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Car theft continues to be a scourge on the Prairies with older-model Ford trucks maintaining pole position as the most popular target for thieves in Alberta, new data from the Insurance Bureau of Canada shows.

Thefts of vehicles in Alberta has jumped 56 per cent over the past five years, placing Wild Rose Country as the hot bed of Canadian vehicle crime. The numbers in 2017 have climbed six per cent over the previous year.

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The Canadian average for theft rates per 100,000 vehicles in 2017 hovers around 230. In rural Alberta that number explodes to about 700 thefts per 100,000 vehicles.

Numbers released last year showed that a smidgen over 22,800 vehicles were stolen in Alberta, or roughly one-quarter of all vehicles stolen across Canada in 2016, and on a per-capita basis, Alberta was behind only Quebec for stolen unrecovered vehicles.

In 2016, an estimated 3,500 vehicles went unrecovered in Alberta, while that number across Canada was closer to 22,000.