The Expert Podcast

Vehicle ownership information is protected under federal law from being revealed to third parties. It's called the Driver's Privacy Protection Act (DPPA). Now, there are exceptions to that protection where you may be able to get that ownership. First of all, you're not going to get it on Carfax or VIN check or any of these online VIN Checkers. First of all, those are all illegitimate anyway, so all you're going to get on there is maybe the state that it was last titled in and whether or not it's a salvage. Even then, we find many of those are incomplete. We've seen many vehicles that have a clean Carfax and turns out it's salvage or that has no records on some Vin Checker website and it turns out it's reported stolen or has liens. Those online checkers are usually not 100% accurate. It'll even say in their terms and conditions. So if you want 100% certainty on what the background of a vehicle is, here's how to do it and also how to get the owner's name.

What you do is you prepare a document called a DPPA request form. It stands for Driver Privacy Protection Act. It's the form that allows the state government to release that private ownership information to you under certain conditions. You have to check off a box saying why you're using it, make sure you're not using it for any kind of identity theft or fraud or scams, and also that you have to show your identity. The reason they have that Protection Law is because they don't want people just looking up owners of a vehicle and then going knocking on their door of their house and bothering them. Many times in the past when this vehicle information was more readily available back in the 70s and 80s, people would write down a license plate or a VIN tag from a parking lot if they saw somebody driving bad or maybe they cut them off in traffic or maybe they were stalking them and then they would go knock on the door and beat them up. There was a famous case in California where there was an actress that had a stalker and the stalker right down their vent tag from their dashboard and went through the door and killed this woman. So they made laws to protect your privacy and this helps you too. You don't want somebody that just maybe thought you were driving bad and cut them off in traffic to write down your license plate or follow you to a parking lot and write down your Vin tag and then they come knocking on your door and hit you in the head with a bat. So these laws are there for a reason.

But if you identify yourself properly, you give a proper reason for wanting this information, you have to do it in formal channels. You can't do it over the phone or by email or online. You have to sign a document, get it notarized, mail it to the DMV headquarters in your state, and they will mail you back a printout of that title record. The only exception is if the title record is more than 7 or 10 years old depending on the state, it may be purged from the system, so they may have no record at all, but it's worth a try and that way you can find out the prior owner if you want to try to contact them or get a title transfer done. The same holds true for things like liens and storage or liens and stolen vehicles. You request that using that DPPA form or go to your Police Department for stolen. They can't look up liens or owner's name but they can tell you if the vehicle's stolen or not. Those are the ways to legitimately get vehicle information. You're not going to get it by some online thing or by just punching in a VIN number on Google.