How Online Car Check Services Inflate Mileage Data

Online car check services can be not only useful, but also add an extra headache to the car owner. What mechanism "broke" in the system of electronic platforms to establish the real history of the car, the AvtoVzglyad portal found out.

Twisted mileage on a used car has been a nightmare for every car owner who buys a second-hand car for decades. But with the advent of digital technologies, services for electronic checks of cars came to the aid of people. It would seem, what could go wrong here? Entered the license plate, make, model and year of manufacture of the car and within a couple of minutes get a complete history of your future car with data on the actual mileage, number of owners and accidents, and even confirmation or refutation of whether it worked in a taxi or car sharing.

However, the myths that all services of such electronic services are equally useful were dispelled by Alexander Sorokin, a member of the Blue Buckets community, who told the group a story about how once, having decided to check his car on one of these resources, he was horrified by the information received that his car was allegedly involved in an accident at least six times.

The car owner has no evidence of what could have caused such and, as he assures, groundless changes in the history of his car, but the fact remains that the car is now beating like an “emergency” according to the databases of electronic checks. And the car owner will be able to resolve the issue of restoring the reputation of his “iron friend” only amicably (or through a pre-trial claim) by agreeing with an electronic resource.

The author of this article also encountered a more common case - the provision of inaccurate data on the mileage of a car. Before purchasing a used car, during the check it turned out that according to the databases, the mileage was not twisted by a little less than 10 times - at the current 8600 km. the car allegedly passed under 80, after which (moreover, 000 years before the proposed sale of the car), the mileage was twisted almost to the current one.

Fortunately, shoemakers actually find themselves without boots much less often than folk wisdom declares. Based on the results of an assessment of the condition of the car by an independent expert, computer diagnostics and a comprehensive check at the car service, it turned out that the mileage of the car planned for purchase fully corresponds to the indicated one - 8600 km.

Of course, such discrepancies in the databases could not but arouse in your correspondent a desire to investigate the situation and understand the reasons for what happened. When communicating with the astonished owner of the purchased car, it turned out that for several years, for a car that was essentially laid up, a diagnostic card was purchased, and not personally by the owner, but by his acquaintance, who did this without looking on the Internet, leaving filling in the mileage data to the sellers of diagnostic cards .

And the latter, who had not even seen the car, filled in the data on the mileage, based on their ideas. Further, this information, which fell into the EAISTO database, neither the owner of the car nor his voluntary assistant bothered to check. As a result, now my car has already gained 6400 instead of 64 mileage. But having not driven a couple of thousand km in a year, the next year it already ended up in the database with data on 000 km, which the vigilant electronic check service immediately marked as doubtful. By the way, similar stories also arise due to incorrectly indicated mileage in insurance documents.

But if you can “break through” with the electronic platform of checks in the first case (it’s enough to request data on the participation of a car in an accident, for example, in the traffic police - and the reputation of your car is restored), then in the second you have absolutely no one to go and prove something to, since this data has already leaked to the "black" market and it is not clear who to ask to make changes to obviously illegal databases.

At the same time, buyers almost unconditionally believe telegram bots, suspecting the seller of an attempt to directly deceive. Such cars with a dubious history are sold at a discount of several tens, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of rubles, and this is the price of inattention when issuing a diagnostic card online without SMS and registration.

The proverb “Take care of honor from a young age” for car owners has become more relevant than ever with the spread of car data. If somewhere in some database they suddenly made a mistake and added an extra zero to the mileage of your car, then then everyone to whom you try to sell the car will consider you a swindler who twisted the mileage the old fashioned way and tries to break the price.

It is almost impossible for a conscientious car owner to get rid of this, so be careful, do not buy a diagnostic card from unknown persons and it is not clear where, because this can result in large financial and emotional losses.