This is the second part of a five-part series into re-vinning, a lucrative tactic by car thieves to disguise stolen cars for sale to unwitting drivers.
It was a call that Chris Olschewski first dismissed because it seemed so outlandish: a customer telling him the car they bought from his dealership couldn’t be insured.
The reason? Because of indications it was a stolen car.
Shocked that something like that could happen on his watch, Olschewski started digging.
“At that point, I started doing more homework, and seeing how deep this problem really went,” Olschewski recalled in an interview with W5.
He identified 22 car sales that appeared suspect, and went to the police, who laid almost 100 charges against two salespeople working at Olschewski’s dealership in Toronto, Rouge Valley Mitsubishi.
And he opened up his records for a W5 investigation as well, which illustrated how these transactions may have gotten through — and also unearthed questions about the Toronto Police Service’s investigation that could upend some of those charges.
Dealership investigation
Running a car dealership was Olschewski’s childhood dream. And he was living that dream, running the Olschewski Auto Group, with three dealerships in Ontario, including Rouge Valley Mitsubishi in Scarborough.
“It was my life’s purpose as a young boy. I always wanted to be a car dealer. My parents thought I was crazy,” Olschewski said.
But that business faced major challenges when COVID-19 hit. Supply chain issues during the pandemic made new cars scarce, and used cars for sale were all of a sudden very hard to come by.
“We were put in survival mode. All dealers were put in survival mode,” Olschewski said.
He said he bought cars anywhere he could, just to keep the lights on, and his staff employed. He thought the company made it through the worst intact.
But some of those cars were not what they seemed.
In 2023, one of his customers, a relative of Frank Rizqo, complained their insurance company wouldn’t cover the theft of a 2019 Porsche Cayenne because it had a “fictitious” vehicle identification number, or VIN.
Every car that is manufactured has a unique VIN which can often be seen behind the windshield on the driver’s side. If a car is stolen, it’s difficult to re-sell it legitimately because authorities and car dealers regularly check those VINs.
Suspicion falls to two salespeople
However if a stolen car’s VIN is physically changed, any checks on that VIN will route back to another car’s history. That’s often referred to as “VIN cloning.” If the cloned VIN isn’t detected on a stolen car, an unwitting customer might buy it.
Olschewski looked into his records and found 22 cars that might be in a similar situation, together worth $2.3 million.
His suspicion fell to two salespeople whose names were on the paperwork for the cars: Fadi Zeto and Harris Bocknek.
He called police, who investigated. In a news conference in the fall of 2024, the Toronto police announced multiple charges against Zeto and Bocknek.
Each of them faced at least four charges per vehicle, including altering a Carfax report, making a false vehicle bill of sale, using a forged bill of sale, and defrauding Olschewski of more than $5,000.
“The dealer’s own funds were used to buy the vehicles, which were fraudulently presented as legitimate to unsuspecting buyers,” Det. Dan Kraehling said at a news conference.
Olschewski said officers told him something even stranger about one customer.
“He’s passed away. He’s not even alive. We delivered a car to a guy who was not alive,” he said.
The W5 investigation
Olschewski shared the sales records with W5, which included information about the buyers listed in each sale and the car loans they had applied for.
We tried to reach many of them. Three confirmed that they had bought vehicles, but faced challenges getting insurance. One of the buyers said he had even been pulled over by the police while driving and accused of driving a stolen car.
But many buyers could not be reached. Some people who picked up the phone at their listed numbers said they had no idea who these buyers were.
When W5 tried the buyers’ listed employers, many said they had no record or memory of them. In the records, one buyer’s contact information was listed simply as noemail@noemail.com. No one responded to an e-mail W5 sent to that address.
W5 also called the companies listed as the suppliers of the cars in the records. Two supplies agreed they had sold vehicles.
But several of these companies listed denied they had sold cars. One, an auto salvage company, said if anything they would be buying cars to junk, not selling them to a dealership.
One company that sold six cars to Rouge Valley Mitsubishi is called Wikicar. W5 checked out Wikicar’s listed address, but Wikicar didn’t seem to have a presence there. One person who worked at a car company at that address said when he arrived two years ago, Wikicar was gone.
Wikicar was registered with Ontario’s auto watchdog, OMVIC. OMVIC’s files list two salespeople connected with the company, and one is Fadi Zeto.
One source close to the investigation suggested some of these cars may have existed only on paper.
Several sources said at that time, paperwork relating to car sales at the dealership were processed at a Service Ontario that is now closed, where three employees are facing unrelated charges.
Zeto and Bocknek are also facing charges from OMVIC, including furnishing false information, and falsifying documents, for a similar set of vehicles.
‘Altering’ Carfax reports?
From multiple sources, W5 obtained copies of 25 Carfax reports that corresponded to the bulk of the car sales referred to in the criminal charges, the OMVIC charges, or in Olschewski’s flagged files.
We took them to Carfax itself, which said that of those 25 total VINs, 20 out of 25 are now “flagged as compromised.”
Using data from the Canadian Border Services Agency, Carfax suggested that 13 of the cars corresponding to these VINs may have been exported before any sales at the dealership, pointing to potential VIN clones.
But as for the Carfax reports themselves, Carfax indicated those reports match the records they have on file, and the records do not appear to be altered, as the Toronto Police Service alleged in their charges.
One explanation for those reports being clean could be that they were run before Carfax had added certain features, including the colours of the vehicles, or before there was any activity from the cloned vehicle that would have been added to the report.
Zeto’s lawyer, Daniel Kayftez, suggested authorities alleged the Carfaxes were altered because they compared the reports at issue not to the originals, but to new ones created at the time of the investigation, which would have included newer information.
All this raises a lot of questions about how this will affect the prosecution of those charges in court. The charges are just allegations and nothing has been proven in court.
Bocknek maintains he is innocent and ran those Carfax reports in the usual course of business, and was not alerted to any potential fraud because they came back without any red flags.
“Had I an inkling that something was involving stolen vehicles, I would never have gotten involved,” he said during a phone call. “That’s not who I am. I was raised better than that.”
Dealership in receivership
Reporting all of this to the police, and coming clean about the activities in these car sales, had devastating consequences for Olschewski’s business, which included two other car dealerships in Ontario.
Banks demanded the car loans be repaid, which Olschewski did, but that left no money to pay his other creditors, including car manufacturer Nissan and the Canada Revenue Agency, he said.
Olschewski said he tried to keep above water by using money from newer car sales to pay older debts, but an Ontario Superior Court justice found that his methods amounted to “ongoing defaults.”
In January 2025, Justice Michael Penny wrote the evidence establishes that he “committed several defaults which have not been remedied. The defaults include sales of vehicles ‘out of trust.’
“This means that the proceeds of vehicle sales were not being remitted to Nissan as the loan documents require. Another default was that CRA remittances on account of employee withholdings were not being made,” he wrote.
“Parts inventory was overstated and the dealerships lacked adequate personnel and security controls. Various warranty accounts appeared to be largely uncollectible. The books and records were in disarray and no bank reconciliations had been performed for over a year,” he wrote.
He appointed a receiver to manage Olschewski’s dealerships, effectively removing them from his control.
“It’s crippled me. I’ve lost everything I ever worked for,” Olschewski said in an interview with W5. “There’s just no way to get in front of it.”
He said he wanted to apologize to his staff, his customers, his business partners and his family for having this happen on his watch.
“I don’t even know how to talk to them. I don’t know how to look them in the eye,” he said.
He said opening up to W5 underscores his commitment to facing this honestly and moving forward.
Despite the financial consequences, he said he believes going to the police was a crucial step in shedding light on the alleged fraud, and is hoping that justice prevails.
“I got to go to bed with my head on the pillow. That at least I did the right thing,” he said.
More from this series:
- Part one: They bought a car from a dealership that turned out to be stolen. How it happened.
- Part three: ‘It never comes back to you’: Corrupt Service Ontario worker brags about her role in a scheme to sell stolen cars
NEXT: Service Ontario employees arrested – what a judge said about how one scheme worked.
For tips about auto theft, or any other story, please email Jon Woodward.
