Wisconsin Found Nearly 6000 Clocked Cars Last Year

Wisconsin’s DMV Dealer and Agent Section flagged 5961 vehicles with rolled back odometers in 2024, up from 1736 the year before, which is a 243% jump that nobody at the state level was prepared for. The estimated fraud loss came out to about $37 million based on a conservative calculation of six cents per mile across some 614 million miles that had been erased from those odometers. Maura Schifalacqua, who runs the Dealer and Agent Section, told reporters that fraudsters have kept pace with technology and are essentially hacking vehicle computers to change mileage, and her investigators ended up revoking 20 wholesale dealer licenses over the course of the year, which was more than 2022 and 2023 combined. Joel Ingebrigtson, a DMV investigator working those cases, made a point that I think gets overlooked in most coverage of this problem. He said the motivation to commit odometer fraud has shifted from gaining a competitive advantage to simply keeping up with fraudulent competitors, and that once clocking reaches a certain density in a local market, it becomes self sustaining. Wisconsin is not a particularly large used car market, and it’s not known as a hotspot for vehicle fraud, which makes the numbers all the more interesting.

The federal picture is worse, and it’s getting worse faster. Industry data published in December 2025 put roughly 2.45 million vehicles on US roads with suspected odometer rollbacks, a 14% increase from the year before. Between 2023 and 2024, the increase had been only 4%, so the acceleration is real and recent. Senior data leads at the major vehicle history aggregators have attributed the rise partly to cheaper and more widely available tampering tools, which is accurate, but also something the industry has been saying since about 2015 without doing much about it. NHTSA still estimates 450000 vehicles sold annually with false odometer readings and puts the consumer cost at over $1 billion a year for the US alone, though that figure is based on a study from 2002, and everyone in the trade knows it’s a fraction of the actual damage. The average loss per affected buyer, according to industry data from 2025, was around $3300 in lost value, and that doesn’t account for the maintenance costs that pile up when you think your timing belt has another 30000 miles on it and it doesn’t.

Across the Atlantic, the numbers tell a similar story with regional variations that track pretty closely to economic conditions. A fraud prevention analyst who tracks VIN checker data across European markets put the regional clocking rate at about 4.9% of all used cars sold in 2024, which was actually down slightly from 5.3% the previous year, though that modest improvement masks enormous differences between markets. Latvia showed the highest clocking rate at around 11%, followed by Ukraine at roughly 9.6%, and the pattern is consistent across Eastern Europe, where import rates are high, and cross border mileage records basically don’t exist. A vehicle that gets serviced in Germany and then exported to Lithuania loses its mileage trail at the border because EU member states still don’t share odometer data in any systematic way, and anyone in the used car trade in Central or Eastern Europe will tell you that imported cars are clocked at nearly twice the rate of locally traded ones. Data showed that imported vehicles in Italy had a 15.4% tampering rate compared to 5.3% for cars that stayed domestic, and France was similar at 10.4% versus 3.7%.

The financial scale is hard to pin down precisely because everyone uses different methodologies, but if you take the conservative European estimates of €5.3 billion in annual losses and add the UK’s €1.4 billion, that gets you to around €6.7 billion just for those markets. UK buyers apparently overpay an average of 48.8% for clocked cars, which sounds high until you factor in that a car showing 40000 miles instead of 110000 miles is a fundamentally different proposition. Germany’s overpayment figure was around 36%. If you add the US losses to Europe’s conservative estimate and factor in what’s happening across Asia, South America, and Africa, where enforcement is even thinner, the $10 billion global figure that gets thrown around probably undersells it.

I keep coming back to the enforcement side because the gap between the size of the problem and the resources aimed at it is frankly absurd. NHTSA’s Office of Odometer Fraud Investigation consists of four regional offices, each staffed with one criminal investigator and some administrative support. Four investigators for the entire United States. They’ve produced about 250 convictions across 30 states over what appears to be the lifetime of the program, with total criminal fines of $2.8 million and restitutions of $15 million. Compare that to the $1 billion NHTSA itself says buyers lose annually, and you get an enforcement apparatus recovering maybe a cent and a half on every dollar of fraud. The Ghzo brothers’ case out of Chicago, where Hussein and Laith Ghzo, along with Musab Sawai, were convicted for buying high mileage cars at auction, rolling back the odometers, falsifying titles through the Illinois Secretary of State, and reselling them at other auctions, is one of the more visible federal prosecutions in recent memory. Hussein was convicted at trial in mid 2024 after a week long proceeding where evidence showed he’d been warned three separate times that the cars he was selling had rolled back mileage, and he kept going anyway, sometimes posing as other people to cover his tracks. He faced a maximum of five years. Shmuel Gali, in a separate Brooklyn case that ran from 2006 to 2011 and involved about 690 tampered vehicles, eventually got 60 months and was ordered to pay $3.9 million in restitution. These are the big cases, the ones that actually make it through the system.

The tools that make all of this possible are sold openly and updated constantly. Devices marketed as “odometer correction tools” or “mileage calibration equipment” are available from vendors globally, some costing about $500, others closer to $700, covering hundreds of vehicle models via OBD port access with regular firmware updates pushed out for the latest model years across mainstream Asian, American, and European manufacturers. The marketing language always says “repair” or “calibration,” and the DOJ’s consumer protection branch has made it clear that the primary commercial application is fraud. Belgium is the only country that seems to have cracked this at a systemic level, with its Car Pass system requiring anyone who works on a vehicle to report the odometer reading into a central database, and after nearly two decades of operation, mileage fraud there has dropped to around 1500 cases per year. The obvious move would be to expand that across the EU, but nothing has materialized.

Digital odometers were supposed to fix all of this. That was the industry line in the late 1990s when mechanical dials were being phased out. Instead, the shift to electronic instrument clusters created new attack surfaces that are in some ways easier to exploit, because a skilled operator with the right tool can rewrite mileage stored across the dashboard module, engine control unit, body control module, and airbag controller in a few minutes without leaving any physical trace. A mechanical odometer at least showed scratches or misaligned digits. Digital displays look perfect after tampering, and NHTSA acknowledges this directly on its website. The industry response has been to store mileage in more modules, but the correction tool vendors update their software every few days to keep pace.Wisconsin’s numbers will probably look normal within a few years as other states build out similar detection capabilities, or they’ll look like a fluke if the resources dry up.

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Adam Regan: Deputy Editor

Features and account management. 7 years media experience. Previously covered features for online and print editions.

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