Can You File An Abandoned Vehicle Title?

The Myth of the Abandoned Vehicle
Today we’re going to talk about one of the most common subjects that comes up in our operations department, where people call in with questions about abandoned vehicles. Many times they use the phrase “abandoned vehicle” because they want to get a title for a vehicle. They say, “I want to file for an abandoned vehicle title.” This often comes from a preconceived idea that if they say it’s abandoned, it’s “finders keepers” and they get to keep the vehicle through some process for a title just based on it being abandoned. The thinking goes: if somebody doesn’t want it and I want it, I get to own it.

Abandoned Doesn’t Always Mean Yours
What we’re going to show in this article is that if you declare something to be abandoned, many times you won’t get to keep it. Most times, the vehicle technically isn’t legally abandoned under the definition that you might think it is. For example, if you buy a vehicle from somebody and they don’t give you a title, you might say, “I’ll just file for an abandoned vehicle.”

It’s Not Abandoned if You Bought It
That vehicle is not abandoned—you bought it. Even if somebody brings a car to your business or parking lot, or if you had a vehicle that was left for storage and the person didn’t pay their bill, that’s really not an abandoned vehicle. That is a storage lien.

We’re going to talk first about what an abandoned vehicle really is and what you can and can’t do to get a title. Then at the end, we’ll discuss how you can get a title for vehicles that you might think are abandoned but really aren’t.

The Georgia Law Example
First, here’s an example from the state of Georgia. We’re picking this as a sample procedure because Georgia has an abandoned vehicle procedure that’s very similar to most states. Most states actually follow federal law for abandoned vehicles, so they’re all going to be similar.

Per Georgia law, a business or person removing an abandoned or unclaimed vehicle from public right-of-way or public property must go through a process to ensure the rights of the vehicle owners, lienholders, and security interest holders are protected. A certificate of title for an abandoned vehicle cannot be issued on a bond (or on vehicles not required to be titled, model year 1985 and older).

Rights of Owners and Lienholders
What does that mean? That means before you become the owner of that vehicle that you’re saying is abandoned (which it probably really isn’t), all of the other people with interest in that vehicle have to have the right to redeem it. If there’s a previous owner, they have to be notified and told, “Hey, your car is going to be transferred to new ownership. Do you want it?” Any lienholders must receive the same notification.

Storage Fees Aren’t That Simple
You might say, “Well, I’m going to just put a storage bill on it.” You probably won’t be able to put a storage bill on it unless you have a signed contract from the owner of the vehicle agreeing to pay you storage. You can’t just make up storage fees out of thin air. Even if you are a licensed automotive shop with legitimate repair bills, you can’t call it abandoned—you have to call it a mechanic’s lien or storage lien, which is a different process.

Lien Process vs. Abandonment
The law states that information on handling abandoned vehicles requires towing and storage firms to notify vehicle owners and lienholders by law when a motor vehicle has been towed and impounded. Authorized businesses that want to foreclose on a lien—see what that says? It’s not an abandoned vehicle; it’s a lien sale, which is different.

Notification is Required
What are the links to do this? Notice of an abandoned vehicle—those are the notices you have to send out. Disposition of derelict vehicle. Apply for a title and tag for an abandoned vehicle after a court order.

Court Order is a Must
What does that tell you? That tells you if you want to get a title for an abandoned vehicle, you can only do it after you get a court order. So why bother with all this? Why not just do a court order title (which you see us talk about quite a bit)? Because once you declare it abandoned according to the abandoned motor vehicle act described here, you have to go through a process of all these notifications and public sales, and you’re probably not going to end up keeping the vehicle.

Don’t Jump In Without Knowing the Risks
Before you jump instinctively to saying “abandoned vehicle, I’m going to file for it,” you need to be very careful. If you start using some of these forms—for example, “Notice of an Abandoned Vehicle”—what’s going to happen is you may block yourself from ever getting a title because you’re going to have to show that you used this form.

A “Notice of an Abandoned Vehicle Request for Information” requires the company removing or storing the vehicle to complete the towing and storage information, and you have to have a license for this. You can’t just make up storage in your driveway or in your business parking lot. You have to notify all the parties.

You Swear Under Penalty of Perjury
If you see the very clear instructions, it will tell you that you have to do this under penalty of perjury: “I swear and affirm that the vehicle described was unattended, removed at the request of a police officer or private property owner in compliance with the motor vehicle act.”

You Could Lose the Title
What’s going to happen is after this vehicle has been transferred (or is in the process of being transferred), the owner of the vehicle is going to get a letter from the DMV saying, “Hey, remember that car that you used to own? It’s being transferred to somebody else. Do you think that any of these facts are not true?” If they dispute or contest any of the facts, guess what’s going to happen? They’re going to revoke your title, and they might even take action against you for doing the process the wrong way.

Final Takeaway and Alternative Options
The takeaway from this is: don’t make “abandoned vehicle” your first idea for getting a title, even though you might have read about it on web forums, chat groups, or heard about it from classic car enthusiasts. Abandoned vehicle is not the process of getting a title—it’s a process of getting rid of a vehicle, which is probably not what you’re trying to do.

If you have more questions about how to work through all this, click the link below and we can tell you more about it. If you found this helpful, be sure to check out other articles on our site to see if there’s further information that could give you more insight into resolving your particular situation.

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How To Get A Title From The Lienholder Paid off or Charge off

What Is a Vehicle Lien Release?
What is a vehicle lien release and how do you get one? Well if you’ve paid off your car, paid off the loan, and you need to get the title for it, what happens is the lender, the bank you borrowed the money from, normally will take the title that they were holding. Because when you finance a car, they hold the title, they don’t give it to you because they’re the lien holder. They hold the title and when you pay it off, they take that title out of their drawer, they sign it paid, stamp it, and they mail it to you.

What If the Title Gets Lost?
But what if you lose that title? What if they never send it to you? What if it gets lost in the mail? Well, the problem is, even though you paid off that lien, the lien record will still be in the DMV database because the lien holder normally doesn’t remove it from the lien record. They just sign it, stamp it, and give it to you. So then what do you do? Well, the lien holder doesn’t have another title to give you. You can’t call them up and say “Hey, mail me another title.” They only have one title.

Getting a Lien Release Document
But what you can get is a lien release and on the screen you see an example of that from the state of Texas and it’s a form that the lien holder can look up. There’s a few other forms that go with it and they can fill it out, sign it, mail it to you. And then once you get this, you bring that to the DMV and they give you a title. Well, how do you get it? Well, a lot of times people will say “I’ll just call up the lien holder, I’ll pick up the phone, I’ll dial my bank and I’ll tell them I need a title or lien release.” And the lender is going to tell you one of two things. They’ll either tell you “Yeah we can’t do it because we already gave you one.” Or they might say “Yeah we’ll send it.” And then they never do. People have been waiting months and they never get it. Sometimes they’ll tell you to go to some website to order online, but the website doesn’t really have anything.

Why the Lenders Delay
The reason for it is because lenders, banks, financial institutions, car loan companies, they don’t have a lien release department. There’s not people just sitting around in an office somewhere waiting to do this work—to pull up this form, find it, look up the records, sign everything. They have to sign a bill of sale, they have to sign a letter of non-interest, they have to do a bunch of work. There’s nobody sitting around with that extra time to do it. So they’re going to just kind of give you the runaround and blow you off. They’re going to say “Get out of here.”

Prepare the Forms Yourself
So what do you do? The best way to do it, even though it doesn’t seem fair, is for you to prepare all the forms. This form you see on the screen, this release of lien, is one example. A letter of non-interest, declaration of facts, the three or four documents that they need. You prepare them all, print them on paper and mail them to the lien holder. What we have found over the years is that’s really the only way.

Making It Easy for the Lender
Any chance of getting that lien release, even though you should have it and we think you deserve it, the bank’s not going to do it unless you do all the work. And that’s how we do it. This is an example of a package that we send to lien holders. We prepare all the documents—the lien release, the letter of non-interest, declaration of facts. We also put an envelope in it for them to send it to the client with a stamp on it. That way the bank doesn’t have to do any work, all they have to do is sign it. Then we also prepare the documents that the client needs for a title because once you get the lien release, now you have to go to DMV to get a title or mail it in. We give you an envelope to mail it to the DMV too.

Recommended Process
So what we recommend doing is to do it the same way we do—prepare this package of documents, send one half to the lien holder, one half to the DMV, and you’ll get your title. It’s a little bit of a pain in the neck because you have to look up these forms, find out where they are. They’re all available, you know, from the DMV. You can go down to the DMV in person, ask them for these forms, take them, fill them in, mail them to the lien holder, put a return envelope with a stamp. We recommend that because here’s the thing—see this book of stamps? Not many people or companies have stamps laying around anymore because everything is online, bill pay, nobody has stamps. So if you send your document to the lender, they sign it, and now that person at the desk is looking around for a way to send it—they don’t have a stamp, they have to go to the mail room—they’re just going to throw it away. They don’t want to do any work. So do the work for them.

If You Didn’t Pay Off the Car
Now what if you didn’t pay off your car? What if it’s a charge off or a write-off? You can do the same thing. You can prepare that package of documents, mail it to the lender. Most times they’ll pull it up on their screen, yep it’s a charge off, and they sign it and mail it to you. There’s a backup with a magistrate title we’ve talked about in other videos, you can look that up. Either way, if you’re going to try to communicate with the lien holder, don’t torture yourself by trying to do it by phone or email or fax or text. Do it all in writing.

Final Tips and Reminders
If you do anything where they have to do any kind of work, that package of forms takes an hour or so to put together, an hour and a half sometimes, sometimes two hours. If you’re asking them to do it, there’s probably not going to be a person there that wants to drop everything else in their job and do this for you. So even though it’s a little extra work, if you want that lien release, put that together. Our website will give you instructions on how to do it. It’ll make it a little bit easier for you. But don’t leave it to chance and let that lien holder drag you around and basically give you the runaround and not give you what you need to get a title for your vehicle.

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Car Titles Not In The Owners Name With Bill Of Sale

What Is Curb Stoning?
Many of you have been a victim of this very common used car scam called curb stoning, although you may not have known what the name of it is. Sometimes you’ve heard it called title jumping or title skipping. What it entails is when a person is trying to flip a vehicle, what they’ll do is they’ll find a vehicle that they can buy for cheap—maybe at an auction, maybe from a private seller—and they’ll take that title and on the back it’ll be signed over to them. But what they won’t do is they won’t bring that title down to the DMV.

The DMV and Skip Titles
They won’t go to the DMV to get a new title in their name, pay the fees, pay the tax, and properly transfer it. They’ll just flip it and skip it over to you and sign the back. The problem with that is it voids the title. The only time you can reassign a title is if you’re a licensed dealer, and many times these curb stoners, as they’re called, will just flip it to you and now it’s your title problem. So you may have received a title that’s signed over to you improperly, and you didn’t know about it until you went to the DMV, which is even worse.

Expert Advice and Options
Why do they call it curb stoning? Well, curb stoning is called that because these are dealers that don’t have an official dealership license. They don’t have a repair shop license, they don’t have a business or a building—they just sell cars on the curb. That’s why they call it curb stoning. They’ll put an ad on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace or OfferUp. They’ll tell you to meet them at some intersection or in a parking lot, and they take your cash, they give you a title that’s not going to be usable, and now you’re on your own.

How the Scam Works
This article from Autotopian is a great description of it. You notice the picture says “buyer beware,” right? You really have to be careful of doing this because if you have that title, you could actually have the title revoked. You might even find out there are liens on it. You might find out it’s a salvage title. But either way, you’re going to have to jump through a whole bunch of hoops to get a title.

How To Protect Yourself
So avoid these cars like the plague. Don’t buy a skip title. If the seller is not the same person printed on the front, you have to check their ID—avoid that car because it’s going to be a title problem. Even if it’s really, really cheap, you could run into problems getting a new title with your name on it.

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Are Japanese Mini Truck Titles Now Legal?

Japanese Mini Trucks and Title Challenges
For years we’ve been talking about these Japanese mini trucks and how hard they are to get titles for in some states. Many states don’t consider them legitimate vehicles for titling and they consider them to be like a motorcycle or even an ineligible imported vehicle. Some states actually revoke titles for some of these Japanese mini trucks and other vehicles. The confusion came from the fact that there was a 25-year exemption for import documents for some vehicles, which is true. It did exempt them from importing requirements, but it didn’t mean that the states had to title them.

Push for Legalization and New Laws
Well, now after some pushback, a few states are trying to put through some laws to allow these on the road specifically because people love these vehicles. Also, the Nissan Skyline, the GTR—all these vehicles people want to put on the road—and some states are trying to pass laws. Now what we’ve been hearing is the federal government is stepping in to try to oppose these laws because they don’t want these vehicles on the road. They consider them unsafe. Whether that’s true or not is a whole different story. But some states want to have these cars on the road. They want to let people drive them. They want to let people use them in their everyday life. But if the state doesn’t allow you to register them, that’s a problem.

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How Does A Court Ordered Title Work?

Introduction to the Court-Ordered Title Process
So you’ve realized that the only or best solution to your vehicle title problem is to do a court-ordered title or a magistrate title, sometimes called a civil lien. How does that work? What do you get? What do you receive if we do the process for you? Well, to give a little insight, this question comes up a lot. When you place an order for a court-ordered title document package, what comes in the mail? We send it priority mail so you get it in two business days. You get this folder and it’s got a package of documents in three categories. You got left side, you got right side, and you have two sections on the right side—one with a paperclip, one loose. We’ll go into these here in a minute.

Confirmation and Quality Check Process
But the first thing that happens when you place your order is you will get a confirmation email that says your order has been received, it is in process. That happens within a few minutes. Usually about an hour or two later you’ll get another email that says “Hey, your documents are almost complete. Take a look at the screen to make sure that your name is spelled right, the VIN number is correct.” It’s just quality control to make sure that you look at everything one more time to make sure there’s no typos, make sure that the right address is on there. We want you to look at that because right after you verify that and authorize the printing, we will print this package of paperwork.

Shipping and Tracking Information
Then what’ll happen is usually an hour or two later you’ll get another email that says “Hey, here’s your tracking number.” It’ll be USPS priority mail, two business day shipping that says “Here’s your tracking number, you can track it going out to you.” We also track it. When we see that that package has arrived to you, we have one of our operations department staff contact you by phone. They will call you and say “Hey, did you get the package? Do you have any questions?”

What’s Inside the Package
It’s pretty straightforward. Basically what happens is each one of these documents—there’s a checklist—starts with a place for you to sign because most of it’s going to already be filled in. All these documents are not blank, they’re filled in with all your information. But the different agencies that need to get these—government agencies—have to have your signature. So we put little arrow stickers where you have to sign and we give you an envelope where to mail it to. We give you the envelope to mail it to the magistrate, to the DMV, to all the different places—maybe lien holders. We provide all that and there’s a checklist of when to send them and when to sign them.

Extra Steps for Convenience
For example, as a courtesy we normally will send out a prior owner request to have the prior owner sign over titles to make it easier so you don’t have to go to court. We also do the lien release request. All of the steps of that are located inside the package.

Vehicle History Report
In addition, we also will run a vehicle history and that vehicle history will have a notification to where if you want to get the official vehicle history from the government agency sent to you directly—because if for some reason it’s requested by the magistrate later—you’ll already have it. So we give you all those documents, all the dates and times, how to check it off.

Timeline Estimate
How long does it normally take? Well, the government agencies that process title documents—they’re not like FedEx or Amazon. When you buy something, they tell you “Here’s your delivery date, it’ll be here on this day.” Government agencies don’t have a timeline that way. They do it pretty much at their discretion. But for most clients we see about 12 to 14 business days is on average what it takes. Now that’s a big wide range to get to that average. Some people get it in a few days, some people get it in a few weeks. But for the most part it’s about 12 to 14 business days to get your title documents.

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