this e-mail, so she called Chrysler-Dodge and pretended she had lost her keys.

They told her to just bring in the VIN #, and they would cut her one on the spot, and she could order the keyless device if she wanted.

The Car Dealer's Parts Department will make a duplicate key from the VIN #, and collect payment from the thief who will return to your car. He doesn't have to break in, do any damage to the vehicle, or draw attention

to himself. All he has to do is walk up to your car, insert the key and off he goes to a local Chop Shop with your vehicle.

You don't believe it? It IS that easy.

To avoid this from happening to you, simply put some tape (electrical tape, duct tape or medical tape) across the VIN Metal Label located on the dash board. By law, you cannot remove the VIN, but you can cover it so it can't be viewed through the windshiel d by a car thief.

I urge you to forward this to your friends before some other car thief steals another car or truck.

I slipped a 3 x 5 card over the VIN NUMBER.

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VINs And Car Keys by Snopes

From: http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?/ubb/get_topic/f/20/t/000693.html

I recently had the misfortune of losing a set of keys that included the keys to our two cars. Since most models of automobiles manufactured in the last decade or so use ignition keys with programmable chips matched to the cars' programming, I couldn't simply have duplicates cut from Barbara's sets -- I had to go down to both auto dealerships (our cars are different makes) to obtain replacements.

Now, I naively thought that by presenting a dealership with a vehicle's registration (to prove I owned it) and its VIN (so that they could look up the correct access code), they could program a new key for that car on the spot. Not so. In both cases I had to bring the car to the dealership so that they could re-program the car, the existing key, and a new key all at once.

I didn't understand why they had to wipe out the programming on both the car and the existing good key to create a new duplicate key (rather than simply programming the new key to match the car), so in both cases I questioned the techs about the process. Their answers were kind of vague (because I don't think they fully understood the process themselves), but I inferred from what they told me that the systems dealerships use for creating keys *force* them to do it that way -- they have to re-program a car and *two* keys all at once, ostensibly to prevent any lost keys from being used by their finders.

If this inference is correct, I assume it is technically possible to create a new key that matches the existing programming in a car (and any remaining good keys) without the need for the car to be present or re-programmed, but dealerships don't have equipment that allows them to do that (at least not without some rule-breaking manipulation). Is anyone here familiar enough with the process to know whether that assumption is valid? If not, it seems to me that the warning about car thieves using VINs to obtain duplicate keys is vastly overblown, because the best a thief could do would be to obtain a new unprogrammed key from a dealership, which wouldn't do him a bit of good if he couldn't program it on his own to match the target car.

- snopes