Used car buying advice. Odometer rollback?

Looking for a car that will make it through college. Primarily looking at 07-09 with 100-135k miles so there's some warranty left on the battery should it fail.

Here's the concerning issue I'm finding.There seems to be a lot of tampering with the odometer. I've ran several cars' VIN and 4 of them have shown up on site likes copart listing them as salvage. The odometer readings tend to be 180k+. But when I checked the cars out the odometers read anywhere from 78k to 98k.

I've also come across some clean title ones that all coincidentally have 98k miles. But these cars seem to be pretty worn and there's indications the mileage is much higher. Several of these cars had a smog in 2014 or 2015 and the odometer was 89k or 95k. I am now to believe the owner stopped driving it or greatly reduced their driving to just 3-9k miles in 2-3 years? So, what's going on here? Is it that easy to rollback the odometer on these cars?


I can post specific examples if anyone is interested as well.

 

Because they aren't any cheaper. In fact a similar year Corolla with the same mileage is a typically $1500-2500 more. It seems people either fear battery failure or have some adversity to a decade old hybrid but they are oftentimes much cheaper than other Toyotas. Also some of the 2007 Prius have carpool stickers so that's another incentive for me to buy one.