Exotic car salesman Ed Bolian would never forget the day someone called him with a 2003 Ferrari 360 Spider for sale. Why? Because they only wanted $25,000 for a car easily worth four times that. The more he listened, the more suspicious the story got.

“They said you could have it for 25 grand, but you have to go and pick it up,” Ed recalls. The catch? The Ferrari was stashed on a remote farm in South Georgia, out of sight. And when Bolian looked into it, he discovered the car wasn’t just hidden—it was wrapped in aluminum foil.

No, this wasn’t some budget metallic wrap. The owner was terrified the car had a transponder tracking its location.

Supercar theft for insurance fraud is common

Bolian reveals that back then loans for luxury cars may have been too easy to get. “Banks had been financing way over sticker,” Bolian explains. “It was a hard thing for them to get rid of.”

Then the supercars would often lose value quickly, leaving their owners upside down on their loans. “At the time, these cars were just depreciating catastrophically,” Bolian explains. “Owners were a hundred, one hundred fifty thousand dollars upside down in equity.”

Some saw only one way out: claim the car was stolen, collect an insurance payout, and stash the vehicle somewhere out of reach. “Rather than getting it repo’d, [the owner] just reported it stolen, got it paid off, and then hid the car.”

The stolen Ferrari wasn’t the first suspicious car Bolian encountered. While investigating a Lamborghini Gallardo in Atlanta, he uncovered two stolen cars, both with falsified VIN numbers. One was parked in a dealer’s garage with fake paperwork. The other had its VIN plates swapped so convincingly that only a close inspection of the glovebox manual revealed the truth.

Who buys a car like this?

You might think no one would touch a stolen supercar, but there’s a market. “For plenty of people that might want a track car to export… there’s a lot of fun to be had for 25 grand,” Bolian says. Buyers might take the risk to use the car in private settings or smuggle it overseas, where stolen vehicle databases are harder to check.

In this case, Bolian passed on the “deal.” But the Ferrari stayed hidden in the Georgia countryside, wrapped like a baked potato, a monument to one man’s desperate attempt to escape his financial mistakes.

For Ed Bolian, it was just another wild story from the exotic car world. But for would-be buyers, it’s a stark reminder to be cautious when a deal seems too good to be true. You can see more of Ed Bolian’s stolen car stories in the video below: