I paid for a monthly Carfax account, and it worked great for cars coming from individual sellers. However, if I looked at cars from Dealers, all of them offered the service for free. It was nice having the piece of mind knowing the car I was buying had been in an accident or not. It is a scam that they only allow you 5 carfax reports using VIN numbers. Especially when they advertise "Unlimited" searches. All of the private sellers did not display the licence plate number of the vehicles I was interested in, which happens to be the only way to get "Unlimited" searches.