Will you die soon? £3 and I'll tell you

"Are you about to buy a new car? Do you know whether it's been stolen, involved in an accident or - gulp - has ever been owned by Kerry Katona? Well now you can, simply by texting this number, at which point we'll charge you £15 to tell you"

OK, that isn't a verbatim account of these kinds of adverts, but you get my drift. For the avid viewer of Top Gear on Dave, such adverts are your staple diet until the next chapter of pre-staged spontaneity from 3 middle-aged men.

Apparently, these companies can tell you whether your car is a cut-and-shut, whether the mileage is accurate or whether it has ever been used to mow down a crowd of nuns at a Sting concert. There is, however, a slight loophole in this argument:
Who's telling them this information?

Let me paint you a picture; a less than reputable car dealer regularly reduces the mileage on his cars to increase their value. He might even say 'Lovely jubbly'. Once the illegal act is done, he gets on the blower to this company to give them a full and frank account of which cars he has altered, so future owners will be able to find out.

Well of course he doesn't, you dick. So how do they find out?

It seems to me the only way this information could ever enter the public domain is when the cops get involved, either by running checks on the roadside or busting dodgy car dealers. But surely, when they discover this information, they don't just wave the owner on their way? No, they impound the car and launch an investigation. Granted, it must be like trying to find a needle in a haystack when they try to track down the ne'er-do-wells who instigated the crime, but I'd be surprised if the car was allowed back on the road.

Maybe I'm doing the Feds a disservice; maybe the cops are given tip-offs about dodgy motors but due to the dealers being slippery customers, not to mention a crippling lack of police resources, they don't have the time to recover every vehicle. In that case, why do they give this information to some slimy company to charge us serfs for the pleasure of knowing how hooky our car is? Why don't they just publish the registration plates of the death traps on some kind of Internet-based site?

Then again, they might have some kind of back-alley deal to pass this info on for a reasonable fee. They've got to pay for the Christmas party champers somehow.

What next? Some low-life pulls you in a pub, you can text their description to a number and a run-down of their previous convictions, STD's and/or propensity to employ rough-housing in the bedroom is returned? Actually, that's not a bad idea...