Used car buyers are being warned to take as many precautions as possible to avoid buying a dud, as an alarming number of second-hand motors have been tampered with.
One in seven vehicles on Britain’s roads today have had their mileage falsely lowered or their true identity hidden – actions that will almost certainly see you overpay for the car when buying second-hand.
In fact, it has been estimated that Britons are being fleeced out of £750million a year by overpaying for used motors that have had their mileage fraudulently adjusted – or ‘clocked’ – with the average victim spending £4,750 over the true value of a vehicle.
The latest analysis of more than 550,000 UK cars between January and September found that 16.3 per cent showed evidence of clocking or discrepancies in the Vehicle Identification Number – or VIN for short.
Diagnostics platform Carly – which conducted 2.5 million vehicle checks in the nine-month period – said motorists are at huge risk of landing a used car with ‘concealed serious issues’.
This not only leaves buyers vulnerable to overpaying for a car but also facing unexpected repair bills due to mechanical problems, greater risk of driving an unsafe motor, and potentially having the vehicle seized in the future with no recompense.
The latest analysis of more than 550,000 UK models between January and September found that 16.3% showed evidence of clocking or discrepancies in the car’s VIN
The analysis found that odometer tampering has become a nationwide problem.
While high-volume car markets like major cities and ports naturally see more activity due to the number of transactions, Carly’s findings show no dramatic regional skew.
Buyers in the North of England are just as likely to encounter clocked vehicles as those in the South, it said.
Dali Ati, head of internationalisation at Carly, said: ‘Mileage tampering can make a car appear newer and more valuable than it really is.
‘But beneath the surface, it could be far more worn and that’s where unexpected problems begin.
‘We want drivers to feel informed and in control before they spend their money.’
However, tampered VIN numbers are considered an ever greater concern.
This is because it can hide the fact a car has been stolen or previously written off, which puts the buyer at enormous risk of having the vehicle seized by police with no recompense.
It also heightens the risk of unwittingly getting behind the wheel of a motor that could be unsafe if it has been salvaged with no record of how it has been returned to the road following a crash.
As such, Ati suggests using Carley’s Used Car Check costing £41. It plugs directly into a vehicle’s internal systems via the OBD (on-board diagnostics) port to compare mileage readings across multiple control units – helping to identify resets, inconsistencies, or VIN mismatches that would be difficult to detect by visual inspection alone.
As economic uncertainty and high new car prices continue to drive demand for second-hand vehicles, Carly said it is of tremendous importance that buyers carry out digital checks before committing to any used car purchase – especially when dealing with private sellers or smaller dealerships where motorists have less consumer protection.
Tampered VIN numbers are considered a major greater concern as it could conceal that the car has been stolen or written off
The analysis found that odometer tampering has become a nationwide problem. While high-volume car markets like major cities and ports naturally see more activity due to the number of transactions, the study’s findings show no dramatic regional skew
A new world of professional car clockers
While clocking was rampant in the eighties and nineties and many drivers consider it a form of fraud that’s been resigned to the past, there is a growing swell of providers offering the latest in hi-tech mileage pausing services they claim is undetectable.
Cheap ‘mileage blockers’ – also advertised as ‘mileage freezers’ – are devices sold online that can make it impossible to identify if a car has been clocked.
Instead of lowering a vehicle’s mileage, they pause it when the car is being driven to suggest it has been used far less than it truly has.
But they don’t only pause the odometer in your car’s clocks behind the steering wheel; they block peripheral modules in modern cars from functioning as designed in an effort to make clocking undetectable.
This means it stops every new mile driven from registering on the vehicle’s ECU, which is essentially the car’s brain and record holder.
The devices will make it difficult even for dealers to spot a clocked car and the scale of the mileage-adjusted models in the market remains unclear as a result.
UK sellers of the products are taking advantage of legal loopholes around clocking devices by caveating that they are ‘for off-road or research use only’.
However, they are also advertised as ‘totally untraceable’ and ’99 per cent undetectable’, raising serious concerns that fraudsters can use them to falsify a car’s mileage before selling for an unjustly inflated price.
Use of these blockers also puts oblivious motorists at risk because a vehicle’s parts will often be substantially more worn than the faked mileage suggests they should be.
They are currently advertised online for around £200 to £250 and provide specific attachments for individual car models.
Vehicle data experts at HPI – who first raised the issue to the Daily Mail and This is Money in January 2024 – say the practice is particularly unscrupulous because an owner can still provide a complete service record history with bogus mileage that looks genuine and legal.
It also means that there will be no obvious discrepancies in the MOT record when the blocker is used, as miles will be paused rather than reduced, falsely suggesting the vehicle hasn’t been used for prolonged periods.
Already widely available in the US, a number of businesses across the UK are now selling these products online, either supplying the devices with instructions or offering installations courtesy of ‘fully qualified technicians’.
