How to check if your looted car in Sudan has been found
I built a free registry of the cars that turn up in Sudanese recovery lists. This is how to search it, and what to do when your number appears.
By Firas Mohammed · · 4 min read
The short answer
Open mycarsd.online and type your chassis (VIN) number or your plate number into the search box. Part of the number is enough, 4 digits or more. Arabic and Latin digits both work.
The site is Arabati Wein (عربتي وين؟, "where is my car?"), a free public registry of vehicles looted or lost in the Sudan war. On 5 November 2026 it held 103,179 identified vehicles and 87,723 distinct chassis numbers, all taken from public posts. Searching is free and needs no account.
Where the numbers come from
A family vehicle was taken during the war. When I went looking for it, the only trace of cars like it was in Facebook groups and Telegram channels: police committee lists, volunteers' lists, photographed handwritten pages, dealer posts. A family holding its chassis number had nowhere to type it.
So I built a pipeline that collects those posts, reads the photos as well as the text, and splits every list into one record per vehicle. It has collected 187,055 public posts since 22 August 2026.
How to search
- Get your numbers ready. The chassis number is on the registration card and usually has 17 characters. The plate is its digits plus the state code, written like
12345 خ1. - Type the number. A partial chassis number works. Type a plate as written, or type its digits alone. You can also search by description, for example كورولا ابيض 2015, and filter by type, colour, year and location.
- Read the dossier. Each vehicle gets one entry: every public post its number appeared in, newest first, with the make, colour, status, location, the contact number the poster published and a link to the original post. Open that post before you act on anything.
- Check the warnings. A record marked من صورة ⚠️ was read from a photo by machine and can carry a wrong digit. A result that matches only part of your number can belong to a different car.
- Register a watch if nothing comes up. Leave the number and a WhatsApp or phone contact. The registry checks it every hour against new posts and photos, and a person reviews each hit before it reaches you. Your contact is stored only to alert you and is never published.
If your number appears
Take a screenshot of the post and copy its link. Then take both to the police or the Traffic Department.
Leave the seller or holder alone, and pay no one. Approaching a holder directly is how families get extorted, and how a car disappears again.
File the free online report at sudanpolice.net/reg/car_stealing whether you found anything or not. According to the police spokesman's statement, it puts a legal ban on re-registering the car and lists it with INTERPOL. Official impound yards check chassis numbers at the gate, so a car can sit in a yard without anyone posting about it.
What the registry is
- A copy of vehicle details that were already public, each with a link to its post. Photos and text read from photographed documents stay off the site.
- Free at every step, including the watch and any lead it produces.
- A community project, independent of the Sudan Police, the Traffic Department and every government body. The official route is still the police report and the Traffic Department.
- Strict about numbers. An alert needs an exact chassis or plate match, because cars of the same model and colour look alike.
- Early. On 5 November 2026 it had 107 standing watches, 2 leads checked by a person and passed on, and 0 confirmed recoveries.
Scams to watch for
- There is no official WhatsApp number for vehicle recovery in Sudan. Treat any account that offers one as a scam.
- Official recovery is free. Anyone asking for money to "release" a car, or for information about it, is working outside the official process.
- Keep your chassis number out of private messages to "search platforms". Fake recovery committees collect numbers that way, then ask for fees.
- Never read a 6-digit verification code to anyone. Account takeover through that code is the most common attack on people who are searching.
Questions people ask
Is it free to search for a looted car in Sudan?
Yes. The registry is free and needs no account. The police online report and a visit to the Traffic Department are free too.
Can I search by plate number in Arabic?
Yes. Type the plate as written, for example 12345 خ1, or the digits alone. Arabic digits such as ١٢٣٤٥ are read the same as 12345.
My car isn't in the registry. What should I do?
Register a watch on the same page, file the police report and go to the Traffic Department in person.
Can I search for a relative's car from abroad?
Yes. Most people searching are abroad, in the Gulf, Egypt, Europe and North America. Use the number from your relative's registration card and register the watch with their contact.
Behind the registry
How the pipeline reads Arabic posts and photos is in the vehicle recovery case study. Two notes go further: how I cut the AI cost about tenfold and the checks that catch lost records.
If you need a pipeline like this for your own documents, this is how I work.