It was advertised as a numbers matching original car with one repaint that needed some work from sitting for 20 years. The buyer exercised due diligence by asking the seller the right questions and then, just to make absolutely sure the seller was correct, he hired an independent inspection service to go and inspect the car. The report back included a disc containg 97 different photographs of the car, a detailed report of everything on the car and its condition. It was verified as a numbers matching car and catagorized as "an excellent restoration candidate" due to its completeness and unbelievably solid California body. Well, what would you do? The deal was struck, money transferred hands and the car was loaded onto the next available transport carrier bound to our facility in New York. Five days later, it arrives. We start going over the car and are very pleased with the condition of the body and the apparent completeness of the car. So far so good. We put the car up and start doing our intake that we do on every car that comes in. What equipment it has, what works, what doesn't, general comments and the like. Then, we start looking at numbers for our own verification, especially when a customer has designated a restoration to be done to a concours condition such as this one was heading for. First off, we looked at the VIN, that checked out okay. The cowl tag was fine also. A second week of march 1973 build date. Windshield had been replaced, no big deal. We removed the air cleaner and cleaned off the carburetor. 7043263 is the number. Wait a minute, it should be a 273 at the end. That decodes to a 1973 400 with a 4 speed transmission. Not an eath shattering event since it is fairly common for carburetors to have been replaced.. We clean off the right front side of the block below the head and see a block sequence number that matches the last 6 of the VIN of the car. What? That is not suppose to be there. We look closer at the XE block code below it and see grind marks in the metal and evidence of an electric engraved code and sequence number. Not even done in the right font or size. Never mind one can see the start and end points of the engraver.

Now we go below to the VIN pad next to the lower pulley and there is many years of grime there. It is apparent the inspector never cleaned off the pad to see what the VIN was that the factory would of stamped there. We clean it off and find a VIN that came from a LeMans. Can you imagine how difficult it was to make that phone call to the customer who already has $16,000 plus into this car? So, what does he have now? A red 1973 Trans Am that has a 400 manual transmission motor. Significant value reduction at this point. Not that it mattered at this point, but the transmission decoded as a PX coded Turbo 400 from a 1971 Pontiac.