Swapping vin plates is illegal. TRS does not condone illegal actions.
Junkyards are not permitted to sell whole CFC cars. They can sell you a whole vehicle if they want, and I have bought vehicles that way, but they are not allowed to sell a whole CFC car. Technically they are not supposed to sell parts off them either, but since most junkyards seem to be run by people interested in making money off of what they have in the yard, parts dissappear.
They usually stuck them in neutral and poured liquid glass in the motor or some other compound to completely destroy the motor.
They can't sell the ENGINES from CFC cars but everything else is up for grabs
And the junkyards have all adopted a policy (around here) of shooting blaze orange paint all over the engines of the CFC vehicles and then put up bigh signs saying they are not allowed by law to sell Blocks, cranks, heads, internal parts or whole engines from the orange marked CFC vehicles.
Oh, and the blanket statement that "Swapping the VIN tag is illegal" isn't the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth
there ARE conditions where doing that IS entirely legal.
Like In pennsylvania where a vehicle is by law a kind of abstract concept,
it isn't so much any specific part is a "Vehicle" as it is the sum of the parts
In Pa we have a "rust law", and in complying with that "rust law" parts replacement
is the prefered method, you just can't replace the Cab AND the frame in the same
job...
I have a spare CAB for my 1987, obviously swapping the VIN tag from
my current cab will be required at some point....
In this case I wouldn't say that swapping the VIN onto a Clunker ISN'T illegal
(You are circumventing the law saying "clunkers must be destroyed")
but if you swap the body and call it "rust repair" then replace the frame and
call it structural repair... well, frankly you are going to be waiting until hell
freezes over before you find a trooper willing to get his uniform dirty to crawl
under a truck to scrape the frame clean to read the VIN on the frame...
And you'll wait 100 times as long for them to do it on a 20year old truck
Unless the vehicle is involved in a fatal accident and if that happens you
might not be around to give a damn.
AD