VINCHECK

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The National Insurance Crime Bureau provides a service to check VIN numbers to see if the vehicle has been reported stolen, but not recovered, or reported as salvage. The service is called VINCHECK. Per their website, “The National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) has access to a database of vehicles which were reported as stolen within the past five years and remain unrecovered or declared as salvage. This information is being made available, free of charge, as a public service to consumers. This database contains a "salvage" file and an "insurance theft" file which is the information VINCheck searches during queries. The terms "total loss" and "salvage" are not synonymous in the insurance industry and that is important to understand when using VINCheck. Not all vehicles identified as a total loss will become salvage.” The user must know the VIN number of the vehicle and accept the terms and conditions of use.

The NICB also offers various VIN manuals (passenger, commercial, and heavy equipment) at a cost of $10 each. The manuals contain VIN structure and decoding for recent model years.