Car cloning is a growing problem but too little is being done to protect the person whose vehicle is cloned.

There was one man in Leeds who was sent a congestion charge bill even though he hadn't been to London.

Knowing about the number of times a car has changed hands, and whether it has changed colour, makes it much easier to identify potential fraud and so-called car cloning, says Lawson.

There are two main ways of unloading a stolen car on to the market. Until recently the most common form was known as ringing, whereby a stolen car has the identity of a wreck from the dump grafted on to it. But now the criminal market has invented a new method of "disappearing" a stolen vehicle — cloning. Car cloning involves taking the identity of a legitimate vehicle and putting it on the stolen car.