- Odometer rollback fraud affects 2.45 million cars on the road.
- Buyers overpay by $3,300 on average without knowing it.
- Cheap digital tools make fraud faster and harder to detect.
For most buyers, few numbers carry more weight than mileage when assessing the value of a used car. There’s no real way to know how a previous owner drove it, and maintenance history can be equally murky. That’s why for most consumers, mileage seems like an objective measure, a simple number that hints at how much life a car might have left.
More: Car Dealer Charged With Rolling Back Odometers By 100K Miles
Yet according to CarFax, that trust may be more fragile than it seems. The company estimates around 2.45 million cars on U.S. roads today likely have tampered mileage, a dramatic rise over previous years that reflects what appears to be a perfect storm of incentives and opportunities.
The Digital Age Didn’t Fix This, It Made It Worse
From 2023 to 2024, CarFax believes odometer rollbacks jumped just 4 percent. In 2025, the company suspects it jumped 14 percent higher. Most of that appears to be due to additional competition in the used-car market.
Sellers desperate to remain competitive could see rolling back an odometer as their edge. Modern tools are only making that easier to accomplish, too.
“As modern vehicles have transitioned from mechanical to digital odometers, tampering has unfortunately become more common due to the wider availability of inexpensive tools,” said Faisal Hasan, Vice President of Data Acquisition at CarFax.
CarFax has demonstrated mileage “correction” devices that sell online for around $200 to $300, capable of wiping tens of thousands of miles from a vehicle’s digital record in seconds. Once completed, the change can be nearly impossible to detect without historical mileage data, since the altered information overwrites what was previously stored.
The company estimates that buyers spend $3,300 more on average on odometer-rolled-back vehicles than they would if the mileage were correct. Of course, that figure doesn’t include surprise safety or maintenance repairs that are the result of unreported mileage.
Number Of Vehicles Suspected Of Odometer Rollbacks
Carfax
The problem is especially concentrated in high-population states. California leads the list with more than 532,000 vehicles suspected of odometer rollback, followed by Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois. However, some smaller states are seeing the fastest growth, including Montana, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.
Unsurprisingly, CarFax suggests using vehicle history reports as a way to combat the issue. It also stresses doing the basic work of double-checking actual components for signs of failure, premature wear, and unusual markers, given the age of a car.