A letter arrives about your car. It looks official, it sounds urgent, and there is a number to call. You cannot tell from the envelope whether it came from the people who built the car or from someone who bought a list of registrations.
That is not a failure of attention on your part. Regulators have said the same thing. In a 2018 enforcement action the United States Federal Trade Commission described mailers headed URGENT RECALL NOTICE sent to more than twenty thousand vehicle owners, most of whom had no open recall at all, and its advice to consumers was not to look harder at the letter. It was to go and check the vehicle against the register instead.
That is the right instinct, and it is what this page is for.
Every genuine safety recall has a campaign number
A real recall is a filing with a safety authority, and filings have reference numbers. In the United States they look like 24V123: two digits for the year, a letter, three digits. Other countries use their own formats, but the principle holds: there is a number, and it exists in a public register whether or not you have the letter in front of you.
So the question is never does this letter look real. It is does this campaign number exist, and does it apply to my car. That question has an answer you can get for yourself, for free, in about a minute, without calling anyone.
How to check it
- Find the campaign number on the letter. If there is not one anywhere on it, that is the most useful thing you have learned so far. A notice about a real recall that does not cite the recall is a notice about something else.
- Look it up. Put the number into our campaign check. We hold the American register and what each notice said on the dates we read it. If the number is real, it is there.
- Check it against your own car. A campaign existing is not the same as it applying to your vehicle. Check your car, or use the manufacturer or the safety authority for your country.
Three answers are possible, and all three are useful. The campaign is real and covers your car: book the repair, it is free. The campaign is real but does not cover your car: the letter is about something else. The number does not exist: treat the letter as advertising.
What a real recall never asks you for
This is the part worth remembering, because it does not require you to identify anybody.
- Money. A safety recall repair is paid for by the manufacturer. Not a deposit, not a diagnostic fee, not a contribution towards parts.
- A card number. There is nothing to pay, so there is nothing to pay with.
- A purchase. No genuine recall requires you to buy a service contract, an extended warranty or a maintenance plan first, and none is conditional on having bought one.
- Urgency about your money. Recalls can be urgent about your safety: some tell owners to stop driving. None of them are urgent about a subscription expiring.
Mail that asks for any of those may still be perfectly legal advertising. It is simply not a recall notice, and it should not be treated as one.
If you think a letter is misleading
Reporting it is worth the five minutes, because these are pattern problems and regulators act on volume.
- United States: the FTC for the mailing itself, and NHTSA for anything touching vehicle safety.
- Netherlands: ACM for misleading commercial practice, the Netherlands vehicle register for the recall itself.
- Elsewhere: your national consumer authority, and separately your road safety authority. They are usually not the same body and the letter may be a matter for both.
What we cannot do
We cannot tell you whether the letter in your hand is genuine. We have not seen it, we do not know who sent it, and we are not going to guess about a document we cannot examine. What we can do is show you what the authority published under a given campaign number, and what that text said on each date we read it, so you can compare the two yourself.
We also make no claim about any particular company. A letter that is not a recall notice is not automatically dishonest: most direct mail about cars is ordinary advertising, sent by people entitled to send it. The distinction that matters to you is narrower and easier to establish: is there a real campaign, and does it cover my car.
We are a company that reads public safety registers. We are not lawyers, and if a letter has already cost you money you should speak to your national consumer authority or to someone qualified where you live.
The register, as it stands
We currently hold 15,236 American recall campaigns, fingerprinted so that we can tell when the wording of one changes after publication. If a campaign number is genuine and reasonably recent, it is in there.
If the recall turns out to be real, here is what happens next.