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About vinfax · Updated

About vinfax: a free, public-data archive of Copart and IAAI auction listings

vinfax is a free, public-data auction archive of every Copart and IAAI listing since 2024 — a free alternative to paid VIN history services for the slice of buyers researching salvage and auction-sourced vehicles. The project is built and operated by a small group of independent engineers. No investors, no advertising network, no affiliate-link bidding.

What is vinfax?

vinfax is a free, read-only VIN check and salvage auction archive over the public Copart and IAAI catalogues, going back to 2024. You paste a 17-character VIN and the free VIN check returns every public auction listing on record for that vehicle, with photos, damage code, mileage, location and sale price. The current archive holds roughly 800,000 listings across about 280,000 unique VINs, with 1.8 million photos mirrored to our own storage so the visual record survives after the auction page is taken down.

Positioned against paid alternatives: vinfax is honestly not a full VIN history report. We do not buy DMV title feeds, we do not license service records, we do not have insurance-claim histories. What vinfax is is the cheapest way to find out whether a given VIN ever ran through a Copart or IAAI lot — a fact that paid services like Carfax and AutoCheck typically do cover, but charge $40-$100 per VIN to surface. For that one specific question, a free VIN check on vinfax answers it in one page, and a follow-up free VIN lookup against a second candidate vehicle costs nothing extra.

Why we built it

Salvage and rebuilt vehicles are a real market — millions of cars change hands annually in the US through Copart and IAAI alone, and a meaningful share of "clean title" private-party sales involve a vehicle that quietly passed through a salvage auction at some point in its life. Buyers who can't justify paying $40 per VIN before they have even decided to make an offer had no good free option. The public auction catalogues already exist on the open web; what didn't exist was a searchable, archived index over them. vinfax is that index.

What we believe

  • Public data should be searchable and free. The Copart and IAAI catalogues are public; the archive over them should be too.
  • The buyer is the customer. We do not sell ads, we do not run affiliate links to bidding services, and we do not push any single auction.
  • No accounts means no tracking, means no privacy surface. Every search is anonymous because we never asked who you were.
  • Cite our sources. Every lot page on vinfax links back to its originating Copart or IAAI listing.
  • Honest about limits. vinfax mirrors what the auctions publish; we do not verify, second-guess or re-grade damage codes.

What vinfax is NOT

  • Not an auction, not a marketplace, not a broker, and not a licensed dealer. We do not take bids and we do not sell cars.
  • Not affiliated with Copart, IAAI, Ritchie Bros. or any other auction operator. We are a public-data aggregator, not a partner.
  • Not a substitute for a paid Carfax or AutoCheck report when financing, warranty or an insurance claim is on the line.
  • Not a substitute for a physical inspection — frame damage and flood evidence are inspection findings, not auction listing fields.
  • Not a paid VIN report. We have no DMV title feeds, no accident histories beyond auction events, no service records, and no recall data.

Who runs vinfax

Independent engineers and long-time salvage-car enthusiasts. The project is self-funded by the people who built it; there are no outside investors and no plans to take any. vinfax is operated from outside the US and EU. Routine questions, data-correction requests and press enquiries all land at [email protected] — the contact page has the rest.

How vinfax stays free

The honest answer: costs are small. The archive is text, structured records and mirrored photos — no transactions, no fraud, no chargebacks, no customer-support backlog. The recurring bill is one dedicated server, Cloudflare R2 storage and a modest bandwidth tier. That is affordable today and we expect it to stay affordable as the auction archive grows.

If hosting cost ever outgrows what self-funding can absorb, we may add optional paid features alongside the free site — printable VIN report PDFs, an API for high-volume integrators, that kind of thing. The free VIN check itself will stay free. That is the rule the project was built around and we are not interested in changing it. About vinfax, in one line: a free public-data archive over public auction data, run by people who would have wanted it to exist before they had to build it themselves.

Where to start

Three ways in: paste a VIN, browse the auction archive, or read more about how vinfax works.

Run a free VIN check → Browse the auction archive →

For more depth: how vinfax works (the operational pipeline), data sources (provenance), the categories index, or the what is a VIN and salvage title primers. Privacy posture is on the privacy page; IAAI auction mechanics live in the IAAI primer.