VIN Number Thieves

We've all received forwarded emails from friends regarding various scams and just yesterday I received one such forwarded email.  The claim is that thieves can steel your car by using VIN numbers to obtain duplicate keys through auto dealerships!  If you didn't already realize this, you can see your car's VIN number through the windshield on the dashboard on the driver's side.

Well, this email caught my interest for obvious reasons.  So I thought I'd do a little digging to verify the validity of this claim.  Snopes.com is quickly becoming a favorite of mine...

Accoding to Snopes.com, some thieves have had some success stealing cars this way.  Is it likely this will happen to you?  Again, according to Snopes.com probably not.  In short, you are required to provide the dealership with a copy of your car's title or registration before they will contact the manufacturer to request a dupicate key.  In the cases where thieves have been successful using this scheme, they've also had elaborate methods to falsify or create false titles & registrations.  The complete article can be read at http://www.snopes.com/crime/warnings/vin.asp.

So is obscuring your VIN number a good way to decrease teh likelyhood of your car being stolen ?  Snopes says not really for the following reasons:

1) Obtaining duplicate keys through automobile dealerships is too elaborate and risky a scheme for most car thieves, so this form of crime isn't very common.

2)  For at least some models of cars thieves can easily create their own duplicate keys.
3)  The dashboard plate isn't necessarily the only place from which a car's VIN might be obtained. In nearly all recent models of cars, the VIN is encoded in multiple locations, such as a bar code found on the inside of the driver's door.
4)  In some jurisdictions, it is against the law to obscure a car's VIN. New York City parking regulations, for example, specify that "No person shall stand or park a vehicle that has the vehicle identification number obscured in any manner."

Source:  http://www.snopes.com/crime/warnings/vin.asp