Look at this dude original9/21/2023 ![]() ![]() In rare cases, CON VINs have been transplanted from totaled cars to donor cars in order to bolster their authenticity. (Ahhh, there's the rub, because only law enforcement and insurance companies are allowed to entrap, uh, check this stuff!) Many states have laws in place that regulate the use and registration of donor vehicles and their parts, and thanks to the insurance industry's obfuscation, you may be blindsided. The main thing to watch out for is if the donor parts come up on the NICB database as stolen. Over time, these driveline components break, get rebuilt, and are eventually replaced with units from donor or salvage cars. It's common for engine and driveline VINs to mismatch, especially non-stock antique vehicles with a long history of competition such as this one. Does it matter? That depends on whether all the other VINs on the car body match up, and in this case they do. Uh oh! The engine's CON VIN partial sequence number stamped on a pad on the passenger side of the block near the rear, "23688," does not match the body's "17247." Also, the CON VIN stamped into the transmission doesn't match. Now let's look at several examples of CON VINs on different makes and models of cars. This is not what you want, so it helps to be able to spot and cross-verify at least one CON VIN on the car with the primary public VIN plate before buying a used vehicle. The Camaro passed the CON VIN test that day, but had it not, the car could've been impounded for further investigation. Besides being inconvenient and costing an extra day out of work, I was not allowed to observe while troopers put the car on a lift to inspect the undercarriage. The local California AAA office could not officially verify the VIN on this vehicle for obtaining a California title and I had to make an appointment at a specially designated California Highway Patrol facility. When the area was rebuilt and painted, the VIN label was no longer in place. In the case of a 1994 Chevy Camaro Z28 I owned that had been involved in a side-impact accident, the secondary VIN on the driver-side door in the latch area had been destroyed. I've had personal experience on the use of CON VINs when I moved to California from out of state. With the most popular muscle cars and other vintage machinery, CON VIN locations have leaked into the public domain and are generally discoverable with a little research. Note that this information is often hard to obtain because it's supposed to be secret and shared only within a consortium of manufacturers, law enforcement, and the insurance industry. You will want to do some internet research on the CON VIN locations for the particular year, make, and model you're interested in. ![]() Manufacturers tend to use similar locations from model to model and year to year, but CON VIN locations can be different from manufacturer to manufacturer. The federal Theft Prevention Standard (49 CFR Part 541) states that the VIN must appear on the 18 "major parts" of a motor vehicle that are subject to the parts-marking requirement. Typical places to find CON VINs include: the radiator core support, frame, trunkfloor under the spare tire, next to or inside the driver-side trunk driprail molding, inside one of the rear wheelwell sheetmetal stampings, on the engine block, on the firewall stamped into sheetmetal (covered by the heater box on the passenger side), the transmission housing, and the rear axletube. NICB service access is not extended to private individuals, shops, archivists, or restorers-a service that otherwise would help consumers safeguard against fraud. Law enforcement agencies and insurance companies have unfettered access to the NICB database via NICB's Investigative Assistance Group, which also maintains a mirror-image database of the National Crime Information Center (NCIC). The National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) keeps records of confidential VIN sequence number locations from all manufacturers going back as far as the 1920s. These help law enforcement and insurance investigators determine if the vehicle and its parts are original and may aid in the investigation of missing or stolen vehicles of a similar year, make, and model where parts or bodies easily interchange. A "confidential VIN," or CON VIN as it is called by law enforcement, contains the last six digits of the VIN-the serial sequence number portion of the VIN number-and can be discovered in a variety of places sprinkled throughout the car, engine, sheetmetal, and powertrain.
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