $400.
When his second car was stolen, Renfro told KRQE he posted details of the car and the theft on social media platforms such as Reddit and Facebook. He received a private message on Reddit telling him to check the Trackers Inc. Instagram account where someone else claimed they found their stolen vehicle. Renfro said he messaged the Instagram account and got a strange response.
“A few hours later, that same day, they got back to us and said (they) had found the car, but that we needed to pay them $400 to do so,” Renfro told KRQE. “They showed us proof that they had the car. It was a picture, a very grainy black and white photo and on that picture, there were coordinates that they had tried to scratch out.”
Renfro asked about the services, and nothing was mentioned about a $400 fee.
“I thought it was a scam,” he told KRQE. “I thought maybe that’s the person who stole my car, saying they need $400 to be able to proceed by giving this information to the police.”
Renfro tried to use the coordinates on the photo to track the location of the car and wound up in Bernalillo where he searched for hours but did not locate his vehicle. Then he got a call from the Albuquerque Police Department informing him they found his car, which had suffered extensive damage.
“It wasn’t a nice car,” Renfro said. “It was an old car, definitely worth more than $400 but not by a huge margin to where we’re paying to get a car back when it wasn’t our fault it was stolen in the first place.”
