How Reliable is a Car Title Check?

cheap used Car Sometimes, the cars you see on offer on a used car lot can surprise you – they have cars that look perfect, that seem to have the perfect title, and that yet seem to be priced super low. Have you hit the jackpot? Have used car dealers somehow suddenly turned honest?

Well, you can tell yourself that there is something funny about that car if you run a quick car title check with Carfax or another vehicle history company, right? Surprise, surprise, it comes back clean. That's about all you're expected to do right – put in a car title check before you buy?

Well, the car title check isn't what it used to be. There are floods all over the country every summer, right? There are thousands of cars damaged in those floods. There are thousands of cars that get written off in accidents too. What do they do with those cars? Well, those are the cars you see priced so attractively on the used car lots.

They rebuild those cars nicely, take care of all evident signs of damage, and bring them to market with a clean title. None of this shows in the car title check.

But aren't these cars supposed to turn up in those title checks as flood- or salvage-titled? Well, if you have the means and if you know how, any kind of history can be erased. How, you ask? Simple – the criminals involved in this kind of business have a network of professional buyers and sellers in every state. Once a car changes hands over state borders three or four times, it loses its history.

You need to understand how the car title system works. The National Motor Vehicle Title Information System came into being about 30 years ago. What the system did was, it tried to link every DMV in every state together into one unified network. The system also forced the car insurance companies to come to report all kinds of damage claims.

The thinking was that the system was so well-supplied with the latest information that it would only take a week for news of any accident to a car or other kinds of damage, to be reported to the system. The belief was that no criminal would be able to clean out the title of a car in such a short period of time – transferring it from state to state.

The only problem is that there are many states in America where the laws regarding how information is to be shared are pretty lax. And criminals know which those states are. That's where they take their cars to clean out their titles. So how do you protect yourself?

Well, you could check your car out at Carfax or the National Insurance Crime Bureau to see anything shows up. That's not really foolproof; but it's the best you have now.