Calgary, Alberta — If today’s drivers didn’t have enough theft-related concerns to power their paranoia, a Calgary resident has come forward to alert the public that cars can be stolen on paper too—that’s right, someone stole his VIN!
At least that is what Rick Barvir suspects, as he recently recounted his ongoing struggles to sell his 2003 Maserati Spyder to Global News.
Barvir caught some major discrepancies in the CARFAX report he received for his car, which he has owned since 2013; namely that his vehicle was shown to be registered in Ontario as of 2018, then listed as “salvage” the following year.
“CARFAX said it had been salvaged in Ontario,” he told Global News. “(This car has) never been in Ontario.”
Despite retracing his entire paper trail leading up to his purchase and subsequent ownership of the convertible, including verifying his VIN with the police, Barvir says CARFAX still won’t update the vehicle’s report.
“They just said you have to clear it from Ontario Transportation before we’ll even change the report,” he said. “So I have to jump through all the hoops? What is CARFAX doing?”
After a long struggle of just getting in touch with someone from Ontario’s ministry of transportation, Barvir says he eventually received a letter back from the ministry that confirmed that his VIN was registered to someone else, and that “If you believe someone has fraudulently registered a vehicle that is in your possession, this matter should be registered with one of the Ontario Police Departments.”
He doesn’t have any proof yet, but this is what Barvir suspects took place.
“I think someone stole the VIN number, registered it in Ontario, made up a fake bill of sale to get the insurance, and they wrote it off. And no one checked into it.
“I can’t believe that there is no way you can track this across Canada with the technology we have,” said Barvir.
A statement to Global News from Alberta’s Law Enforcement Response Team (ALERT) said that stealing and cloning VINs is a common practice that often precedes the use of a vehicle in a crime.
The spokesperson said nationwide tracking of VINs isn’t so simple as most provincial registry systems don’t “speak to each other”, and therefore vehicle data is hard to access on an inter-provincial level.
For its part in the ordeal, CARFAX issued a statement saying “CARFAX Canada cannot change data on the reports, our commitment to transparency is to display the data as is from the source—only the source can change it (which would then update the data on the vehicle history report),” CARFAX said in a statement.
The company added that it is happy to assist Barvir in the ongoing investigation process.
Ontario’s ministry of transportation declined to provide comment on the matter, however.
