CAR owners are falling victim to a new type of scam that makes it look as if their vehicle is no longer theirs.
One car dealer in Ontario, Canada, was unable to sell a vehicle due to a problem with its VIN number, a 17-digit code that labels each car.
The car’s VIN number was taken and used on another vehicle[/caption]
Doug, the car seller, was told that the car didn’t belong to him when he tried to transfer it to the buyer[/caption]
Unbeknownst to the seller, Doug, the car had been essentially stolen despite it never leaving the property.
In a new method called re-VINning or cloning, scammers use a legitimate car’s VIN number and put it on another vehicle that may have been stolen.
This, in turn, is taking cars out of people’s possession – without them even knowing.
“We go there to put in a transfer,” Doug told CTV News. “They say, ‘Sorry, this car doesn’t belong to you.’”
“Meanwhile, it’s been sitting in our showroom for quite a while.”
He claimed that the car already had miles on it in the paperwork, even though the vehicle he was selling had none.
“They took our car’s serial number, and put it on a stolen car,” he claimed.
“There’s 35,000 kilometers on it, which for sure is not our car, because our car had no kilometers on it.”
Doug said to the outlet that he thinks someone came and wrote it down before leaving with the valuable number.
Carfax, a car company that holds reports for vehicle history, claimed that rates of re-VINning are exponentially up, estimating that more than 370,000 VIN numbers may have been cloned in Canada.
The new trend has pushed Carfax to create a new VIN monitoring service that could possibly warn customers that their number is being used somewhere other than their own paperwork.
“VIN fraud costs consumers a lot of money. We’re hoping we can make a difference by mitigating the amount of fraud that happens,” Carfax president Shawn Vording said to CTV News.
“[I]f we can do something as a business to help defund organized crime, that’s good for society overall.”
In February, an Ohio man fell victim to the same scheme after buying a truck on Facebook Marketplace.
How to check for VIN cloning
Steps can be taken to avoid buying a car that has been VIN cloned, including:
- Get the vehicle’s history report
- Look for misspellings on paperwork
- Check the VIN plates located on the dashboard to see if it was tampered with
- Look at the vehicle’s ownership history
Weeks after purchasing the truck, police confiscated the vehicle, leaving him with almost $30,000 in losses.
“It’s mind-boggling is what it is,” John Turco told WLWT-TV in February.
“I’m a victim now that my credit is going to get killed, or I owe somebody $30,000, and I got nothing.”
And in April, four vehicles valued at over $220,000 were also confiscated after Houston police inspected trucks for sale on Facebook‘s selling feature, according to KPRC-TV.
“There are multiple victims in this crime,” Detective Matthew Hayles told the outlet at the time.
“The person whose truck was stolen and the person who unknowingly bought it. Sometimes insurance may be able to step in, but it depends on the policy. It’s case by case.”
One of the main signs was the mileage number on the counterfeit paperwork[/caption]
