Fraudulent VIN question

[roger will]

By chance, I found a Corvette currently for sale that shows a VIN on a car that I special ordered.  I have the Corvette Owners Card and the original sales receipt.   

 

The car offered for sale has photos of the VIN and purports to be original.  It is not my car.

 

Should I contact the state DMV that issued the title, the seller sent me a jpg of the title?

 

Your thoughts.

 

 

 

 

            

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[keiser31]

It would be good to report that as many cars are sold by fraud.

[roger will]

I don't think this car (advertised) was stolen as it has a powerglide transmission and mine had a 4 speed.

[Harold]

I wouldn't, under any circumstances, do any in-person investigating.  Contact the police department local to where the car is now and have them look into it.   Assuming there has been some  some fraudulent activity along the way (your original car may have been wrecked and this a stolen car re-VINned with your VIN plate) someone's feathers are going to be ruffled. 

[1912Staver]

Probably not the case here as GM is usually quite reliable in applying numbers. But smaller company's do sometimes get rather sloppy about allocating serial numbers.

Lotus in the 1960's and 1970's springs to mind. Once things like car registry's started to become more common in the computer age it became apparent that Lotus 

was very sloppy in allotting blocks of numbers. Sometimes the same sequence would be re - used. This seems to be more common on vehicles destined for different markets,

but in one instance at least a sequence of a couple of hundred numbers were used twice on cars destined for the U.S. market. OOPS! And before that on the race cars all sorts

of numbering irregularity's have been found over the years. It is suggested Lotus played quite a few games to avoid import duty's in several of the export markets.

Also not uncommon to find errors in the paperwork on cars sold in the 1950's and 60's. Many times these errors happened right at the selling dealer and weren't noticed for years.

Always a flaming hoop to jump through to correct the error years or decades later. 

Lola for example always used the numbers over on the I.D. plate They took the form of HU *** with the numbers starting at 1 and going up to the number of examples built.

So there are literally a hundred or so HU - 1's and so  on for all the small numbers. It is only when the car number is used in conjunction with the model number that you can

differentiate   T 540                                                    from  T 290

                          HU - 6                                                             HU-6

 

Greg in Canada

Edited June 6, 2020 by 1912Staver (see edit history)

[padgett]

Around here once I have the VIN a complete history is just a few clicks away. My first check is for a Florida title (free) and if serious (not often) use a service to get the complete record. It is all available & why if not included in an advt my first request is for the VIN (or just the last 6 since I usually have the rest).

[1912Staver]

That's a good plan for recent cars , but collector  / hobby cars often have all sorts of potential complications.  Some dealers registered vehicles by the frame number, others may have used the engine number and so on. Modern vehicles have to a large degree standardised 

numbering practices. Vintage cars are often a different matter altogether. And like I mentioned , at one time dealer typo's were reasonably common.

My 1970's TVR has a stamped number on the frame { a little tab welded to one of the tubes } and a hand engraved , different number on the I.D. tag. On some of the cars the engraved number is very sloppy and hard to read. Some dealers just registered the cars by the frame number.

Wrong by todays rules , but back in 1974 who really cared ? You bought a car and it came with paperwork. Almost no one checked that it was consistent with rules / regulations in force { if any were }at the time. It's only decades later that everyone { including MVD } expects to be just so.

That little 935 TM down at the bottom is the number. Many are a lot harder to read than this one. {3 pint lunch that day ?]

Greg

Edited June 6, 2020 by 1912Staver (see edit history)

[nzcarnerd]

4 minutes ago, 1912Staver said:

That's a good plan for recent cars , but collector  / hobby cars often have all sorts of potential complications.  Some dealers registered vehicles by the frame number, others may have used the engine number and so on. Modern vehicles have to a large degree standardised 

numbering practices. Vintage cars are often a different matter altogether. And like I mentioned , at one time dealer typo's were reasonably common.

 

Greg

 

Here in NZ we now have carjam -  https://www.carjam.co.nz/ - to find info. Unfortunately, as you noted dealer typos were common. I think it often occurred when the office girl was sent to the car registering office - In NZ it was the Post Office - with several new vehicles to register at once and details got mixed. Often chassis numbers were simply mis-read. Also at that point the 'office girl' wrote the numbers on a form and the clerk then had to transcribe it - another potential mistake point. In the 1990s the records were computerised. Apparently a bunch of temporary employees did this and I am sure many had no idea about vehicles. As you noted also, the hoop jumping to correct mistakes is significant.

 

Another problem here is that in the early days of computerisation, the registering computer would only recognise a small number of makes, so many less common models, particularly new registrations of older makes,  were registered as (make) Custombuilt, and newer ones registered as (make) Factorybuilt.

 

I frequently look at carjam to get details of cars at shows, or in old photos, but find so many errors. In some cases not helped by cars being dated as the year of registration and not their model year.  Very frustrating.

[TAKerry]

Do you still own the car? I would agree in checking with the PD in the for sale jurisdiction. I dont think I would say too much to the seller. I agree it may ruffle some feathers. Depends a lot on what year car you are talking about and how long ago it was in your posession. Is the only change the transmission? Or is it a completely diff car altogether? I have heard of cases where  a stolen car shows up many years down the road and the owner ends up SOL.

[1939_Buick]

How close is it the car you owned?

Corvette's do seem to get rebuilt, restored, modified and/or assemebled from many random bits.

[padgett]

And then there is the "Gone in 60 seconds" method.

[carlover_2020]

You can also check the vehicle history report by yourself, and if there will occur any problem or weird thing noticed, then you you should request your issues to DMW. I have mentioned one the free tools, but you can check it other way as well. Good luck. 

[8E45E]

On 6/6/2020 at 5:03 PM, TAKerry said:

Do you still own the car? I would agree in checking with the PD in the for sale jurisdiction. I dont think I would say too much to the seller. I agree it may ruffle some feathers. Depends a lot on what year car you are talking about and how long ago it was in your posession. Is the only change the transmission? Or is it a completely diff car altogether? I have heard of cases where  a stolen car shows up many years down the road and the owner ends up SOL.

Like this one:  https://www.sportscarmarket.com/news/the-saga-of-a-stolen-shelby

 

Craig

[Fossil]

12 hours ago, 8E45E said:

Like this one:  https://www.sportscarmarket.com/news/the-saga-of-a-stolen-shelby

That's quite a story. 

[Guest]

Unless you're planning to buy the car back, why get involved at all?

You know it won't go good for you or the seller. No happy ending here for anyone if you open this can of worms.

I'd just walk away.