VIN Switching is the unlawful technique suspects use to disguise a vehicle's true identity by changing its VIN. VIN Switching is most often used to disguise a stolen vehicle, by changing its VIN to one which is not stolen. Specifically, the suspect replaces the public VIN plate on the dash board, and the federal certification label at the driver's door. The vehicle is then sold to unsuspecting buyer, exported, or the suspect may keep it for himself or his associates.

Sloppy work sometimes makes a VIN switched vehicle easy to detect. Unfortuantely, most VIN switches are perpetrated by experienced, professional auto thieves, and the quality of their work easily fools citizens and patrol officers alike. These vehicles are often only detected by experienced auto theft investigators.

There are several ways a suspect may obtain a "replacement" VIN:

A salvaged or junked vehicle is low valued because it may have been heavily damaged, burned, stripped, abandoned, or even previously stolen and recovered. A suspect will buy a salvaged or junked vehicle solely for the title and VIN information. He will then steal an identical vehicle, and changed the VIN of the stolen vehicle to match the VIN of the salvaged vehicle. The disguised stolen vehicle is then sold to an unsuspecting buyer. Leagally, the buyer only owns the title to the salvaged vehicle, which may still be sitting at a junk yard or may have been chopped to pieces by the suspect to avoid its discovery and examination by police.

Suspects may also get VIN information from vehicles they already own. A suspect may have crashed his vehicle, but rather than repair his vehicle, he might steal an identical vehicle, and replace the stolen vehicle's VIN with his own.

Suspects may also make up their own VINs by either making up an entirely new number, or by simply changing one or two digits of the stolen vehicle's VIN. Title documents are either altered or counterfeited to match the new VIN. In these cases, the unsuspecting buyers have only purchased a worthless title to a nonexistant vehicle.

Rather than make up a VIN number, suspects often copy the VIN from a similar vehicle they happened to have come across in a parking lot. The suspect then goes to DMV and falsely represents himself as that vehicle's owner. He will claim to have lost a license plate, and order a new set of plates, a current registration, and a replacement title. After a stolen vehicle's VIN has been changed to match the replacement VIN, the title and license plates are then used to sell the stolen vehicle to an unsuspecting buyer. O.C.A.T.T. investigated a case where one vehicle had been cloned 13 times!