• Sukumar Mukherjee of Lake Town was offered a fabulous deal on a second-hand Maruti 800, barely months old. He accepted, without realising that the vehicle?s papers were forged. He is now fighting a legal battle to keep the car, which police say was stolen.

• Anubhav Sinha of Madhyamgram bought a second-hand scooter at a throwaway price. He too was duped with false documents and has been prosecuted for buying and using a stolen vehicle.

Nearly 3,000 people in Calcutta and its suburbs fall prey each year to organised rackets in stolen vehicles, which are passed off as second-hand ones.

The criminal investigation department (CID), along with National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), has come up with an online tracking system to protect the buyers.

The system will allow prospective customers to find out if the second-hand vehicle they want to buy had been stolen.

?One has to obtain the registration, chassis and engine numbers of the vehicle and fill up an online form. Within a minute, he will get to know whether the vehicle had been stolen or not,? said deputy inspector-general CID (operations) Rajiv Kumar.

Assisted by the NCRB, the department has prepared a list of vehicles stolen across the country since 1995.

?We have compiled the registrations, engine and chassis numbers of the vehicles that were stolen from different parts of the country in the past 10 years. If the numbers for a vehicle are available, we can immediately tell if it is stolen or not,? deputy inspector-general Kumar explained.

According to the CID officers, the online check will also help prospective buyers detect a mismatch between a vehicle and its engine.

?Car-lifters often change the engine before selling the vehicle. Thanks to our online database, they cannot dupe people even by forging the papers,? the official added.