The wording in the article is kind of funny, but I took it to mean that it had only been driven 12K miles since it was reported stolen. The article does not say if he had theft insurance on it at the time it was stolen, so who knows if any insurance company was involved back then or not. You would assume there was on a car only 5 yrs old, but you never know.
It seems to me like there have been a rash of these old theft recoveries lately...I wonder if there has been an improvement in access to some national database recently
EDIT: oops, I see I was typing at the same time Jim provided many pertinent facts
