Hi,
Does anyone have any other methods / places to check VINs for? Before going to see a car, I go through this checklist (I am in California).
Paid (I now usually get just autocheck, because they have 30 days unlimited still):
CARFAX - Vehicle History Reports and VIN number check
AutoCheck Vehicle History Reports Homepage - A Part of Experian.
If the VIN is slightly off (e.g. a zero should be a "O", the "free" carfax report corrects this automatically,
and then I copy/paste that same vin into the others.
Fraud/Salvage check.
https://www.nicb.org/theft_and_fraud_awareness/vincheck/vincheck
I check smog history here. I do it twice, once by license plate, and once by VIN, to make sure
the plates I see on the car match with the VIN.
Vehicle Test History
For 911's, I manually crosscheck, seeing if the VIN fits in the range it should:
http://www.adelgigs.com/911vin_numbers.shtml
Also I do a plain old google search for the VIN, as well as in ebaymotors.com and see what
comes up (mostly nothing) - but sometimes you find the same guy has listed it on ebay, or
someone a few months ago sold the same car on ebay
There is a Car dealer called Cars Dwydiak - they run some kind of "Olias" report on a vin, but
it is apparently just associates the VIN with the owner's name, and it isn't available to the public.