Gang sold £1million worth of stolen diggers and dumper trucks to customers across the world

Three members of a gang that sold stolen machinery worth more than £1m from across the North West have been jailed.

Items including diggers and dumper trucks were stolen from sites around the region before being sold around Europe and Australia. The stolen machines cost between £8k and £105k and had a total value of about £1.3m.

In total, 46 plant machines were stolen between 2015 and 2018 before being sold on to the gang, which operated out of an industrial unit in Nelson, Lancashire. Once there, the stolen goods were cloned before being sold on to innocent buyers.

READ MORE: Vigilante mob hunted down killer 90 minutes after he murdered their friend

Those who purchased the machines only realised they were stolen when police later seized the equipment, Lancs Live reports.

Detectives launched an investigation after one victim, who had a digger stolen from him, noticed an identical vehicle was being sold from the unit on the Lomeshaye Industrial Estate in Nelson. Officers visited the site and although the digger had been moved on, they caught two men, Max Wynn and Alex Grice, in the act of cloning another stolen machine.

The stolen digger was later tracked down with another two stolen vehicles in the Clayton-le-Moors area.

Police raided the unit in September 2017 and seized a Kubota digger belonging to an equipment hire company in Blackpool, and a Kubota mini excavator, along with genuine and cloned PINs, grinding equipment, sanding pads, stencils and stamping equipment.

The same day, officers attended another unit in Clayton-le-Moors where they seized three more stolen machines. During the investigation, evidence relating to 41 more machines was uncovered.

Wynn, from Wigan, was the “driving force” behind the sham