The Expert Podcast

Do you think you're safe just because you ran a VIN check on a vehicle before you bought it? Not so fast. Here's an example of where somebody had a vehicle stolen over a decade ago, and the vehicle had been bought and sold several times. Now the owner has come to find out that they have to give it back because it was stolen and wasn't reported properly. One crucial DMV mistake led the judge to rule in my favor. This also brings up another important point: if you're looking to get a title for a vehicle where you don't have the right paperwork, the best method is a court order title. You'll see the bonded title Vermont loophole prior to contacting all these different methods and different ways you can try to get a title. The best way to do it is with a court order title, because when you get a judge's ruling, that overrides everything else.

Right, and look at these loopholes with Vermont. People do it all the time. You'll see it on our website. Car and Driver talked about it; Hagerty Insurance talked about it; and Jalopnik talked about it. You know, people do it. You can do a bonded title; that's done through your state with a surety bond. You could do that too, but all of those methods have risks and additional expenses associated with them. If you file a court order and get a judge's ruling, you're done. Right, that overrides everything the DMV could do. Anyway, to make a long story short, a driver recovered their beloved '71 Nova after it was stolen and missing for 13 years.

They parked it outside of a friend's house for two months while they were away, and when that happened, um, when they came back, it was gone. They searched for nine years, and they saw a sales ad on Craigslist. They found that a car dealer put the car up for sale, and they believed that they had purchased it legally because they had the right paperwork. The DMV later issued a title for the vehicle, but it created more issues. It was missing a date at the bottom; the DMV didn't scan the records and came to find out the person who was involved with this was arrested because they reported it, but the bottom line is that the DMV made an error when they entered it. What happens a lot of times is that when a vehicle is reported stolen to a local police department, they may not upload all the information to all the different places where it could be stored, like if you look on Carfax, VIN Check, or these VIN Check websites. Look, they have access to a lot of information, but they don't have everything the DMV has. They don't have everything the NCIC and all the government agencies have. As a matter of fact, if you look at the bottom of the website for companies like Carfax, I'm not picking on Carfax right; they do a lot of things, but it'll say that this is not complete information. It's just basic information. So, by spending 10 or 15, 20, or whatever the Carfax charge is, you're not getting the same information as if you actually went to the DMV and went to the police department.

And right here, it tells you the judge says somebody who doesn't have a valid title cannot pass title. Right here's the bottom line: If you are not getting a valid legal title when you're buying a vehicle, you shouldn't be buying the vehicle. It's against the law for somebody in most states to actually sell a car without a title, so if you're going to be buying a car without a title, go through the court process. Right here's what the Circuit Judge said in the article: The person never had a title and couldn't transfer it despite the DMV's new title. The judge ruled in Elliot's favor since he had the original title.

Um, they say when you get clean, everything comes back, and that's what happened. Look, somebody ran the title search with some online websites, and it looked like it was a clean title, but in reality it wasn't. So the moral of the story is, first of all, don't buy a car without a title. If you do end up with a car without a title, use the court-order title process. Right, that's one way to make sure that all your bases are covered. Don't fall for this story. This is one we hear all the time in our car title division: The title was missing when Conroy bought the car, but he was promised that one could be obtained. Look, we get thousands of calls every day, thousands of contacts every day, and the vast majority of them are for people who bought a car from the seller who told them, "Look, I don't have the title, but I'll either get you one or you can get one." Right, you can get one using a bonded title, a Vermont loophole, or something else. They'll promise you to get a title as soon as they have your money; they're gone, and they're going to ghost you because they don't need to do any more work, and they probably couldn't get you a title anyway.

And part of the reason is too that older car records are purged from the government database, whether it's a theft report or a title report. Now keep that in mind: databases are different from documents. If you have a database, that's one thing; if you have a document, that's something else. Every vehicle record starts with a paper document; those are in the archives. So when you go to court, the court's going to be looking at those archives. So make sure that you're using the highest and best authority for getting a title, which is a court-ordered title, not some random loophole or some database record, which may not be 100 percent.