Odometer Fraud

The act of illegally altering, resetting or disconnecting a vehicle's odometer to misrepresent its actual mileage, most often to increase its apparent resale value or to make it appear to have been driven less than it has, concealing wear that would otherwise be expected at its true mileage. In the United States, the practice is prohibited under the federal Truth in Mileage Act of 1986, which requires a seller to provide a signed mileage disclosure statement at the time of a vehicle's title transfer and makes odometer tampering and the sale of a vehicle with a known fraudulent mileage disclosure a distinct federal offense, enforced by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration alongside state-level odometer fraud statutes. The shift from the mechanical odometer, which stores mileage on physical gears, to the digital odometer, which stores mileage electronically, moved the typical method of tampering from physically rolling back the gears to altering data stored in a vehicle's onboard computer, a practice that a specialized cottage industry of odometer-correction services and devices has been documented as facilitating despite its illegality.