When you go to buy a used car, you can pay much more money than the vehicle is actually worth due to one of the most common… and least recognizable scams: manipulation of the number of kilometers. A malpractice that does not occur only in Spain, is widespread in a large part of the markets: in the United States it has become a serious problem, since almost two million models show false mileage.
Let’s start with Spain. CarVertical, a company specializing in reports on second-hand vehicles, revealed that in one in ten second-hand cars have tampered with their odometer: 10.6% of the market. In Europe, however, this practice is more widespread: they represent 15.2%. Of course, the picaresque does not understand borders: there are more serious cases.
The case of the United States
In the United States, according to data from the Department of Justice, the models that suffer this fraud, on average, cut 64,370 kilometers on the odometer. It is one of the biggest frauds suffered by consumers in that country: not surprisingly, there are abundant tutorials on YouTube that explain how to do it with systems that are for sale on Amazon and eBay.
The latest report on the subject is signed by CarFax, another vehicle history provider: the main conclusion of their investigation is that, in the US, more than 1.9 million cars They drive on the road with a false number of kilometers. A figure that represents a growth of 7% compared to 2021. Due to this fraud, drivers pay, on average, $4,000 (3,700 euros) more when buying a model with a ‘shaved’ odometer.
A fraud that costs 1,000 million a year
The state with the largest number of vehicles handled on its roads is California (437,600) followed by North Carolina. In the ‘top 10’ we also find Texas, Florida, Ohio, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Virginia. Some of them represent the markets with the highest volume in the country.
These ten states represent, by volume, 1.2 of the 1.9 million vehicles handled according to data provided by CarFax. Especially worrisome is the increase experienced in Texas (15%), Florida and Arizona (12%), North Carolina (7%) or Pennsylvania and Illinois (5%). In California, New York, Georgia and Virginia the increase was less than 5%. Doing the accounts, on average, we would find 17,000 cars with a fake odometer in each of the remaining forty states.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) does not have updated data on this fraud: you have to go back to 2002. At that time, they estimated that 450,000 vehicles with tampered odometers were sold annually. And according to the same body, it is a fraud that “costs Americans more than 1,000 million dollars (924 million euros) a year.”