Shaquille O’Neal purchased a black 2025 Land Rover worth a reported $180,000 from an auto broker in Riverside. He paid even more to have it customized for his 7-foot-1 frame.
It was meant to be delivered to Baton Rouge, La., earlier this month but never arrived at its intended destination.
Instead, Shaq’s latest automobile purchase appears to be the “high-value vehicle” that is being investigated as stolen by the Lumpkin County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia and thought to be somewhere in Atlanta as of Monday morning.
In a news release last week, the Sheriff’s Office indicated that the vehicle had been “originally ordered through a California-based auto brokerage on behalf of a high-profile client.”
The New York Post was first to report that the client was O’Neal and the company was Riverside’s Effortless Motors. Ahmad Abdelrahman, owner of Effortless Motors, confirmed both facts to The Times during a phone interview.
Abdelrahman said his company had provided O’Neal with numerous customized vehicles over the last two years. He referred to the NBA and Louisiana State legend as “an amazing human being” and said that Effortless Motors was offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of the vehicle.
“The last guy you want to steal a car from is Shaquille O’Neal, you know?” Abdelrahman said. “I’ve never had this happen to us before. We do all his vehicles. We’ve transported deals for him hundreds of times, and something like this is definitely insane.”
In a statement emailed to The Times on Monday, the Lumpkin County Sheriff’s Office said that its criminal investigations division “is actively investigating the theft of a high-value vehicle that was fraudulently removed from a business in the Dahlonega area earlier this month. Investigators have confirmed that the vehicle was transported from a local fabrication business under false pretenses and is believed to have been taken to the Atlanta metropolitan area.”
The department added that multiple search warrants had been obtained and executed as part of the investigation and several people of interest had been identified.
Abdelrahman told The Times that O’Neal’s Land Rover was customized locally by Effortless Motors but was supposed to have additional fabrication work done in Georgia before completing its trip to Louisiana.
After learning that the vehicle never arrived in Baton Rouge, Abdelrahman said, he contacted the company he had hired to ship the vehicle, FirstLine Trucking LLC, and was told that “their system was hacked.”
“They never got our order,” Abdelrahman said he was told, “and the hackers intercepted the vehicle and picked it up, and they vanished with the car.”
FirstLine Trucking did not immediately respond to messages from The Times. O’Neal has not publicly commented on the matter.