How to find out the history of a car by vin code - Russia, Germany, Japan

The vehicle identification code contains complete information about the vehicle:

manufacturer;
Country of Origin;
Production year;
main technical characteristics: body type, gearbox type, engine, availability of additional options.

The manufacturer encrypts all this information using 17 alphanumeric characters.

However, when a car is registered in a particular country, the VIN code is entered into the traffic inspection database, and everything that happens to the car is recorded, and a small dossier is compiled for each vehicle, which contains information about:

run;
service maintenance;
place of the first and subsequent registrations;
the presence of fines;
traffic accidents;
possible theft.

Also, photographs of the vehicle at different points in its history can be attached to this file: after an accident, during scheduled technical inspections.

All this information is of great interest to those people who buy a used car. It is imperative to protect yourself from the possibility of acquiring cars with a dark past: stolen and wanted, survived serious accidents and restored, credit and collateral.

How to check the full history of the car by VIN-code?

There are several main ways:

Contact the traffic police department directly and request a full report on the history of this vehicle;
Use paid services on the Internet.

It was not in vain that we singled out the word “paid”, since there are many free services that only decipher the VIN code and give the most basic information about the car: make, model, country and year of production, main technical characteristics.

There are also official website of traffic police and several partner sites where you can only get information about whether a given car is wanted and whether there are any restrictions behind it. This is also very useful information, and for many, only it is enough to buy a car.

Form from the traffic police website.

How to find out the history of a car by vin code - Russia, Germany, Japan

However, there is one important point - on the official website of the traffic police you can get data only for those vehicles that were registered in Russia.

And if you want to drive, or you are offered to buy a freshly driven car from Germany, Lithuania, or even the same Belarus? The traffic police website will give you only a simple answer - information about the search or restrictions on this vehicle was not found.

In this case, you need to turn to the help of special paid services. The cost of obtaining a full report is not too high, and averages from 2,99 to 4,99 Euro.

But you get not only the decryption of the VIN code, but also:

checking the car for theft according to the IAATI databases (International Association Auto-Theft Investigators - International Association of Auto-Theft Investigators, which includes about 50 countries, including the USA);
checking for theft on the bases of European countries - the Czech Republic, Italy, Germany, Romania, and so on - in a word, all those countries from which cars are mainly imported;
service history - mileage, technical inspections, accidents, replacement of nodes;
registrations - how many have changed owners;
photos of the car before and after maintenance, and most importantly after the accident - that is, you can really see what this car had to endure.

Also, if the car was re-equipped, repainted, if important components were replaced - gearboxes, clutches, engines - all this will also be displayed in the report.

How to find out the history of a car by vin code - Russia, Germany, Japan