BEAUMONT, Texas — You may love your truck for off-roading, hauling, and tailgating but so do a specific group of criminals.
They're capitalizing on that horsepower and towing capacity for some pretty ugly reasons.
Investigators started noticing an alarming trend in auto thefts involving Ford F-250s.
What they didn't anticipate is who is stealing them from local driveways, shopping centers, and workplaces and why.
"I walked out and my whole truck was gone," Nate Swartz said.
Swartz is from Lumberton, and he's still trying to wrap his head around this.
"There's cameras that saw a truck come, saw my truck leave. There's a camera right behind my house and saw my lights turn on at 2:29 in the morning, and they were gone in one minute," Swartz said.
In that one minute, his Ford F-250 was stolen from his Lumberton driveway in late August.
Swartz's truck went on a wild ride itself according to sheriff's deputies from Houston to Bee County, where Swartz said his truck was used in a high-speed chase. Finally, his truck was found 230 miles from home in Victoria.
But what's even more shocking is what investigators said Swartz’s truck was being used for.
“One of the sheriff's told me what they like to do is put a cover on the bed and they put people in the bed of these trucks," Swartz said.
Smuggling people and drugs. Detective Kane Dean with the Southeast Texas Auto Theft Task Force said Swartz isn't alone, just like Southeast Texans love their F-250s, so do traffickers.
"A lot of them that we see are taken down to the border a lot of them that we see recovered are down by the border areas, and utilized for let's say, the human trafficking side, also the smuggling side," Dean said.
And this is a big problem in the Lone Star State.
A University Of Texas At Austin study found there are more than 300,000 victims of human trafficking in Texas alone.
Around, 79,000 are minors or young victims of sex trafficking. The other 234,000 are adult victims of labor trafficking in other words, modern-day slavery.
Dean said these traffickers’ vehicles of choice are Ford F-250s, 350s, and 450s. Why?
“The availability of the many trucks out there, and then that person able to take that truck and move it towards the border, if they wanted to smuggle narcotics, if they want to smuggle people, whatever it takes to get back and forth, then you take the workload of the truck,” Dean said.
Their off-roading capabilities and interior space are a win-win for traffickers.
“The truck has the ability to have different panels made for the truck for smuggling, any type of narcotic,” Dean said. “Also the interior of normally it's a four-door truck, so it's rather large. They can take everything out of the inside of that truck.”
As for Swartz, he settled with insurance on his truck, so he won’t see his truck again.
"It's kind of a little disheartening, you know, in a whole sense of the fact not just yeah, they stole my truck, which Yeah, really, man they stole my truck wishes to had it, It’s an overall kind of like, security thing for where we live,” Swartz said.
Swartz said his message to other f-250 drivers is "lock ‘em up" and Dean said the same thing. There’s nothing that will stop someone from trying to steal your truck, but locking doors, setting alarms and an ignition kill switch can make it harder for those thieves.