Dealership told him low mileage was due to single owner — but it was actually odometer fraud

Steve Andrews had been shopping for a used car online for a while when he came across a registered dealership in Burnaby, B.C., advertising a 2012 Subaru that seemed to fit the bill.

He and his partner were on a budget, but needed a car to get around with their growing family — a two-year-old and a one-year-old. 

“They said it was in very good condition, that there were no real problems,” said Andrews. “Everything seemed to be right about it.”

Most importantly, he said, the mileage on the odometer was low — just under 98,000 kilometres. Under 100,000 kilometres is a sweet spot when selling a used car.

B.C. man speaks out after buying used car with rolled-back odometer | Go Public

But when the car developed mechanical problems shortly after the sale six weeks ago, Andrews brought it to a mechanic who became suspicious about the low mileage and told him to call a Subaru dealership where the car had a recall issue repaired in 2020. 

Andrews discovered that at that time, the car’s odometer was already at 112,000 kilometres. 

“It was pretty shocking,” he said. “I was definitely angry.”

Andrews brought the car back to the registered dealership, DD Auto, and produced the Subaru recall report showing the odometer had been rolled back. 

The sales agent called the manager, who agreed to refund the $13,000 Andrews paid for the car. He also claimed to have no knowledge of the odometer fraud, saying that the dealership itself had been scammed, but did not elaborate. 

Across Canada, no one is keeping track of how often odometer fraud occurs. Go Public checked with the federal RCMP, several provincial police departments, Transport Canada and several provincial regulators of car dealerships. 

All said statistics were difficult to isolate, because the issue is often part of a larger fraud investigation. 

A spokesperson for the Ontario Motor Vehicle Industry Council (OMVIC), said in a statement that it believes odometer fraud “is on the rise,” citing “many recent investigations” that have involved some form of odometer tampering.

Odometer rollbacks are closely tracked in the U.S., where the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that over 450,000 vehicles are sold each year with false odometer readings and that this type of fraud costs American car buyers more than $1 billion annually.

With recently announced tariffs threatening to drive up the cost of new cars, more drivers may turn to used cars — demand and prices for pre-owned vehicles have already gone up since January, according to a recent report on the Canadian automotive market by AutoTrader.

Odometers on older model cars used to be analog counters on the dashboard, so rolling them back meant manually turning a dial to change the number. 

Today, digital odometers can be re-programmed using a handheld device that plugs into a vehicle’s computing port. You can buy them online for a few hundred dollars.