Health-care worker Cleveland Wishop landed at Baltimore-Washington International Airport last fall expecting to retrieve his car from long-term parking and drive home.

It never crossed his mind that he had fallen into one of the economic traps stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.

His Camaro had vanished. The dealer who sold him the 2010 car a year earlier seized it after Wishop fell just 19 days behind in making his August payment.

"I was pissed, extremely," Wishop said.

In times past, auto dealers and lenders were slower to retake cars when borrowers fell behind. Finding and repossessing vehicles was often difficult, occasionally even risky. And recouping costs on seized vehicles was a losing game.

But the pandemic changed that.

Global supply chain snarls continue to cause chronic shortages in many vital products, including the computer chips at the heart of modern cars. That has led to a skyrocketing demand for used cars as production of new vehicles remains constrained, and that, in turn, has led to a boom in the repo game.

Now a dealer who moves fast to repossess a vehicle can expect to resell it quickly, sometimes at a higher price. And thanks to the prevalence of tracking technology, finding vehicles is fairly simple.

Auto repos had been down during earlier phases of the pandemic as lenders gave more breaks to borrowers. Although statistics for this year aren't yet available, title firms, government regulators and many people involved in auto collection and auctions say that repossessions are rising notably.

"There was a period for a lot of creditors, they were deferring earlier in COVID," said Colin Welsh, an attorney who works with borrowers and has been fielding many more repo calls. "That has waned, and now they're seizing the moment."

Mark Lacek, a Florida repo man who's recovered more than 10,000 vehicles since the 1970s, predicts the trend will only grow.

"I expect to be super, super busy," he said, adding that technology has streamlined assigning and finding repo vehicles. Like beachcombers with metal detectors, Lacek said, a small army of people with license-plate-reading cameras mounted on their cars cruise the streets, waiting for a ping to alert them when they pass a vehicle in the repo database.

In the case of Wishop's Camaro, Caspian Auto Motors of Stafford, Va., resold the car within two weeks and is now suing Wishop, of Petersburg, Va., to pay off the balance due on the four-year, high-interest loan.

Wishop, while acknowledging his checkered credit history, is pursuing his own legal action against the dealer.

"They got paid twice for the same car," he said. "That was their aim. That's their game."

Caspian managers didn't return calls.

Repo rebates

An odd twist to the current repo boom is that car prices have soared so high that some people who have had their cars repossessed have ended up cashing in on the deal.

Robert W. Murphy, a Florida attorney who represents borrowers, said he's had clients get paid several thousand dollars after their cars were repossessed and sold at an auction. That's because, by law, proceeds exceeding the loan recovery amount must be returned to the borrower.

Not only is inflation straining household budgets, but government pandemic aid checks have stopped flowing, and many people who bolstered their savings accounts during the earlier phases of COVID are seeing those balances dwindle.

American consumers currently have auto loans totaling $1.4 trillion, double the amount from 10 years ago and now larger than credit card debt, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Banks and credit unions that have invested heavily in car loans face the brunt of the pressure generated by late payments.

Pentagon Federal Credit Union, headquartered in McLean, Va., has one of the largest portfolios of used-auto loans, about $3.6 billion as of March. That's up a whopping 80% from a year earlier. As of March, the dollar volume of delinquent accounts 60 days or greater has more than doubled from a year ago to about $45 million, according to quarterly filings.

Another wrinkle in the repo market is the possibility of a sudden return to normal. If kinks in the supply chain disappear and the supply of new cars surges, used car prices likely will fall, leaving some consumers upside-down in their auto loans.

Some analysts say the situation looks similar to the mortgage crisis of 2007, when people caught upside-down in their house payments simply walked away, leaving lenders to deal with the fallout. Likewise, car owners owing thousands of dollars more than their cars are worth might stop making payments and just wait for the repo man to show up.

The average monthly payment on a used-car loan today exceeds $500, says Bankrate.com. It's about $650 for new vehicles.