Incidence Rate of Odometer Fraud: Preliminary Report

摘要

Odometer fraud is the illegal practice of rolling back odometers to make it appear that vehicles have lower mileage than they actually do. This has historically been considered a significant problem for the American consumer. While any vehicle sold on the used car market could have been the object of odometer tampering, the problem has been considered to be most prevalent among late model vehicles which have accumulated high mileage in a relatively short period of time. This study attempts to estimate the incidence rate of odometer rollback based on nationally representative data. None of the previous studies on odometer fraud produced a comparable national estimate. Most of the previous studies estimated the rollback rate for leased vehicles.