Shaquille O’Neal shipping a custom Land Rover from CA. It disappeared

Shaquille O’Neal bought a black 2025 Land Rover worth a reported $180,000 from a car broker in Riverside. He paid more for customization for his 7-foot-1 frame.

It was delivered to Baton Rouge, La., earlier this month, but never reached its intended destination.

Instead, Shaq’s latest car purchase appears to be a “high value vehicle” that is being investigated as stolen by the Lumpkin County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia and is believed to be somewhere in Atlanta as of Monday morning.

In a news release last week, the sheriff’s office indicated that the car was “originally ordered through a California-based auto brokerage on behalf of a high-profile customer.”

The New York Post was the first to report that the buyer was O’Neal and the company was Riverside’s Effortless Motors. Ahmed Abdul Rahman, owner of Effortless Motors, confirmed both facts to The Times during a phone interview.

Abdul Rahman said his company has supplied O’Neal with several custom cars over the past two years. He referred to the NBA and Louisiana State legend as “an amazing human being” and said Selfless Cars is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of the vehicle.

“The last person you want to steal a car from is Shaquille O’Neal, you know?” Abdul Rahman said. “I’ve never seen anything like this with us before. We do all of his vehicles. We’ve done hundreds of deals for him, and something like this is definitely crazy.”

In a statement emailed to The Times on Monday, the Lumpkin County Sheriff’s Office said its Criminal Investigations Division is “actively investigating the theft of a high-value vehicle that was fraudulently removed from a business in the Dahlonga area earlier this month. Investigators confirmed that the vehicle was transferred from a local construction business and mistakenly believe it was transferred to a fraudulent business.” area.”

The department added that as part of the investigation, several search warrants were obtained and executed and a number of persons of interest were identified.

Abdul Rahman told the Times that O’Neal’s Land Rover was customized locally by Effortless Motors but was scheduled to undergo additional construction work in Georgia before completing its trip to Louisiana.

After realizing the car never made it to Baton Rouge, Abdul Rahman said, he contacted the company he hired to ship the car, First Line Trucking LLC, and was told “their system had been hacked.”

“They never received our order,” Abdul Rahman said, he was told, “the hackers stopped the car and lifted it, and they disappeared with the car.”

First Line Trucking did not immediately respond to messages from The Times. O’Neal has not commented publicly on the matter.