Car Cloning & How to Always Avoid It
When it comes to you and your car, there is an awful lot of things that can go wrong. It’s rare, but it can happen, and it’s more often than not just a part of life and another learning curve that just goes underway whether you like it or not. Others, however, are a lot more serious, and one of the best examples of that in action is car cloning.
Car cloning isn’t something that’s gets talked about as much as it should do in recent years, but it’s just as big a problem now as ever before. Because of that, it’s absolutely essential that you learn everything that you possibly can do about it to prevent it from happening to you.
What is Car Cloning?
By definition, car cloning or car fraud as it can also be known by is where someone is essentially stealing the identity of your car. Someone makes their car look like yours, and as a result, whenever anything happens to that car, or when it gets used, it comes back to you. That can be parking fines to serious crimes, it doesn’t matter, since it’s your car in the mix… allegedly anyway.
How Does it Work?
It sounds ridiculous since someone can’t exactly make a copy of your car or take down your details, but it’s actually a lot more simple than that. Most of the time, it happens by someone with a car the same make and model and even colour as your own replicates your licence late and puts it on their own car.
A lot of the time, this comes from dodgy dealings or black market trades but it’s always something that can happen if you’re seriously, seriously unlucky.
What Can You do about it?
If it even does happen to you, the next step in the process is to realise what you need to do about it. You need to act fast after all, since you don’t want anything falling on you that isn’t your fault, especially if it’s in the realm of criminal activities.
The best thing that you can ever do in a situation like this is to always go straight to the authorities in charge. In this case, since it’s a serious crime affecting your car and your identity too, you need to go straight to the police as well as the DVLA. Give them as much information as you can, and let them do their thing.
How Can You Avoid Car Cloning?
So all of that sounds a lot more scary than it may actually be, but it’s still always worth making it as unlikely to happen to you as you possibly can and even more so is to prevent you actually buying a cloned car in the first place. To make sure what you’re buying is legit and to stop you getting in hot water, there are always a few signs for you to look out for in the first place.
Firstly, always make sure that you have the relevant paperwork for your car and for any car you intend to buy. You should always have a V5C in any vehicle ownership change, and that’s the best way to make sure that everything stays above board in legal. In fact, it’s actually one of the documents you should make sure you look after more than anything else.
Always look for the signs of a bad deal when you try to buy a car. This kind of thing can even happen form low scale car dealers if you don’t know what to look out for, so it really is essential. If the car seems far too good to be true, then chances are, it is.
Never be afraid to get a second opinion on your car, and even try to do checks yourself to make sure the car is what it seems. Check the MOT history and see if the car’s mileage matches up to what it should or thereabouts. Check for a service history to see what’s been going on with the car. Better than both of those is to get a totally independent vehicle inspection anyway form someone like us.
No matter what you do, make sure you look after yourself and your money. If you buy a cloned car, you lose the car and the money, and if it happens to you, call the police. Stay safe.
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