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.
