[tirebird]

There's more to this story. Shelby, according to reports, is dissolving his arrangement with Unique and there are several, again according to reports, lawsuits against Unique for non-delivery of cars from customers who've paid. But the most important point, if these reports are true, is that a dealer can't remove or change a vin#. It's against federal and state law. Only the State DMV can issue a new Vin, not a dealer. What's a clue in this whole mess is that the charge is title washing. What may have happened here is where an individual or dealer in state #1 pretends to sell a car to someone else in state #2, usually for a small fee, who registers this car in that state then pretends to sell it back to state#1 with the second state's registration. That's fraud. The car was never really sold. It never leaves the first state. It's a sham and the former owner of "Titles Unlimited" in Alabama spent a couple of years in a California pen for "washing" thousands of titles of Cobra's and other expensive cars and motorcycles using this method. Besides being designed to quickly and cheaply "wash" a title, it's also designed to avoid paying sales taxes because the car is undervalued, usually by tens-of-thousands of dollars. Cobra's were "sold" to Alabama title washing company and valued at $4K. Of course, when some of those Cobras were stolen or wrecked, the value went up 10 or 20 fold when reported to the insurance companies. So, the story that may be happening here, as mentioned in the report, is "title washing", not just removing a Vin,..which is illegal enough. So, what's maybe going on here is that Unique is being accused of removing the old vin, perhaps, salvaged vin, creating a new vin and attaching it to the cars then sending the paper work to another state with a sham sale where someone registers the car and then, through another sham sale, sends it back to Texas where it is registered as a real vehicle. The state is out the money and, if this whole scam unravels, the new owner and subsequent owners are out a lot of money too down the line. Besides the state and feds looking at all these and other transactions, insurance companies can easily do some simple research and quickly tell a customer that he can't have it both ways where a 4 thousand dollar Cobra is suddently worth 50k or more when there's a claim. And a final note, even if the car is valued at it's real price, there has to be more than just a title flying back and forth. There has to be a check for 50k going to the new owner and some real cars have to leave Texas and go to the new owners who hang on to them for some time before selling them back to Unique. But, as mentioned before, most of these transactions in other cases were a few hundred dollars and the whole deal goes back and forth in a week or two. Hello! You might as well get a bullhorn and announce the fraud in front of the federal building. Today, especially since 9/11, there are so many data bases that federal and state authorities can look at instantly that raise red flags. I'm sure we'll know about this mess in the near future after the formal charges are filed.