**The Dangers of Buying a Cloned Car**

When buying a car, it's essential to do your research and verify the authenticity of the vehicle. A cloned car is one that has been copied from another vehicle, often with the intention of selling it at a lower price. In this article, we'll explore the dangers of buying a cloned car and provide tips on how to identify them.

**The Importance of Verification**

When buying a car, it's crucial to verify its authenticity before making a purchase. A clone car can be difficult to detect, but there are several red flags that can indicate it's been cloned. One of the most significant indicators is if the VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) and V5 document don't match up. This suggests that the car has been tampered with, and it may not be a genuine vehicle.

**What to Look Out For**

If you're considering buying a car, there are several things you should look out for. First, check if the price is significantly lower than the market value of similar cars. If it's too good to be true, it probably is. Next, inspect the number plates and ensure they match the VIN and V5 document. Show plates can make it difficult to verify the authenticity of the car. Additionally, check for any signs of damage or tampering with the vehicle.

**The Dangers of Buying a Clone Car**

One of the most significant dangers of buying a clone car is that you may be purchasing a stolen vehicle. Cloned cars are often created using stolen VINs and V5 documents. If you buy a cloned car, not only will you lose your money, but you'll also be helping to fund further theft and cloning operations.

**A Real-Life Example**

Recently, one of our team members was approached by a seller who was advertising a car at a significantly lower price than its market value. The seller claimed that the car had been cloned from another vehicle and that it was worth £2,000. Our team member was initially taken in by the offer, but upon further investigation, they discovered that the car was indeed cloned and had a much higher value.

**The Importance of Research**

If you're considering buying a car, it's essential to do your research. Look up the vehicle on the UK's Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) website to check its history and verify its authenticity. You can also use online services like CarWow to compare prices and find out how much you can save on your next car purchase.

**Conclusion**

Buying a cloned car can have serious consequences, including financial loss and potentially even theft. By being aware of the red flags and taking steps to research and verify the authenticity of a vehicle, you can avoid falling victim to these scams. Remember, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Always trust your instincts and do your due diligence before making a purchase.

**Additional Tips**

If you're buying a car from a private seller, consider the following tips:

* Make sure to inspect the vehicle thoroughly for any signs of damage or tampering.

* Check the number plates and ensure they match the VIN and V5 document.

* Do not accept cash only payments, as this can make it difficult to verify the authenticity of the vehicle.

* Research the seller online to check their reputation and background.

* Consider using a car inspection service to verify the vehicle's authenticity.

By following these tips and being aware of the dangers of cloned cars, you can avoid falling victim to these scams and ensure that your next car purchase is legitimate.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday I'm going to sell this written-off car for double what I paid for it in cash that would be great cash how am I going to do this well I going give this car the identity of a golf that hasn't been written off that's right I'm going to clone it there's nothing here that's raising your suspicions even though that's a clone car no but what am I doing this car cloning is a massive problem not only can It scam you out thousands of pounds it can even implicate you in high-profile crime in this video I'm going to show you how the criminals do it how legitimate businesses are actually helping and how you can avoid getting caught out but first what exactly is a cloned car a cloned car is essentially a car that's had its identity stolen or copied so it can be just simply stealing a number plate more often than not it's actually copying the identity of a car the National Police Chief's Council estimates there could be around 20,000 clone cars driving about in the UK but actually that number could be a lot higher criminals clone cars to hide the fact that they got a dodgy pass such as maybe they've been stolen or RIT them off now they can then sell them on at a huge marker if they give these cars a new identity of a clean or undamaged car and this is what I'm going to do now with this golf Mark 6 from 2009 now it' normally be worth about £1,500 but I managed to pick it up for just 500 reason being look at this can you see here doesn't seem to fit right that's because it's been damaged it's a cat end write off that's why it was so cheap but ah I'm going to double its value I'm going to see if I can get £1,000 for this car by cloning it what I'm going to do now though is head out onto the road and try and find a car of a similar age and look I was driving around for about 30 minutes with no luck but then I turned into a car park and spotted two golves the right color right vintage right model in the same place but I only actually needed one of them to copy so how am I going to do this so I've got two options one is I can go and get the number plates off that car might look a bit dodged especially if the person comes back to their car my other option is where's my phone just going take a photo get the number plate I am very very sneaky sir okay there we go bollocks do ctitious look crime was clearly not coming very natural to me still I did a better job the second time round I managed to get a photograph of the clean car I wanted to clone but this isn't the only way that criminals can find the identity of a clean car in order to clone it actually there's a much easier way to find my Victim car and it's the method that criminals are actually most likely to use so I've gone online put in the details of the conom after and I've got one here which handily I can see the registration plate in the pictures perfect once criminals are found a suitable car they then need to check that it's got a valid mot and it's taxed and they can do this using the government's own websites because there's no point cloning a car that is already being driven illegally now it's just the small task of obtaining a counterfeit registration plate I found a place that sells number plates now if I want proper number plates for the car I've got to send off on V5 and stuff like don't want to do that obviously I'm cloning the car right but I do have the option of buying some other plates without a V5 and they're called show plates several days later look what's arrived from the post some lovely number plates so as you can see on the rear one I've actually got UK sticker that I've added to it to make it look even more genuine with the show plates on the car I am ready for my unsuspecting buyer but before that is my clone car convincing enough to even fool the police this is Sergeant Owen messenger from Deon and Cornwall police and he's seen many a clone car in his time will he be able to spot something wrong with my car if you look at the number plate on this one you'll see it isn't a proper number plate because it doesn't have the legal writing that it needs to have when you buy a legitimate plate you've got to provide the V5 for the document an ID in order to be able to to buy that plate that one clearly hasn't been so where's that plate come from what are these things that we're looking for the maker detail the maker postcode the bsau marking which means that that plate complies with all the legislation the reflectivity and everything that it needs to work with the ampr system if you bought a clone car with show plates you could pretty quickly get pulled over by the police here's why why Here Comes our cloned golf will the police car's ampr read the Clone plate and that will be the problem driving around in a car that's on show plates the police will spot that it doesn't register on the ampr system and think that it's a little bit suspicious and then pull it over this means that if you bought my clone car you'd find out pretty damn soon but what if criminals could get their hands on genuine registration plates without all the necessary documentation I thought I'd give it go I've come to a place that makes number of plates for cars so I'm going to go in there and see if I can get some plates made up for my clone car going try and record it on my phone hopefully they won't notice if I'm just holding it down here hi uh hello mate how you doing I'm all right thanks mate listen I'm looking for some number plates on my car I went shopping and I think someone's just nicked my plates off my car cuz they've just gone so I obviously need some to get home do you have any documents on you at the moment no cuz I've obviously just been shopping before we can make your plates we do need to see some documentation despite being Matt Watson from car W do documents unfortunate it's probably best not to get involved in car crime If you're sort of well known in the car industry however even though Chris from Southerland carare wouldn't make me some registration plates without the documents even though I'm a zist celebrity he did reveal something rather worrying I am aware that there's a lot of places where you can buy fully road legal number plates without documentation I needed to go to them I came to the wrong place yeah places online um you can buy number plates without sending any documentation right I'm going to go online now and try my Lu at ordering some genuine number plates for my dodgy golf I'm not sure this is even going to work I'm going to try as many as possible it turns out that it was actually incredibly possible I tried 12 different online suppliers one refused unless I had the necessary documents one sent me show plates but much to my surprise the other 10 sent me genuine road legal number plates for my clone car no questions asked seems like I didn't have to waste my time with the show plates and this is really worrying because criminals don't just clone cars to sell them on for a profit they also clone them for other spurious reasons that could affect any car owner not just those looking to buy a used vehicle Owen explains why an organized crime network will deliberately clone cars so that they can avoid the systems that we're using to trace the organized crime Network this means that if your car gets cloned you could end up getting a knock on your door by someone like Owen looking to investigate a crime however criminals aren't just cloning cars for serious crime they're also doing it to get away with petty crime as Simon Williams from the RAC explains the first time you might realize that your vehicle's being clone is when you get a nasty letter coming through the letter box that could be a speeding offense parking charge notice driving in a bus loan or something that you'll be shocked because you'll realize instantly that you weren't there then you have to go through this whole rigar roll of trying to prove that it it wasn't you and this is only going to get much much worse ules in London is one of the biggest reasons for that around a, pcns are being cancelled every month due to cloning incidents now if I just so happen to be in possession of a silver golf Mark 6 and I wanted to dodge speeding tickets parking fines and congestion charges I could stick those genuine number plates on it however I'm not a criminal and I don't suggest you should do something similar either we don't condone that kind of behavior but I did want to see if these genuine plates could trick Owen's obviously we did this test on private land cuz we didn't want to break the law so here comes our cloned golf with the fake number plates now there we go it's picked it up if we go into the details Volkswagen Golf silver that's fine we're not going to chase after that one AR we we'd be looking to make sure it is the right model that five door was it a five door sometimes it will come up with if it's an Audi maybe an sine is it an sine that's gone past us if it's not then that's something that we're looking for but there's nothing here that's raising your suspicions this time on that car is there no even though that's a clone car but let's get back to the real reason why I've decided to clone a car it's not to get away with fines it's to make a quick profit I've got someone coming to see the car about half an hour away they've come by taxi which is a good sign that they're going to need to get home so they're probably expecting to buy this car hopefully they won't smell a rat now I should point out that the potential buy is actually a car wow employee but they don't know what's going on we just put it on our internal messaging system that we had this car for sale for500 quid but we're going to reduce it to £1,000 yeah always beware if there's a sudden price drop we didn't want to do it to just a member of the public because feel a bit wrong duping somebody that we don't know coming all the way out here I said better to do it with an employee I guess but they don't know that this car is cloned will they spot it now the chap is coming is called will Jackson and he doesn't know that we're going to be filming him so we've got a couple of cameras hidden around the car hopefully he's not going to spot this here and then we're going to have some of the film crew just over there in the woods on a long L I'm all going to get away with it you all well how's it going one more here 1.4 L golf it's worth about 1,500 we sell you like for a grand should get his car we've been using it for a story what seeing if we can improve the efficiency what we did we got a bunch of cars and we put them on a rolling road like did like loads of miles on them but what it's done it's made it more efficient oh wonderful a little look around so Golf N valed Clean well well kind of cleaned winded down Windows means that nothing to break oh that's one way of looking at it the fluids are all topped up looks fine it's not on fire oh do you know what I've been sitting there with a bloody thingy on Good Start go on drive it come push push push obviously if you take it and you drive it home it'll charge it up cuz I sat here with the lights on and everything for ages so how long have you had this since August we bought it to this test okay it 50,000 mil but it's just been on a rolling road so actually those miles are like the easiest miles a car could ever do what do you think of the way it drives I mean yeah it's fine so if you just pay me in cash that would be great so it's not bad though ,000 before you agree to buy us car there are some very important checks you should do make sure the car's number plate vehicle identification number and V5 document all match the VIN is a little bit like a car's fingerprint no two cars have the same Vin and it contains information about their build date the make the model and all that kind of stuff and it's Unique to that particular car the number plate is a little bit like the car's name and the V5 registration document is a little bit like its passport so if these two don't match up then there's clearly something wrong so how would you spot if someone's tampered with a car's V5 registration document after all they can be scanned edited on a computer and then printed out here I have an official V5 registration document for a car if I hold it up to the light you will see the dvla watermarks showing that this is a genuine original document tell you the truth I didn't really know about the watermark thing until we did the research for this video so I'm going to have to go back to my house now and check out all the v5s that I have for all my other cars cuz I've really checked them if you didn't know what you were looking for such as these official dvla watermarks you could quite easily be fold Vin tampering is much harder to do and in most cases you should be able to spot it Owen explains what to look out for so on the golf here we've got the VIN number in the window there'll be a VIN number stamped into the body side you have a look under the under the Bonnet here you can have a look under there but if you go to uh a main dealer and look at a genuine car you can look at all these numbers and look where they are what they look like on a genuine car and check for things like the font on it is it the same font on the the numbers and the letters because that will give you an indication as to whether that's been changed so here we have like I found the there's the VIN number there I mean look and see whether any of the paint's different so where that's been stamped in there does anything look different there to what the car that you looked at in the dealership looked like as well it looks fine it's just a slight issue that that VIN number won't actually um correlate to that registration yeah so you need to be checking all those numbers and letters against what you're being presented with the V5 as well so someone has cloned the car and they've done a really good professional job and then you run a history check on the car it's just going to come back clean isn't it the company that's running the check uh AR only going to check the numbers that you give them so you need to just do as much as you possibly can to make sure that those numbers are correct if there's anything about what we've said or anything about that car that makes you just think it's a red flag and for me I would just be walking away and is there another thing that kind of just might raise your suspicion if like me you're advertising the car substantially under list value yeah that's it's red flag is it you know why nobody's there to do you a favor everybody wants to make as much money as possible if you do buy it then the chances are you're going to lose both the car and your money because there something seems too good to be true it generally is so if a car's Vin registration plate and V5 document don't match up it's a sign the car has been tampered with so don't buy it even if you're buying it of a friend or colleague let's see if we all check the documents on my clone golf or is he just too trusting shake me hand there we go a new car beautiful car yeah so cash I need cash definitely Cash Cash do you know why on now let me just put this on you like that there we go reason being will I kind of like let you out here under false pretenses so basically this car here it's cloned this is actually a 2009 not a 2010 car it's a cat and right off this particular car and we've given it the identity of a 2010 car that's part of the reason why the mileage was like 50,000 more than theot the last mot in August and you can probably see look here there's a bit of damage here someone did a bit of a dodgy repair on it don't worry about it we've got the actual 2010 car which is worth about 2 Grand oh Lush obviously I was like why is Matt doing the Handover yeah but it's actually worked out well but you would have no idea would you there's a little tip actually if you see the number plate there those are show plates so they're not genuine number plates they normally have like uh special markings on them and stuff like that I would say I was probably the average punter on the street even though I work for car eight years basically if things seem a little bit too good to be true or odd then there's something up and that's the thing with this you see you know it was, 1500 quid and it was all of us sudden down to a grand yeah look I thought this was all above board a nice wholesome deal this is the genuine one look same number plate and look you don't even have look look at this more bangs no l bangs less bangs look see see this is how that should line up I feel like a bit of a fool now Matthew no well though do you want to take this one for a drive and see if it drives better oh does that feel easier to drive so much easier smooth Smooth Operator now you might have noticed that the car that we've given will is actually the one that we copi the number plate from from the classified earlier we actually already owned that car because we didn't want to clone someone else's car cuz that would have been illegal but you know we own that car so it's all fine so here's what you need to check to avoid buying a clone car is the car seriously cheap this could mean the seller is trying to flip a clone car for a quick profit do they only accept cash that could mean they don't want a paper trail leading back to them do the number plates look suspicious they should show the Maker's name postcode and the official bsau number otherwise they might just be show plates does the vehicle identification number look like it's been tampered with if you're not sure what it should look like visit a dealer with a similar car and compare them does the V5 document match the VIN and the number plate if something looks wrong it could be forged another little tip if you're buying a Ed car even if it's not cloned or stolen or anything like that if you're having to push it to bump start it you probably best just walking away if you enjoyed the video please give it a like if you click on the video Windows you can watch some more videos and if you click on the carwow logo you can go to carwow to see how much money you can save on your next car thanks for watchingtoday I'm going to sell this written-off car for double what I paid for it in cash that would be great cash how am I going to do this well I going give this car the identity of a golf that hasn't been written off that's right I'm going to clone it there's nothing here that's raising your suspicions even though that's a clone car no but what am I doing this car cloning is a massive problem not only can It scam you out thousands of pounds it can even implicate you in high-profile crime in this video I'm going to show you how the criminals do it how legitimate businesses are actually helping and how you can avoid getting caught out but first what exactly is a cloned car a cloned car is essentially a car that's had its identity stolen or copied so it can be just simply stealing a number plate more often than not it's actually copying the identity of a car the National Police Chief's Council estimates there could be around 20,000 clone cars driving about in the UK but actually that number could be a lot higher criminals clone cars to hide the fact that they got a dodgy pass such as maybe they've been stolen or RIT them off now they can then sell them on at a huge marker if they give these cars a new identity of a clean or undamaged car and this is what I'm going to do now with this golf Mark 6 from 2009 now it' normally be worth about £1,500 but I managed to pick it up for just 500 reason being look at this can you see here doesn't seem to fit right that's because it's been damaged it's a cat end write off that's why it was so cheap but ah I'm going to double its value I'm going to see if I can get £1,000 for this car by cloning it what I'm going to do now though is head out onto the road and try and find a car of a similar age and look I was driving around for about 30 minutes with no luck but then I turned into a car park and spotted two golves the right color right vintage right model in the same place but I only actually needed one of them to copy so how am I going to do this so I've got two options one is I can go and get the number plates off that car might look a bit dodged especially if the person comes back to their car my other option is where's my phone just going take a photo get the number plate I am very very sneaky sir okay there we go bollocks do ctitious look crime was clearly not coming very natural to me still I did a better job the second time round I managed to get a photograph of the clean car I wanted to clone but this isn't the only way that criminals can find the identity of a clean car in order to clone it actually there's a much easier way to find my Victim car and it's the method that criminals are actually most likely to use so I've gone online put in the details of the conom after and I've got one here which handily I can see the registration plate in the pictures perfect once criminals are found a suitable car they then need to check that it's got a valid mot and it's taxed and they can do this using the government's own websites because there's no point cloning a car that is already being driven illegally now it's just the small task of obtaining a counterfeit registration plate I found a place that sells number plates now if I want proper number plates for the car I've got to send off on V5 and stuff like don't want to do that obviously I'm cloning the car right but I do have the option of buying some other plates without a V5 and they're called show plates several days later look what's arrived from the post some lovely number plates so as you can see on the rear one I've actually got UK sticker that I've added to it to make it look even more genuine with the show plates on the car I am ready for my unsuspecting buyer but before that is my clone car convincing enough to even fool the police this is Sergeant Owen messenger from Deon and Cornwall police and he's seen many a clone car in his time will he be able to spot something wrong with my car if you look at the number plate on this one you'll see it isn't a proper number plate because it doesn't have the legal writing that it needs to have when you buy a legitimate plate you've got to provide the V5 for the document an ID in order to be able to to buy that plate that one clearly hasn't been so where's that plate come from what are these things that we're looking for the maker detail the maker postcode the bsau marking which means that that plate complies with all the legislation the reflectivity and everything that it needs to work with the ampr system if you bought a clone car with show plates you could pretty quickly get pulled over by the police here's why why Here Comes our cloned golf will the police car's ampr read the Clone plate and that will be the problem driving around in a car that's on show plates the police will spot that it doesn't register on the ampr system and think that it's a little bit suspicious and then pull it over this means that if you bought my clone car you'd find out pretty damn soon but what if criminals could get their hands on genuine registration plates without all the necessary documentation I thought I'd give it go I've come to a place that makes number of plates for cars so I'm going to go in there and see if I can get some plates made up for my clone car going try and record it on my phone hopefully they won't notice if I'm just holding it down here hi uh hello mate how you doing I'm all right thanks mate listen I'm looking for some number plates on my car I went shopping and I think someone's just nicked my plates off my car cuz they've just gone so I obviously need some to get home do you have any documents on you at the moment no cuz I've obviously just been shopping before we can make your plates we do need to see some documentation despite being Matt Watson from car W do documents unfortunate it's probably best not to get involved in car crime If you're sort of well known in the car industry however even though Chris from Southerland carare wouldn't make me some registration plates without the documents even though I'm a zist celebrity he did reveal something rather worrying I am aware that there's a lot of places where you can buy fully road legal number plates without documentation I needed to go to them I came to the wrong place yeah places online um you can buy number plates without sending any documentation right I'm going to go online now and try my Lu at ordering some genuine number plates for my dodgy golf I'm not sure this is even going to work I'm going to try as many as possible it turns out that it was actually incredibly possible I tried 12 different online suppliers one refused unless I had the necessary documents one sent me show plates but much to my surprise the other 10 sent me genuine road legal number plates for my clone car no questions asked seems like I didn't have to waste my time with the show plates and this is really worrying because criminals don't just clone cars to sell them on for a profit they also clone them for other spurious reasons that could affect any car owner not just those looking to buy a used vehicle Owen explains why an organized crime network will deliberately clone cars so that they can avoid the systems that we're using to trace the organized crime Network this means that if your car gets cloned you could end up getting a knock on your door by someone like Owen looking to investigate a crime however criminals aren't just cloning cars for serious crime they're also doing it to get away with petty crime as Simon Williams from the RAC explains the first time you might realize that your vehicle's being clone is when you get a nasty letter coming through the letter box that could be a speeding offense parking charge notice driving in a bus loan or something that you'll be shocked because you'll realize instantly that you weren't there then you have to go through this whole rigar roll of trying to prove that it it wasn't you and this is only going to get much much worse ules in London is one of the biggest reasons for that around a, pcns are being cancelled every month due to cloning incidents now if I just so happen to be in possession of a silver golf Mark 6 and I wanted to dodge speeding tickets parking fines and congestion charges I could stick those genuine number plates on it however I'm not a criminal and I don't suggest you should do something similar either we don't condone that kind of behavior but I did want to see if these genuine plates could trick Owen's obviously we did this test on private land cuz we didn't want to break the law so here comes our cloned golf with the fake number plates now there we go it's picked it up if we go into the details Volkswagen Golf silver that's fine we're not going to chase after that one AR we we'd be looking to make sure it is the right model that five door was it a five door sometimes it will come up with if it's an Audi maybe an sine is it an sine that's gone past us if it's not then that's something that we're looking for but there's nothing here that's raising your suspicions this time on that car is there no even though that's a clone car but let's get back to the real reason why I've decided to clone a car it's not to get away with fines it's to make a quick profit I've got someone coming to see the car about half an hour away they've come by taxi which is a good sign that they're going to need to get home so they're probably expecting to buy this car hopefully they won't smell a rat now I should point out that the potential buy is actually a car wow employee but they don't know what's going on we just put it on our internal messaging system that we had this car for sale for500 quid but we're going to reduce it to £1,000 yeah always beware if there's a sudden price drop we didn't want to do it to just a member of the public because feel a bit wrong duping somebody that we don't know coming all the way out here I said better to do it with an employee I guess but they don't know that this car is cloned will they spot it now the chap is coming is called will Jackson and he doesn't know that we're going to be filming him so we've got a couple of cameras hidden around the car hopefully he's not going to spot this here and then we're going to have some of the film crew just over there in the woods on a long L I'm all going to get away with it you all well how's it going one more here 1.4 L golf it's worth about 1,500 we sell you like for a grand should get his car we've been using it for a story what seeing if we can improve the efficiency what we did we got a bunch of cars and we put them on a rolling road like did like loads of miles on them but what it's done it's made it more efficient oh wonderful a little look around so Golf N valed Clean well well kind of cleaned winded down Windows means that nothing to break oh that's one way of looking at it the fluids are all topped up looks fine it's not on fire oh do you know what I've been sitting there with a bloody thingy on Good Start go on drive it come push push push obviously if you take it and you drive it home it'll charge it up cuz I sat here with the lights on and everything for ages so how long have you had this since August we bought it to this test okay it 50,000 mil but it's just been on a rolling road so actually those miles are like the easiest miles a car could ever do what do you think of the way it drives I mean yeah it's fine so if you just pay me in cash that would be great so it's not bad though ,000 before you agree to buy us car there are some very important checks you should do make sure the car's number plate vehicle identification number and V5 document all match the VIN is a little bit like a car's fingerprint no two cars have the same Vin and it contains information about their build date the make the model and all that kind of stuff and it's Unique to that particular car the number plate is a little bit like the car's name and the V5 registration document is a little bit like its passport so if these two don't match up then there's clearly something wrong so how would you spot if someone's tampered with a car's V5 registration document after all they can be scanned edited on a computer and then printed out here I have an official V5 registration document for a car if I hold it up to the light you will see the dvla watermarks showing that this is a genuine original document tell you the truth I didn't really know about the watermark thing until we did the research for this video so I'm going to have to go back to my house now and check out all the v5s that I have for all my other cars cuz I've really checked them if you didn't know what you were looking for such as these official dvla watermarks you could quite easily be fold Vin tampering is much harder to do and in most cases you should be able to spot it Owen explains what to look out for so on the golf here we've got the VIN number in the window there'll be a VIN number stamped into the body side you have a look under the under the Bonnet here you can have a look under there but if you go to uh a main dealer and look at a genuine car you can look at all these numbers and look where they are what they look like on a genuine car and check for things like the font on it is it the same font on the the numbers and the letters because that will give you an indication as to whether that's been changed so here we have like I found the there's the VIN number there I mean look and see whether any of the paint's different so where that's been stamped in there does anything look different there to what the car that you looked at in the dealership looked like as well it looks fine it's just a slight issue that that VIN number won't actually um correlate to that registration yeah so you need to be checking all those numbers and letters against what you're being presented with the V5 as well so someone has cloned the car and they've done a really good professional job and then you run a history check on the car it's just going to come back clean isn't it the company that's running the check uh AR only going to check the numbers that you give them so you need to just do as much as you possibly can to make sure that those numbers are correct if there's anything about what we've said or anything about that car that makes you just think it's a red flag and for me I would just be walking away and is there another thing that kind of just might raise your suspicion if like me you're advertising the car substantially under list value yeah that's it's red flag is it you know why nobody's there to do you a favor everybody wants to make as much money as possible if you do buy it then the chances are you're going to lose both the car and your money because there something seems too good to be true it generally is so if a car's Vin registration plate and V5 document don't match up it's a sign the car has been tampered with so don't buy it even if you're buying it of a friend or colleague let's see if we all check the documents on my clone golf or is he just too trusting shake me hand there we go a new car beautiful car yeah so cash I need cash definitely Cash Cash do you know why on now let me just put this on you like that there we go reason being will I kind of like let you out here under false pretenses so basically this car here it's cloned this is actually a 2009 not a 2010 car it's a cat and right off this particular car and we've given it the identity of a 2010 car that's part of the reason why the mileage was like 50,000 more than theot the last mot in August and you can probably see look here there's a bit of damage here someone did a bit of a dodgy repair on it don't worry about it we've got the actual 2010 car which is worth about 2 Grand oh Lush obviously I was like why is Matt doing the Handover yeah but it's actually worked out well but you would have no idea would you there's a little tip actually if you see the number plate there those are show plates so they're not genuine number plates they normally have like uh special markings on them and stuff like that I would say I was probably the average punter on the street even though I work for car eight years basically if things seem a little bit too good to be true or odd then there's something up and that's the thing with this you see you know it was, 1500 quid and it was all of us sudden down to a grand yeah look I thought this was all above board a nice wholesome deal this is the genuine one look same number plate and look you don't even have look look at this more bangs no l bangs less bangs look see see this is how that should line up I feel like a bit of a fool now Matthew no well though do you want to take this one for a drive and see if it drives better oh does that feel easier to drive so much easier smooth Smooth Operator now you might have noticed that the car that we've given will is actually the one that we copi the number plate from from the classified earlier we actually already owned that car because we didn't want to clone someone else's car cuz that would have been illegal but you know we own that car so it's all fine so here's what you need to check to avoid buying a clone car is the car seriously cheap this could mean the seller is trying to flip a clone car for a quick profit do they only accept cash that could mean they don't want a paper trail leading back to them do the number plates look suspicious they should show the Maker's name postcode and the official bsau number otherwise they might just be show plates does the vehicle identification number look like it's been tampered with if you're not sure what it should look like visit a dealer with a similar car and compare them does the V5 document match the VIN and the number plate if something looks wrong it could be forged another little tip if you're buying a Ed car even if it's not cloned or stolen or anything like that if you're having to push it to bump start it you probably best just walking away if you enjoyed the video please give it a like if you click on the video Windows you can watch some more videos and if you click on the carwow logo you can go to carwow to see how much money you can save on your next car thanks for watching\n"