Can white smoke be caused by someone tampering with your car?

Can white smoke be caused by someone tampering with your car?
It's a long story so I will elaborate beyond my question a little here.

Repo people have been coming to our house looking for a girl who rented there before us. We keep telling them we have no idea who she is and that we have lived in the house for 7 mos now. This last group of "thugs" came after dark in an unmarked pickup. They were demanding to see in our garage, and one guy said "if you don't let us in, I'm going to come back every night until I see that garage." My husband told them "if you're going to take that attitude, you can go f yourself and get off of my property right now." So the guy said "ok I'll go f myself then" and they left. How do we know if they were legitimate repo people or thieves you know?? Their truck was unmarked and they were a bunch of huge tough guys.

The next morning we went to start the car to run errands and the car made a chugging, rumbling noise and we shut it off immediately. We looked around the car and saw some white smoke coming out of the left rear tailpipe. This car is a 2008 Nissan Altima and has never given us problems before. We called in a police report just to be safe.

I'm wondering if this sounds like a freak coincidence, or if it is possible that one of these guys could have done something to sabotage it during the night. There wasn't any sign of forced entry into the doors, hood or even gas tank, and we couldn't see anything in either of the tailpipes. I don't know what someone could do externally to cause this?

Thanks for your time!