A secondary location for the VIN is the leſt front-door jamb or door pillar area, and is in the form of a label. The complete VIN characters will be displayed on this label. If the label is removed, it is designed to leave a residue on the jamb or pillar that cannot be easily removed. If you encounter a vehicle that has this label removed, look further for latent evi- dence that the label was actually removed, such as in the form of scratches in the paint, rub marks or other forms of disturbances of the immediate area. There are occasions where the vehicle may have been in a colli- sion, and as result, the label may have been removed with the door or pillar replacement as repaired damage. This would account why the label is missing. Notify the insurance claims examiner that sent you the theſt referral, and ask them if this vehicle ever suffered a collision loss to the leſt front door area. Don’t just assume that this is why the label is missing. Retag- ging of a vehicle is common. I have encoun- tered many retagged vehicles in my career. The following will explain how and why a vehicle is retagged. Vehicle Retagging A person who has a state auto dealer’s li- cense visits an insurance pool savage yard on the day of their weekly vehicle auction. They bid on a vehicle that has either been totally destroyed as a result of a collision or fire loss. The dealer places a bid for the vehicle salvage. If he is lucky and wins the bid, he later obtains the vehicle aſter paying for the salvage bid and takes it to a secure location. He may sell it to a second or third Get Published! IAIL members: Submit your articles for the Investigative Spotlight department. Send your information to Ken Vitty at [email protected]. “There are secret locations on the vehicle that contain a 9-character derivative of the VIN.” party. So far, no crime has been committed. Let’s say a third party finally purchases the salvage vehicle. All that he is really in- terested in is the public VIN tag, perhaps the secondary VIN label, the section of the engine compartment firewall (which may also have the VIN stamped into it), as well as the title or salvage title and the transac- tion paperwork. The third party, who is also a criminal professional vehicle re-tagger, steals an ex- act copy of the subject vehicle and brings it to a location where the salvage vehicle is also now located. The thief then installs the salvage VIN plate on the stolen vehicle aſter removing all forms of vehicle ID from the stolen vehicle. VIN Derivative Codes However, there are secret locations on the vehicle that contain a 9-character deriva- tive of the VIN. The locations are privy to agents of NICB (National Insurance Crime Bureau) and the State Police. Most thieves do not know the locations where the hid- den VIN derivatives are located and fail to have them removed. Each VIN subsequent to 1980 has seven- teen characters — a combination of letters and numbers. Some letters such as I, O and U are never used in a VIN combi tion because they can be misconstrued a numbers. 1 G 1 J C 5 S H 9 C 4 1 0 0 7 3 1 Let’s decode a typical VIN. The first character, 1, indicates country WWW.ALOA.ORG of origin (1 = USA). The second character, G, stands for Gen- eral Motors. The third character, 1, indicates Chevrolet. J C indicates the car line series. 5 is the body style H is the engine type 9 is a check digit privy only to NICB C is the vehicle year (2012) 4 is the GM assembly plant The last six numbers denote the sequen- tial production number, which identifies your specific vehicle and how it came off the assembly line. There can be thousands of the same type of vehicles that will have the first 11 char- acters the same; however, the sequential production numbers always will identify only one vehicle in sequence. The 10th denotes the year, for example: 1980-A 1981-B 1982-C 1983-D 1984-E 1985-F 1986-G 1987-H 1988-J 1989-K 1990-L 1991-M 1992-N 1993-P 1994-R 1995-S 1996-T 1997-V 1998-W 1999-X 2000-Y 2001-1 2002-2 2003-3 2004-4 2005-5 2006-6 2007-7 2008-8 2009-9 2010-A 2011-B 2012-C 2013-D 2014-E 2015-F 2016-G 2017-H 2018-J 2019-K 2020-L 2021-M , CML, CFL, CFI, is mmittee chair and f the board of di- r the International n of Investigative s. He is the vice f the technical vision of Sterling ve Services, ection Group, LLC mboy, NJ. Ken is uthority of NY and NJ police department and was one of the found- ers of the Essex County NJ Auto Theft taskforce. character of all VIN’s since 1980 NOVEMBER 2014 KEYNOTES 27
