Eight years ago my vehicle was stolen. I filed a police report and notified my insurance company, but having only liability (car was only worth a few thousand dollars) after filing the police report I never heard anything about it. I have to wonder if it was chopped for parts or is floating around out there somewhere. I have the VIN number. Are there any databases I can search? Carfax reports, etc?
I see the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB - NICB | National Insurance Crime Bureau) has a VINCheck database, but it doesn’t even register there as stolen.
I have done license plate traces and the sites that offer such services will not provide any information on a currently valid plate. (I was getting the plate number from old photos) I wonder if the VIN falls under this also?
Do people who license or insure vehicles in your state have access to DMV registration data? (Of course, there may be issues with releasing private information).
I suspect a car worth only a few thousand eight years ago was probably chopped, or used until it started giving trouble, then driven into the nearest lake or abandoned in a vacant lot. A lot of stolen cars in my region are just joyriders, abandoned in a few hours or days. One of the first articles I read about license plate readers mentioned that the LA Police would cruise “interesting” neighborhoods scanning for stolen cars; it was impossible to check any volume of plates by hand, so stolen cars could sit on the street for months until someone noticed they hadn’t moved, if they weren’t being regularly used. The only risk for the thieves was in being pulled over in a stolen car.
My father-in-law was an insurance agent, he described an older customer whose car was stolen from a shopping mall. They settled, the guy got his payout; then about a year later when they were tearing down the mall, he got a call asking why his car was still there. he’d simply forgotten where in the parking lot he’d parked.