The Expert Podcast

If you buy or sell cars you might want to be aware that odometer rollbacks or autometer tampering is creeping up again. Look back in the 70s or 80s—it was very common to have odometers flipped to reduce the mileage on a vehicle. And there were some laws passed at the federal level in the 1980s that made it a crime and made odometer statements, odometer reporting part of a vehicle transaction process. But because of some new high-tech scams and some ways to navigate the titling process, more and more vehicles now are finding that they're having their odometer readings changed to reflect a lower amount, which raises the value of the vehicle.

So when you're titling a vehicle or buying a vehicle, you want to make sure that you're not a victim of buying a vehicle that has actually more miles than what's showing on the odometer. How do you do that? Well, the first thing to do is to run a proper type of vehicle history check. Look, there's a lot of VIN checks online that are not really accurate—they're not really legitimate.

You want to run a vehicle check that's done by the NMVTIS, and there's third parties that do this. You'll see a link on the screen, and that will give you the history of that vehicle along with the odometer reading at each transfer—or if the vehicle is offered for sale even, it'll show you the odometer reading. That way, you can compare to what's on the vehicle now to make sure, first of all, the vehicle isn't showing less mileage but also to make sure that it's not showing suspiciously fewer miles above it.

That's what's happening now. People are buying cars that have, let's say, 90,000 miles on it as their last reported mileage, and maybe that mileage was recorded in 2012. But since 2012 to now, there was no mileage reporting because the vehicle was never sold, it was never advertised for sale. Some states require mileage every year when you do your emissions or inspections. And the people will find that vehicles that don't have that record, and then they will buy the vehicle with maybe 150,000 or 180,000 miles on it, and they'll roll back the mileage to something a little bit more than what they have found on the last title—95,000 let's say.

But now you have a 180,000-mile vehicle that's rolled back to 95, and you're buying a vehicle worth half as much, maybe. So what you have to do is run a VIN check to look at all the sources of that mileage to make sure you're not being scammed on a high-mileage vehicle.

Well, how do you roll mileage back? Well, it's a lot easier now with computers. It used to be that mileage was actually on little roll wheels that had numbers on it, kind of like a combination lock that showed up on the dashboard. And somebody would have to take apart the dashboard and roll them back, and it would leave little scratch marks on the odometer.

Now you can do it electronically because most odometers are digital. It's a series of numbers on an electronic readout, and they can plug in a certain type of computer into your vehicle's computer readout and change that mileage. And that's something where it's a lot easier to do now if you have the right kind of hacking software.

So make sure you're not being a victim. Run a good VIN check. Again, Car and Driver came out with this article this week that odometer tampering is on the rise—it's going back up. And probably in three or four years it'll change again, where they'll come out with new protections against it. But in the meantime, you want to make sure you're not a victim—or not unwittingly reselling a vehicle with lower mileage that could come back on you as a liability.