Carfax

Occasional bartender Steve Bartley saved the day at always-open Johnny White’s Sports Bar in the French Quarter when he secured 15 bags of ice from a FEMA relief station.

Ways to Avoid Becoming a Fraud Victim

To help stop flood cars from becoming fraud cars, Carfax is making all its flood information available to consumers and dealers free of charge on a special page at www.carfax.com/flood.

At the Web site, potential buyers or interested parties can enter the VIN of a car and search Carfax’s records for any evidence of Katrina damage. Carfax has also tagged all vehicles whose last registration was in the ZIP Code of an area affected by the disaster and attached a special consumer advisory suggesting the car be checked by a mechanic because of the possibility that it was damaged in the disaster.

In addition, the National Insurance Crime Bureau has set up a special search engine at its Web site, www.nicb.org, where anyone can enter a VIN number and determine whether that number matches any of the hundreds of thousands of VINs collected from cars in the disaster zone.