Family Finance Blog

We just bought ourselves a new (used) car the other day (I’ll talk about the reasoning we used to justify the car in another post). Since we bought it used, and from a private person, we ran the VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) to check the vehicle’s history. Checking the VIN will tell you whether the car is stolen, whether it has been in major accidents or whether the odometer has been significantly rolled back. It’s a crucial step in buying a used car and could save you a lot of headaches.

Unfortunately, it can also be much more expensive than necessary. If you go to one of the most popular sites for VIN checks, CarFax.com, they want to charge you $24.99 for a VIN check, or $29.99 for unlimited VIN checks for a month. Another service, AutoCheck.com charges $19.99 and $25.99, respectively, for the same services.

Before we bought this car, we looked at a car that was being sold by EBay motors. On their site, they provide a click-through way of checking the VIN number. Their cost? $7.99. So when we were looking to check the VIN of this other car, I was expecting it to be $7.99. When it wasn’t I tried to find a way to make it $7.99.

I looked back at the EBay Motors pages, and noticed that when you click through on a VIN number on their site, it has the VIN number as part of the web address. So I thought, what happens if you substitute another VIN number? Do they only allow VIN numbers that are active on EBay Motors? Turns out the answer is no.

That means for your $7.99 VIN check ($14.99 for 10 VIN checks), type the following into your web browser:

http://www.autocheck.com/?siteID=204&vin=1HGEN26431L000752

Update: You can now just type the VIN into this form and press return:

Of course, replace the VIN number I have (1HGEN26431L000752 after the text “vin=”) with the one you are curious about. And note that this is the same AutoCheck site that charges you $19.99 if you go directly to their home page.

(P.S. There are places on the web where you can post a note to people who have “unlimited VIN check” accounts and they will do it for you for free or for $1 or $2, but this is the cheapest way I have found that seems legitimate.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 8:35 am and is filed under Tips, Money Saving. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.