Here’s the deal: back in February or so, I donated my old car to a charity. As atow company took it away, I gave the title to the driver, signed it, but left blank the line in which one is supposed to fill in the recepient’s name, per the instructions from the charity. The car was towed away.
I returned the license plates to the DMV, per the law in Washington, DC, where I live, and later received a receipt from the DMV confirming the return of the plates. I also got the receipt from the charity about my donation. All was swell.
Yesterday, a guy from rural Maryland calls me up and asks if he can buy my car. Turns out that my donated car is now near some gas station, with its windows broken out and its tires flat. (I keep thinking of that poor lamp in the Ikea ad.) The guy says that he opened up the car and found an old registration certificate with my name on it, so he gave me a call.
I told him sorry, I gave up the car long ago, and had no idea who owned it now. But then I started thinking…
Today I did a Westlaw search on the VIN for the car, and the only name that pops up from the DMV databases is my own, leading me to question whether anyone actually bought the car after I donated it.
So now I’m wondering if the Maryland State Patrol is going to call me up one of these days and hassle me about still being the owner of a junked car that may or may not be on a public street (I’m not exactly clear on where the car is at the moment, other than “near a gas station.”)
Do I have any reason to worry here? Is there something I ought to do to protect myself further?
As long as you have the receipt from the charity saying you donated a car with VIN so-and-so, and the letter from the DMV that you’d surrendered the plates, you should be fine.
You may want to call the DMV or your state police and explain the situation that you’d donated the car, have a receipt for the donation, but the charity never re-titled the car and it’s now abandoned near that gas station. They will probably be more than happy to have an officer pay a visit to the charity and explain the requirements of re-titling cars donated to them.
Something rather like this happened to me a few years ago. I sold a car to a private party. Said private never registered the car and managed to either dislike it intensely and abandon it or left it in a bad place and it got stolen and then abandoned. (Poor car really deserved better!) Either way, it was abandoned under a freeway and the local cops three counties over ran the VIN, saw my name, called my local cops and an officer came for a visit. I had the paperwork handy, so I made a copy for the officer and he left with it, presumably to fax back to the other jurisdiction as I never heard about it since, except for the towing and storage bill I got a month later from the CHP. So, same deal, send them a copy of bill of sale and they stopped bothering me right off.
Ask the DC department of motor vehicles about signed but not filled-in titles. I believe that in Missouri, for instance, it’s a violation to not fill in the purchaser’s name at the time of sale. You might want to know if that presents a major problem, a minor problem, or no problem.
Exact same situation as gotpasswords scenario. I had different state policemen call me randomly, but always around 3:00 AM in the morning, for months, and I kept explaining I didn’t own the damned car anymore. If it was never titled, unless you are able to get yourself off the title, it will keep popping up. IIRC I had to go to the state police barracks and sign something.