[njsteve]

It is absolutely illegal everywhere to do what your "friend" did. And if by some remote chance he found a state that had some type of exploitable loophole somewhere in the law, UNDER FEDERAL LAW IT IS A FELONY! The removal of a number used for vehicle identification purposes (and note that this can also apply to firewall tags!) and placing it upon a vehicle that it did not originally come on, and then representing the vehicle as that previous vehicle, is a felony. Period. It's like identity theft for cars. The car is subject to being seized and confiscated as contraband material and the owner who authorized it, as well as the individuals at the shop who performed the VIN swap, can be prosecuted under those same statutes as well as the relevant conspiracy statutes. You may ask why would the Feds bother with one car? Well, that may have been true years ago when the cars weren't that valuable, but now when you are talking about swapping the vins on say, a 6 cyl Camaro body with the vin from a wrecked ZL1. The result is a $200,000+ vehicle, and that will get the attention of any U.S Attorney very quicky who is looking for an easy conviction stat...BTW, feel free to tell us all the name of the shop so we can all avoid this place like the plague! The last thing anyone needs is to have the reputation of their car's legitimacy tainted by a shop that would do vin swaps, because once an investigation starts with one of these shops, all the records get examined and all vehicles "restored" by them get examined as well. -NJSteve