As South Carolina struggles to recover from record-breaking rainfall and flooding, the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) is working with law enforcement agencies, insurance and car rental companies to identify and catalog water-damaged vehicles and keep them from being resold to unsuspecting consumers.
Authorities estimate that thousands of vehicles may have been flooded.
“Unfortunately, natural disasters bring out dishonest salvage dealers who don’t tell you that the vehicles they’re selling are heavily water-damaged,” said NICB President and CEO Joe Wehrle.
NICB encourages those entities required by law to report flood-damaged vehicles to the National Motor Vehicle Title Information System (NMVTIS) which currently includes information on 96 percent of all U.S. vehicles. Currently, 44 states report data to the system which contains approximately 20 million salvage or total loss records.