isn’t it a crime to hide your car from the finance companies and claim you found it later when you can afford your payments again? I know someone who is doing this, if I turn that person in can they be prosecuted for a stolen car?
ennaid, welcome to the Straight Dope. Legal questions are best suited to our IMHO forum, where I have moved this.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Does the have a sign out looking for posters with insane grudges, or something?
We have: I spent hours tracking a co-worker, and boy do I have the dirt! Can I rat him out?
We have: Some peasant kid got an education in MY neighborhood - can I extort money to keep my moth shut?
Now we get: I want to rat someone who is driving a better car than he deserves!
I’m going to pass on this one.
Who wants to start?
It’s definitely not auto theft. In some states, intentionally hindering repossession by creditors is a separate crime, usually a gross misdemeanor or a class E felony (i.e. relatively minor, but more serious than a traffic ticket or something). If there is any jail time attached, it’s on the order of days. However, in practice, if you’re just parking the thing down the block or keeping it in a garage it’s really difficult to prove intent. It’s also not something the local authorities are usually going to be all that interested in actually pursuing.
What can happen is if the repo guys can’t find the car, the creditor can eventually get a court order telling you to hand over the car. If you don’t, then you could start seeing some jail time for contempt. But, again, in practice this hardly ever happens. The repo guys are good at their job and by their nature most cars are going to be in a place they can be nabbed at some point. A few might fall between the cracks and “get away” but in the overall scheme of things it usually makes more sense for the lenders to just let the repo company do its thing instead of spending money trying to litigate every single one.
Why is it up to you to police the world? What stake do you have in all this? Hard times hit people in different ways. Be glad you have a roof over your head. (Or at least internet connection. You could be in the library for all I know.)
Stay tuned next week for:
Ennaid: The Auto Bounty Hunter
Just because your car is stolen doesn’t mean that you don’t have to still make payments. My car was stolen and I still had to pay. However I did put in an insurance claim but the car was recovered before the claim went through.
If the person did put in an insurance claim while hiding a car, that would be fraud.
You can do pretty much anything you like with a chattel. Paying the obligations related to it is an entirely separate matter. There are many, many people paying off underinsured cars that were totaled.
Depends on the state. In Illinois, a car can be listed as stolen merely if the purchaser is in arrears on a payment due, and in a routine traffic stop, the driver arrested for at least possession of a stolen car, even if registered in the driver’s name, and car impounded.
I am going to need a cite for that.
Regards,
Shodan
“The Discovery Channel: Where Prime Time is Still Classy”
Why? Why not just default on the payment, and let Mr. Repo Man come and help himself to the totaled wreck?
Credit Report?
The lender would have to write that debt off as non-collectable.
It requires that the financier of the car send written notice to he borrower to return the car for repossession, if in default, and can be reported stolen after ten days if unresponsive.
This is the opinion forum. No cites.
Regards.
You are making a factual assertion. One that, if true, should be easily verifiable by citation to an official source. I’d like to see you provide a link to that source.
Late payments are better than No payments. I think GreasyJack has got it right. The finance company isn’t going to waste time with the legal system unless as a last resort.
I used to be an underwriter, but never heard of any stories like that from the collection side of the place. Lots of repos and late fees, but no cops.
In some places, the cops do have lists of cars that the repo companies are looking for, but that’s just so when the owner reports them stolen they can say “yeahhhhhh, about that…” not so the cops can essentially participate in helping find them. Could that be what you’re thinking of?
I Googled “late payment = stolen car” and, as luck would have it I found this quote from an Illinios lawyer:
Late payments are generally a civil matter, not criminal.
“My opinion is my cite”? It’s taking longer than we thought. :rolleyes: