An English man unknowingly bought back his own Honda Civic just weeks after having it stolen from his driveway in Solihull, West Midlands.

Ewan Valentine was devastated when his 9-year-old Honda Civic Type R was stolen. His girlfriend woke up one morning to drive his car to work, but it was gone. He notified police and his insurer about the theft, but things were moving along at snail’s pace, so he started looking around online to replace his pride and joy. Having become attached to his little speed demon, when he found one that was virtually identical down to the custom exhaust system, he couldn’t believe his luck. The car had different registration plates, but other than that, it looked just like his stolen Type R. For some reason, he never even considered the possibility that it could actually be his car.

Photo: Ewan Valentine

“So it seemed perfect,” 36-year-old Ewan told Yahoo News UK. “I went down to the garage to check it over, but I think my judgment was a little clouded by how desperate I was to replace my car, so I didn’t do the most thorough check.”

Valentine ended up paying 20,000 pounds ($26,800) for the black Honda Civic, but he quickly started noticing strange things. While checking the trunk, he found a tent hood and some Christmas tree pines that he had had in his stolen car, then he found some wrappers he remembered leaving in his old Honda, and finally, there was this distinctive smell of beer that his Honda had had ever since he accidentally shattered a beer bottle in it.

Photo: Ewan Valentine

“I started driving home, feeling a little strange about the situation because it could all have been a coincidence,” he recalled. “So I suddenly had the idea of checking the satnav history. Sure enough, there was my address, my parents’ address, my partner’s address, and places we’d visited over the previous couple of years. It then dawned on me that my phone connected instantly as I left the garage, rather than needing to pair it as a new device. So it was pretty clear at this point that it was my car.”

After contacting the police, Ewan learned that the vehicle identification number (VIN) did not match the one of his old car because the thieves had gone to great lengths to replace it. It had been scratched off the engine, the embossed plate on the door frame had been replaced with a sticker, and the engine serial number had been painted over.

“It was my car. They did further checks, plugging a laptop into the car, and managed to find the original VIN number,” Ewan said. “So they’d attempted to override the VIN number in the ECU, even though that was tricky to find.”

So far, the evidence collected by police suggests that the garage Ewan had bought back his stolen car from had no idea it had been stolen either, they had just been deceived by the thieves.