As consumers and insurers become more sophisticated in their efforts to stop insurance fraud, those determined to defraud the system create new methods of doing so. The National Insurance Crime Bureau and Farmers Insurance recently warned the public of two new scams involving vehicles.
One innovative theft scheme, called cloning, entails the copying of vehicle identification numbers from legally owned and documented vehicles sitting in parking lots or dealerships, according to the NICB. The VIN is used to create counterfeit VIN tags. A similar vehicle is stolen and its VIN tag is replaced with the counterfeit one, making it a clone of the original vehicle.
To complete the scenario, criminals create counterfeit ownership documents for the cloned vehicles or obtain ownership documentation under false pretenses. The phony documentation is used to sell the stolen vehicles to innocent purchasers. With the counterfeit tag, the stolen vehicle can be sold without detection by government agencies.
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