Terms of service

A handful of words recur across all four documents, and it is worth fixing what they mean once.

Report

The digital document vincode generates for a single vehicle identification number, viewable online and downloadable as a PDF.

Credit

The pre-purchased right to generate one Report. A credit is consumed at the moment the Report is generated and made available, not when you open it.

Sources

The public and private archives vincode queries: registration registers, roadworthiness databases, claims records, theft reports, historic sales listings, manufacturer recall campaigns. The categories actually queried for a given vehicle are listed at the foot of every Report.

VIN

Vehicle Identification Number: the 17-character chassis number assigned by the manufacturer. It is the only search key the service is built on.

Consumer

A natural person acting for purposes outside their trade, business, craft or profession (art. 3(1)(a) of the Italian Consumer Code). These terms are written for consumers; dealers and professionals buy on separate terms.

vincode undertakes to query the data sources available to it at the time of the request for the VIN supplied by the User, and to return the information so obtained in the form of a Report. vincode's obligation is an obligation of means, not of result: vincode does not warrant that the Report represents the complete history of the vehicle, nor its current condition, nor the absence of events that were never recorded in the sources searched.

A Report is not, and does not replace:

• a technical appraisal or a mechanical diagnosis of the vehicle;
• a physical inspection: no archive tells you about the clutch, the brakes or the rust under the sills;
• a search of the Italian vehicle register (PRA) or a digital certificate of title;
• a check with the Motorizzazione civile that the vehicle's paperwork is in order;
• a binding market valuation or a valuation report;
• a warranty of any kind about the vehicle or about the seller's honesty.

vincode does not sell vehicles, does not broker between buyer and seller, does not hold money for either party and does not make buy or don't-buy recommendations. The decision stays yours.

Vehicle history reports are incomplete by construction. Coverage varies by country, by period, by source and by event category: a claim settled outside insurance, a repair paid in cash to a non-affiliated body shop, or work done before an archive was computerised leaves no trace in any database, from any provider.

That is why we always show which categories we queried for that vehicle and which returned nothing, instead of silently dropping empty sections. A Report that says "No data" in a category is telling you something precise and limited: that we found nothing there. It is not telling you the vehicle is fine.

vincode is not liable for the incompleteness, inaccuracy or staleness of the third-party archives the data comes from. It is liable for the proper performance of its own service: having queried the sources it declared, and having reported faithfully what it found.

You are given this information before you buy — on the product page and at checkout — not only here. Under art. 49(1)(a) and art. 49(5) of the Italian Consumer Code, the main characteristics of the service communicated before the order form an integral part of the contract.

The purchase flow is built around the duties in arts. 49 and 51 of the Italian Consumer Code. The order of the steps is not an implementation detail: it is what makes the contract valid.

1. 1You choose a package and see the total price, inclusive of the VAT resolved to the country you are buying from. Nothing appears later.
2. 2The summary screen carries the pre-contractual information required by art. 49(1) and a consent checkbox — unticked by default and not bundled with any other acceptance — covering immediate performance and the waiver of withdrawal.
3. 3The order button reads "Ordine con obbligo di pagare" ("Order with obligation to pay"), as art. 51(2) requires. Until the box is ticked the order cannot be submitted.
4. 4Payment is handled by Stripe. vincode never receives or stores your card details.
5. 5We send the order confirmation on a durable medium, reproducing verbatim the consent text you accepted, as art. 51(7)(b) requires.
6. 6Only then is the Report generated and made available.

If the confirmation fails to go out, the Report is held in a waiting state with a notice rather than delivered. Almost every competitor runs this sequence the other way round, and running it the other way round is precisely what destroys the withdrawal waiver.

Prices shown on the site are in euro and include applicable VAT. For sales to consumers resident in other EU member states, the rate is that of the consumer's country (art. 58 of Directive 2006/112/EC; in Italy art. 7-octies of Presidential Decree 633/1972), accounted for through the Union OSS scheme.

vincode sells single purchases and prepaid credit packs only. There are no subscriptions, no paid trials that turn into recurring charges, no automatic renewals and no charges after the first. There is nothing to cancel.

For sales to Italian consumers an invoice is not mandatory (art. 22 of Presidential Decree 633/1972) but is issued if you ask for one no later than the moment the transaction is completed. If you buy quoting a VAT number, the electronic invoice is transmitted through the Sistema di Interscambio: at checkout we need either the recipient code or the certified email address.

In every case we issue a receipt showing the seller's identity, a description of the service, the taxable amount, the VAT rate and amount, the total and the country of taxation.

If we announce a price reduction we state the lowest price applied in the preceding 30 days, as art. 17-bis of the Italian Consumer Code requires. We do not use countdown timers, permanent "discounts" that never expire, or scarcity notices on a digital product available in unlimited copies: those are misleading practices, not conversion tactics.

Your purchase gives you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable and non-sublicensable licence to view, download, print and keep the Report for your own buying or selling decision about that vehicle. You can show it to the seller, to a mechanic you trust, to a family member or to your insurer: that is personal use.

What you may not do:

• resell the Report, transfer it for consideration or embed it in a paid product or service;
• republish it in full on a website, a marketplace or a listing as your own content;
• systematically extract its data, by any means, to build or feed a competing database;
• remove the source attribution, the generation date or the coverage warnings.

Dealers, resellers and anyone buying in the course of a business need a separate B2B licence, which covers use of the Report in sales listings and carries different commercial terms. Talk to us before you buy.

vincode keeps a copy of the generated Report on its own systems for 24 months from generation, so it can be reissued if something goes wrong and so we can reconstruct what was shown and when. After that the server-side copy is deleted; the PDF you downloaded remains yours, with no expiry.

vincode is a tool for assessing a vehicle. It is not a tool for investigating a person, and using it that way is prohibited. This clause is not decoration: it is one of the mitigations the legitimate-interest assessment behind our database rests on, and we enforce it.

You may not use vincode, in whole or in part, to:

• identify, trace, profile or contact the current or a previous owner of a vehicle;
• conduct debt collection, debtor tracing or service of process;
• make individual insurance underwriting or pricing decisions;
• screen employees, contractors or job candidates;
• carry out bulk automated use: scraping, crawling, circumventing rate limits, serial queries across VIN ranges;
• share access credentials, resell access or operate a personal account as a shared one.

We apply per-user and per-VIN rate limits and monitor abnormal usage patterns. Where these terms are breached we may suspend access, refuse an order or terminate the contract; credits not yet used are refunded.

We do not accept a person's name as a search input, and we do not offer, perform or resell name-based register searches (visure nominative). That is a design choice rather than a technical limitation: searching by name would turn the service into a people-profiling product, which is exactly what the Italian data protection authority has been penalising data brokers for.

Every Report carries a "Report an error" link. If you flag a data point you believe is wrong, we check it against the source and, within a reasonable time, either correct it or explain where it came from and why we consider it correct. We keep a log of reports and decisions.

A wrong "accident-damaged" or "odometer tampered" flag on an identifiable vehicle can harm the person selling it. That is why we treat error reports as priority requests rather than ordinary support tickets.

Where the error is upstream, in the originating register, we cannot correct a third party's archive: we tell you which source it is and how to ask for rectification there. Where the error is ours, the case falls under the conformity guarantee in the next clause.

A Report is digital content within the meaning of arts. 135-octies ff. of the Italian Consumer Code, implementing Directive (EU) 2019/770. If a Report is not delivered, is not readable, relates to a vehicle other than the one you requested, or contains errors attributable to vincode, you are entitled to have conformity restored — in our case, a free regeneration of the Report — and, if that is impossible or does not happen within a reasonable time, to a proportionate price reduction or to termination with a refund.

These are statutory rights. They are independent of the right of withdrawal and are neither limited nor excluded by any clause of these terms. A clause purporting to exclude them would be void.

The full rules on the right of withdrawal, on the waiver we ask for at checkout, on unused credits, on the conformity remedies and on the "no data, no charge" guarantee live in a dedicated document, which forms an integral part of these terms.

Start with what we cannot exclude, because that is the part that matters. Any clause excluding or limiting liability in advance for wilful misconduct or gross negligence is void (art. 1229 of the Italian Civil Code). A clause excluding or limiting the consumer's rights of action in the event of total or partial non-performance or defective performance is presumed unfair, and therefore void against a consumer (art. 33(2)(b) of the Italian Consumer Code). That nullity operates only in the consumer's favour and may be raised by a court of its own motion (art. 36(1)).

So you will not find the sentence "vincode is not liable for the inaccuracy of the information provided" in these terms, even though it appears in the English terms of the leading competitor. Against an Italian consumer that clause would have no effect, and writing it would serve only to make you believe otherwise.

What we can do, and do, is define the subject matter of the obligation precisely, in clauses 3 and 4. vincode is answerable for failing to query the sources it declared, for misreporting what it found, for not delivering the Report or for delivering one about a different vehicle. It is not answerable for the fact that a third party's archive was incomplete.

For ordinary negligence, and to the extent the law permits, vincode's liability for financial loss is measured by the price paid for the Report concerned. Liability for wilful misconduct and gross negligence, liability for personal injury and the consumer's mandatory rights — including the conformity remedies in clause 10 — are unaffected.

vincode is not answerable for the buying or selling decisions you make. The Report is one of the inputs to that decision, alongside inspecting the vehicle, checking its documents and, where the value justifies it, commissioning an appraisal.

As to continuity, the service is provided without a guarantee of uninterrupted availability: we may suspend it for planned maintenance, for security work, or because an upstream source is temporarily unreachable. An outage that prevents you from generating a Report you have already paid for does not cost you the credit.

If a data source becomes unavailable for a sustained period we update the list of covered categories before purchase, not after. Advertised coverage that is no longer delivered would be a main characteristic of the service described misleadingly.

A one-off purchase does not create an ongoing relationship to be varied over time: the terms that apply to your order are the ones in force when you submitted it. Every version of this document is numbered, dated and archived, and the version number is recorded on the order.

For prepaid credits not yet used, the terms in force when the pack was purchased continue to apply, unless a change is in your favour.

The contract is governed by Italian law. If you are habitually resident in another EU member state, that choice does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory consumer-law provisions of your own country (art. 6 of Regulation (EC) 593/2008, Rome I): a German buyer keeps the mandatory protections of German law.

For disputes with a consumer, territorial jurisdiction lies mandatorily with the court of the consumer's place of residence or elected domicile (art. 66-bis of the Italian Consumer Code). These terms do not contain, and will not contain, an "exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Milan" clause: it would be unfair and void.

The first step is to write to [email protected]. We reply within one working day, and disputes about a payment or an undelivered Report take priority over everything else.

As an alternative to the courts you may use the alternative dispute resolution bodies provided for in Part V, Title II-bis (arts. 141 ff.) of the Italian Consumer Code, and in particular the conciliation services of the Chambers of Commerce.

For cross-border disputes within the European Union you can approach the European Consumer Centre Italy (ECC-Net), which assists consumers free of charge in dealings with traders established in another member state.