The Facts
Enterprising criminals continue to invent new scams to defraud insurers and consumers. One innovative vehicle theft scheme involves copying a vehicle identification number (VIN) from a legally owned and documented vehicle sitting in a parking lot or vehicle dealership. The VIN is then used as the basis to create counterfeit VIN tags. The next step in the cloning process is to steal a vehicle similar to the one from which the criminal lifted the legitimate VIN. The stolen vehicles legitimate VIN tag is replaced with the counterfeit one. With this counterfeit tag, the stolen vehicle is now a “clone” of the original vehicle that was legally owned and innocently parked in a lot. With the counterfeit VIN tag, the stolen vehicle can easily be sold without detection by government agencies. To complete the scenario, criminals will create counterfeit ownership documents for the cloned vehicle or obtain the ownership documentation under false pretenses. They use this phony documentation to sell the stolen vehicle to an innocent purchaser. Vehicle cloning is a highly lucrative crime. Car thieves often travel across state and international borders to sell cloned vehicles at the highest prices. Most licensing agencies do not check for duplicate ownership when an out-of-state ownership document is surrendered, so the odds of discovery are low. It is also easy to simultaneously insure the same VIN in different locations.