- The owner of a used car dealership in Ohio has been charged with rolling back odometers.
- He allegedly rolled back eight vehicles by 80,000 to 100,000 miles and sold them to consumers.
- Estimates suggest that odometer fraud costs consumers more than $1 billion annually.
Buying a used car can feel like a crapshoot and things get even harder when people game the system. However, the wheels of justice have come for an Ohio dealer who allegedly rolled back odometers on multiple vehicles.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Ohio, Simon Nwaru owned S. Automotive Ltd in Whitehall. However, between November 2020 and May 2022, Nwaru “knowingly disconnected, reset and altered the mileage registered by the odometer on vehicles, changing them from high mileage to lower mileage, before selling them to customers.”
More: Odometer Fraud Is Soaring And You Could Lose Thousands
The government pointed to rollbacks on eight different vehicles that had their mileage reduced by roughly 80,000 to 100,000 miles (128,748 to 160,934 km) each. Doing the math, that could be a total rollback of 640,000 to 800,000 miles (1 to 1.29 million km).
Nwaru was recently indicted by a grand jury for his role in the scheme and the government noted odometer fraud is a federal crime that is punishable by up to three years in prison. The U.S. Attorney’s Office went on to say the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that odometer fraud costs consumers more than $1 billion annually.
That’s an alarming statistic and this doesn’t appear to be Nwaru’s first run-in with the law. Years ago, he and his dealership were sued by the State of Ohio for a litany of shady practices.
In particular, the Ohio Attorney General claimed they misrepresented actual mileage in written odometer disclosure statements and did not disclose odometer discrepancies to some customers. However, the real kicker was the “discrepancies were the result of … rolling back the odometers before selling the vehicles to consumers.”
They went on to highlight the case of a customer who paid $4,295 for a 2002 Acura MDX with a claimed 132,000 miles (212,433 km) on it. However, it had actually been driven 168,120 miles (270,563 km).
The state also pointed to other problems with titles, paperwork, and not properly disclosing the fact that they were selling rebuilt salvage vehicles.
