Clone Car Guide - Protect yourself

samy4127

EdGasketTheSecond wrote: »

They are making it into a film.



(shouldn't joke it was a terrible thing to happen)

I could have won an Oscar Award

Shaun_of_the_Dead

samy4127 wrote: »

I could have won an Oscar Award

The mark and some mates go to Manchester and no one shows up.

Not exactly the greatest story ever told.

Deneb

samy4127 wrote: »

4: Connect a portable diagnostic scanner which you plug in the OBD usually underneath the steering foot well on the drivers side. This will show the genuine VIN number as these cannot be reprogrammed. (Ask seller if they are OK for you to do this)

Actually, they can. The VIN may also be recorded in several different ECUs on a car, but a typical OBD scanner will only retrieve one of them. As well as being reprogrammed, it sometimes happens that the ECU containing the VIN has been swapped with the one from the "donor" car whose identity the cloned car has be transposed onto.

A professional clone will cover this, and the stamped VIN which you found ground off will have been replaced by the false VIN also.

But an obviously ground off VIN should ring alarm bells, as should a printed piece of paper or card stuck over the original or ground off stamped VIN, which also happens a lot these days, since most buyers know they should check the VIN matches, but not what it should look like, and the perpetrators don't care if the buyer discovers the problem five minutes after they've scarpered, only that they are fooled long enough to hand over the money!