Excerpts from a 2004 bulletin to insurance companies, from the National Insurance Crime Bureau, about the growing problem of vehicle cloning. Anybody who is thinking about buying a car should read this, and then research the problem on Google. Frankly, it gave me chills:



Buyer Beware: Your Vehicle May Have a Twin

As a brief introduction to a simple cloning scheme, an individual will copy a VIN from a legally owned and documented vehicle sitting in a parking lot or car dealership. The legitimate VIN is then used to create a counterfeit VIN tag, frequently multiple times. From there, thieves steal a similar vehicle as the
legally owned one from the parking lot, and replace the stolen vehicle's VIN tag and other labels with the counterfeit ones containing the non-stolen vehicle's identification numbers and other known identifiers.

Bearing a counterfeit tag, the stolen vehicle is now a "clone" of the legitimate one and can be titled, then sold, without detection by government agencies. To government agencies, the stolen vehicle looks just like the one from the parking lot…on paper that is. Fred and Lorraine Pierson of Prestonwood, North Carolina, were exactly the kind of victims that vehicle cloning criminals prey upon.

The Pierson's case began with an investigative lead gathered in February 2004 by the NICB's Area 9 office in Hartford, Connecticut, and shared with the Area 6 office in Washington, D.C. The lead involved a stolen vehicle insured by an NICB member: a Lexus LX 470, a luxury sport utility vehicle (SUV) reported stolen from New York City. Through an investigative database search, the NICB
believed it had located this vehicle in the Raleigh, North Carolina area, which is covered by the Area 6 office.

The Piersons were the stolen vehicle's unsuspecting owners. They had bought the Lexus as a used vehicle for $40,000 from a private individual. With $10,000 to use as a down payment, Fred asked a car dealership in a nearby community to finance the balance. The Lexus was fully inspected for previous damage, with its VIN checked by Carfax for a vehicle history. The Piersons assumed they had
done everything correctly to ensure they purchased a legal vehicle. They drove the Lexus for nearly two years and diligently made loan payments for 20 months.
That's when investigators from the North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles, working in conjunction with the NICB, paid a visit to the Piersons.

Investigators discovered the car's VIN markings had been professionally altered almost everywhere on the vehicle and replaced with a VIN of a similar non-stolen
Lexus. Further examination of the vehicle proved Pierson's car was the one stolen from New York City in late 1999. Its title had been washed in Virginia. Within hours, officials towed the Lexus and later returned it to the NICB member insurer that paid the claim on the stolen vehicle years before. The total
elapsed time from when the lead was shared among NICB area offices to the time the vehicle was returned to the insurer: three weeks.

Tallying up the costs on this case: The Piersons made $17,700 in payments on the Lexus, and could potentially be liable for the loan's balance of more than $25,000, pending legal action. They have also lost the Lexus and must come up with the money to replace it with another vehicle. The thieves made
off with an easy $40,000.

Even consumers like the Piersons, who did everything right when purchasing their used Lexus, can be victimized in vehicle cloning crimes. It's clearly a buyer-beware market.