2 ms·
My fiance's bike was stolen a few months ago. By coincidence someone who was a friend of a friend of her's ended up buying it off of craigslist. We discovered t
by kisielk 14y ago
My fiance's bike was stolen a few months ago. By coincidence someone who was a friend of a friend of her's ended up buying it off of craigslist. We discovered this when he arrived at a BBQ riding her bike. When we asked about the details of his purchase, he sent us all the email correspondance with the bike thief.
The thief had actually given him the serial number of the bike, which he checked in the online police database and it returned no hits. The catch was that the thief slightly altered the serial number so that it wouldn't yield any hits. When he went to actually look at the bike he didn't notice the subtle difference in the serial number and assumed it to be legit.
- tadfisher 14y agoMotor vehicle VINs in North America use a check digit to detect VIN errors, which consequently makes it hard to modify a VIN without failing checks at time of purchase (such as when the VIN is looked up via CarFax or at the DMV). It's not cryptographically "hard" to modify it, but additional check digits up the difficulty (like appending a hash to the plaintext serial number). The OCR-A character set used in the MICR numbers on checks makes it easy to spot a modification like the one in your story.