The National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) will expand their “VINCheck” consumer protection service to include information on vehicles that have been declared “total losses” by its participating member insurance companies.

Consumers can now obtain pre-purchase information about used vehicles that is made available to the NICB by participating insurance companies supporting the free VINCheck program.

“Our goal is to provide as much information as possible to consumers to protect them against fraudulent used car sales and potentially deadly accidents from driving unsafe vehicles,” said Robert M. Bryant, NICB President and Chief Executive Officer.

“NICB's membership includes over 1,000 property and casualty insurance companies and, collectively, they insure roughly 91 percent of the vehicles on the road. When one of those vehicles is declared a total loss and sold for salvage, our members do not want them being rebuilt and fraudulently resold to unsuspecting consumers,” said Bryant.

The expanded VINCheck will include the existing Hurricane Katrina Flood Vehicle Database. All VINCheck queries will now automatically search for flooded vehicles that have been declared total losses, as well as all other total loss designations and unrecovered stolen vehicles.

Once a vehicle is declared a total loss by a participating carrier, its identification number is uploaded into the into the Insurance Services Office (ISO) ClaimSearch All Claims Database. From the moment that data is in the ISO system, it is subject to a VINCheck query.

For more information visit www.nicb.org.

Special Reports /

NICB Expands Consumer Prevention Service

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