Japanese imports: mileage tampering

I came across this video:
The Mystery of Odometer Fraud Explained, Pacific Coast Auto

which is very detailed about the sorts of mileage tampering you might get on cars exported from Japan. This is often a thing that people importing are worried about.

It's worth watching through, but some rough summary of things I remembered:

• Japanese people drive fewer km than other countries, because most people take the train to work

• The Japanese system is pretty good at recording km at stages: Shaken at 3-2-2-2-... year intervals, plus any time it goes through auctions

• Tampering is a criminal offence in Japan, but is still a thing for exports

• I didn't write down the figure mentioned but it's something like 1% of Japanese cars have mileage tampering, lower than eg the UK

• Tampering may happen just before it goes in for Shaken, but you can only rollback maximum 2 years of miles without showing a discrepancy

• First Shaken is more of a risk as they can roll back 3 years worth of km, eg make a 60k car a 10k car

• Once the car leaves the Japanese system then that's where there's more risk of shady exporters/importers as the Japanese won't prosecute

• Export cars bought from auction are less likely to be affected than cars bought from an exporter, because there's no profit for the auction to tamper

• Places like UAE, Kenya where cars are imported and then re-exported to nearby countries are a problem, because if one importer does it then all their competitors are forced to too

• Look at the auction sheet, especially the mark for odometer not confirmed (* or #) - could also be due to gauge replacement or 5 digit odometer

• CarVX is a trustworthy way to get the Shaken records and the last 2 sales (beware a trick where somebody sells the car to a friend to hide a previous record)

• The km is shown on the export certificate so check it agrees with the auction sheet

Edited 3 hours ago3 hr by Ptarmigan