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A truck disappears from a depot in Belgium. Six weeks later, the same machine — repainted, seemingly renumbered — resurfaces in a professional listing 900 kilometres away. The insurer has already paid out. The police have already opened a file. And yet the sale is about to close, because the three parties who each hold one piece of the puzzle never speak at the right moment. This article is for the people who can change that: Europe's insurers.
The second-hand market between professionals has never been busier. Vehicles, construction plant, farm machinery, industrial equipment, production lines: high-value assets change hands every day, across the borders of the single market. That is good economic news. It is also a windfall for anyone looking to offload a stolen asset far from where it vanished.
At Kinkoza, we are building Europe's first marketplace designed to secure B2B transactions. And we start from a simple observation: we share with insurers the same adversary and the same goal. The adversary is fraud and handling of stolen goods, at continental scale. The goal is a world where an online transaction between professionals is no longer a bet on the other party's good faith.
This article is an open hand. Here is why a partnership between European insurers and Kinkoza is simply common sense — and how it could work in practice.
The problem: the information already exists, but arrives too late
In Europe, the fight against theft and the handling of stolen goods does not suffer from a lack of data. It suffers from a failure of timing.
Law-enforcement agencies in the Schengen countries already feed the Schengen Information System (SIS), the Union's largest internal-security database: it records wanted or missing persons and stolen or missing objects — vehicles, documents, number plates, registration certificates, means of payment — and it is searchable by the competent authorities of thirty European countries. Insurers, for their part, have built their own national registers of assets reported stolen or written off, and increasingly cooperate across borders to spot fraudulent networks.
So the information about the stolen asset does exist, often within hours of the loss. The problem is that it never meets the moment that truly matters: the instant that asset is put back up for sale.
Between the reporting of a theft and the resale of the asset on a platform, there is today almost no automatic bridge. The fraudulent seller exploits precisely this blind spot. They resell in another country, under another identity, to a good-faith buyer who has no way of knowing that the machine they are about to pay for is already on a list of stolen goods.
Why this problem is getting worse
Three dynamics pull in the wrong direction.
Fraud is professionalising and scaling up. Investigations now document organised networks that clone legitimate websites, operate from servers abroad, and orchestrate fake sales in entire clusters. Insurance Europe makes the point: cyber-enabled fraud and identity fraud are growth areas, and insurers carry the bill — ultimately passed on to honest customers.
Cross-border trade multiplies the blind spots. An asset stolen in one country and resold in another crosses an administrative border that neither the investigation nor the insurance check easily follows. The single market makes commerce flow more freely; it makes the handling of stolen goods flow more freely too.
The transaction has no checkpoint. Between two businesses, there is usually no consumer-protection reflex, no third party holding the funds, no mandatory identity check. Someone always has to move first — and it is in that gap that theft and resale thrive.
Kinkoza's proposal: make the transaction the checkpoint
We are convinced that the most effective last line of defence is neither the police station nor the claims department: it is the resale platform itself, at the precise moment when money is about to change hands.
That is exactly what Kinkoza was built to do. Every transaction on our marketplace rests on three safeguards that are built in, not bolted on:
Verified counterparties (KYC / KYB). Every business and every signatory is checked before a deal can proceed. No more anonymity behind a listing: you always know who is on the other side.
Funds held in escrow. Payment is released to the seller only once the asset has been received and confirmed as agreed. No one has to trust blind; no one is left exposed.
Full traceability, border after border. From the first connection to the final payment, the entire journey is recorded and protected, everywhere in Europe.
This architecture needs one final building block to become a genuine barrier against the handling of stolen goods: the ability to cross-check, at the point of listing, the offered asset against the legal registers of goods reported stolen by police forces and by insurers across the various countries.
That is precisely what the partnership we are proposing is about.
What we are proposing to European insurers
We want to establish — on clear legal foundations, fully respectful of the GDPR — channels of cooperation that would allow us to:
Verify an asset at the point of listing. When an identifiable asset (serial number, VIN, chassis number, unique reference) is listed on Kinkoza, cross-check it against the registers of goods reported stolen — to detect a match before the transaction completes.
Block and flag rather than absorb. In the event of a match, suspend the transaction and alert the authorised parties, rather than letting a stolen asset dissolve into a legitimate circuit.
Surface weak signals. Share, within a controlled framework, the suspicious patterns the platform observes — cloned listings, dubious identities, atypical resale behaviour — to feed insurers' anti-fraud systems.
Aid recovery. A stolen asset located early in its resale cycle is an asset the insurer can hope to recover, reducing the final cost of the claim accordingly.
We do not aim to replace the authorities or the claims departments. We want to be the missing link between the information you already hold and the moment it becomes truly useful: the transaction.
A shared goal, a shared responsibility
Insurers do more than pay out: they have always carried a mission of risk prevention. Kinkoza shares that mission, applied to the most vulnerable moment in an asset's life cycle — its resale.
Each party holds a piece. Law enforcement keeps the register of stolen goods. Insurers know the claims and fund the fight against fraud. Kinkoza operates the place where these assets resurface. As long as these pieces stay apart, the fraudster keeps the lead. Brought together at the right moment, they take it away.
We believe in a European market where professionals can buy and sell without betting on the good faith of the stranger across the table. That is a safer world for buyers, a fairer one for honest sellers, and a less costly one for insurers and their customers alike.
Let's build this bridge together
If you are an insurer, a trade federation, or the person responsible for anti-fraud in your organisation, we would be delighted to discuss the legal and technical foundations of such a partnership. Whether you are in France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Estonia or anywhere else in the Union, the principle is the same — and the appetite to move forward, we hope, just as shared.
Let's write the chapter where reselling a stolen asset becomes the exception that gets caught, rather than the rule that slips through.
Let's talk about your anti-fraud partnership → Contact Kinkoza
Smart connections, trusted transactions.
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