2) trying to sell a car with a fraudulent odometer value;
3) when asked, claiming that the reading is accurate.
I would expect #3 always was illegal anywhere in the EU. #2 may have been a gray area in some countries or even legal; #1 may have been legal in quite a few (similarly, printing fake money was, and maybe still is, legal in the Netherlands, too. Printing it with the intent to spend it as real was a crime), if alone because many mechanical odometers would roll back when the car drove backwards.
The EU likely wrote a directive that instructed EU members to harmonize laws across the EU, that, once implemented, filled a few holes in international law. For example, if laws aren't harmonized, one could do the rolling back in country C, where #1 was legal and #2 was illegal, and sell the car in country D, where #1 was illegal, but #2 was legal, and neither country C or country D could prevent the car from being ex/imported because of free trade within the EU.
I think the EU also has worked towards making such fraud harder by requiring the odometer reading to be recorded whenever cars get up for mandatory checks (which are yearly for older cars), and require those readings to be brought forward when a car is moved between countries (otherwise, country D would not have any way to detect that rolled back odometer)
1) rolling back an odometer;
2) trying to sell a car with a fraudulent odometer value;
3) when asked, claiming that the reading is accurate.
I would expect #3 always was illegal anywhere in the EU. #2 may have been a gray area in some countries or even legal; #1 may have been legal in quite a few (similarly, printing fake money was, and maybe still is, legal in the Netherlands, too. Printing it with the intent to spend it as real was a crime), if alone because many mechanical odometers would roll back when the car drove backwards.
The EU likely wrote a directive that instructed EU members to harmonize laws across the EU, that, once implemented, filled a few holes in international law. For example, if laws aren't harmonized, one could do the rolling back in country C, where #1 was legal and #2 was illegal, and sell the car in country D, where #1 was illegal, but #2 was legal, and neither country C or country D could prevent the car from being ex/imported because of free trade within the EU.
I think the EU also has worked towards making such fraud harder by requiring the odometer reading to be recorded whenever cars get up for mandatory checks (which are yearly for older cars), and require those readings to be brought forward when a car is moved between countries (otherwise, country D would not have any way to detect that rolled back odometer)