[Mark_C]

Theres at least 4 parties involved here. No. 1 - the buyer who really is only an interested party and had no part in how this problem came about, No. 2 - the restorer/rebuilder, No. 3 - the guy he bought the shell from with the VIN and tags already attached, and of course No. 4 - "Gary" who sold the tags and paper work in the first place. There may be others between people 3 and 4 as well. The tags were originally going to be sold in April of 2004 (don't actually know if they were or not, but I do know they were removed from the car along with a chunk of the cowl - the pictures verify this), and the (a) shell with those tags reappeared on Ebay in October of 2007, and the "most original ever" Z28 reappeared around June or July of this year at Carlise, and then at this auction. Obviously person number 3 (or maybe someone between him and "Gary") is the one who affixed the tags to the new shell.

The seller/restorer of this car might get off the hook because of that sequence of events, but he's going to be out a ton of money if law enforcement seizes the car.

You don't have to dig up anything to determine if the car has its original shell or not. Every stamped peice of sheetmetal on a camaro contains a plant code and a date code on it. For example the firewall body mount cage has at least 3 stamps on them consisting of a letter and 2 digit number indicating the week of the year it was stamped out. All you need to do is find a few and compare it to the build time of the car. If theres a big difference in dates then the parts of the shell don't belong with the tags.