Identity Theft of Cars

If you have not yet got enough reasons to get concerned about the identity theft problem, well, here is another already in your basket -- the identity theft ...of your car.

In what is now termed by police department as vehicle identification number (VIN) cloning, thieves replace a stolen car ID number with a legitimate number from another vehicle of the same make and model. The "cloned" car then ends up in an unsuspecting used-car lots. If you still think these are too much of raising an alarm, consider this report from Carfax which estimates that 225,000 of the 1.5 million stolen vehicles last year were tagged with cloned VINs.

How could you avoid this? Before you decide to purchase a used car, conduct a title search, which will detect cars with the same number registered to different people.