Berlin: The European Public Prosecutor’s Office has charged nine suspects in Germany in a salvage car fraud investigation that it values at more than €90 million, according to reports on 14 September 2026. The case, known as Nimmersatt, targets a network that allegedly shipped badly damaged vehicles from the United States into the European Union, patched them up cosmetically and sold them to unsuspecting buyers while dodging customs duties and VAT.
The figures show how much money leaked from public budgets. Prosecutors put the lost customs duties at €15.1 million and the unpaid import VAT at €49.6 million. Customs duties flow into the EU budget as traditional own resources, which explains why the EPPO, rather than national prosecutors alone, leads the case. The office has also issued orders to freeze assets worth more than €33 million, although investigators have so far secured only around €2 million.
Those charged include the organisation’s alleged ringleader, whom the authorities have held in detention since April 2025, and seven German car dealers suspected of selling the repaired vehicles to private customers. The new charges follow a first indictment in April 2026, when the EPPO’s Berlin office charged three car traders before the Regional Court in Berlin with participating in a criminal organisation and aiding VAT fraud worth an estimated €15 million.
The network reached far beyond Germany. The EPPO says the investigation stretches from the United States to Russia, with links to Canada, Hungary, Ireland and the United Kingdom as well as eleven member states in the EPPO zone. Investigators carried out a first wave of searches and arrests in April 2025 and a second wave in Lithuania in February 2026, and the office estimates that the network sold at least 16,500 cars from Lithuania alone, for a total of €144 million.
The salvage car fraud also raises a road safety problem. Insurers in the United States write off cars that have suffered serious crash, fire or flood damage, and the EPPO warns that vehicles repaired only on the surface may endanger the people who drive them. Buyers paid full market prices without knowing the history of the cars they took home.
The case fits a wider pattern in the EPPO’s caseload, where customs and VAT fraud account for a large share of the estimated damage to the EU budget. It also illustrates why the Union is building a central customs data hub, since fraudsters exploited gaps between national administrations to move cars through different ports and registries.
The EPPO’s account of the Nimmersatt investigation sets out the earlier phases. All suspects are presumed innocent until a court rules, and German judges must now decide whether the salvage car fraud charges hold up at trial.
