Four years ago, I sold a broken motorcycle to a young fella looking for his first bike. Somehow, I made a huge mistake by not removing the license plate from the bike. I’ve started receiving a stack of traffic tickets for a vehicle I haven’t owned in years and went through a huge headache of fighting Chicago and Illinois about them. I won, but the guys who have been selling my motorcycle are about to have a really bad day.
Buying and selling vehicles private party is already a massive thorn in the backside. People like to waste your time, insult you, or even threaten you over the pile of junk you’re just trying to offload for $900. Yet, we still do it because it’s not like a dealership is going to give you a decent price for your rustbucket.
Four years ago, I accidentally committed the worst mistake you could make in a private party transaction. In many parts of the United States, you should remove the license plates from a vehicle you sell. If you don’t and the person who bought your vehicle is a jerk, your world will get turned upside down. They’ll rack up tickets, but the sucker will be you as that’s where the tickets will go. That’s what happened to me over a broken 1980 Honda Gold Wing GL1100.
This Poor Motorcycle
One of my first motorcycles was that 1980 Honda Gold Wing. I bought it in 2018 from a man serving in our armed forces. He needed the money to pay for vehicle repairs and I wanted something bigger than the 2005 Honda Rebel 250 I spent a month riding. The owner lovingly restored the motorcycle and gave it fantastic metallic blue paint and a marvelous comfortable saddle. He also tossed out the Honda’s four individual carburetors for a single Weber unit meant for an air-cooled Volkswagen Beetle. My Honda didn’t have a working tachometer, ran richer than Elon Musk, and had no turn signals, but it was a great ride.
It remained a great ride for over a year. Then, toward the end of summer 2019, the motorcycle delivered a double whammy. The hearty flat-four engine blew its right side head gasket. Then the starter clutch started dying. I studied the repair process over that winter and decided that repairing my $900 steed wasn’t worth it. Even if I fixed the gasket and starter clutch issue, I still had to fix a sticking brake, rewire the turn indicators, and figure out why the carb was way out of tune.
I don’t really do this car and motorcycle thing to make money, but because it’s something I love. If I’m selling something, it’s because I no longer want the vehicle. Thus, I give my vehicles a price that I think is fair. I’m not going to ask you to pay $3,000 for something I know isn’t worth that. I listed my Gold Wing for a touch over $1,000 and was immediately inundated with hundreds of messages.
As usual with Facebook Marketplace, the vast majority of messages were lowballers, people who didn’t read the listing, and people who claimed to have interest just to never respond to messages. I’m pretty good at cutting through the nonsense and found a message from a prospective buyer asking me about how quickly the motorcycle burned through coolant.
He seemed satisfied enough that the motorcycle had repairable issues, but still ran and rode. The buyer came by after the Memorial Day weekend, paid me $1,000, and off he went. According to the buyer, the motorcycle was going to be given to a friend as their first bike. A chunky, temperamental Honda tourer isn’t the ideal beginner bike in my eye, but it’s not my money.
Some number of days after the transaction ended I realized that I couldn’t find the plate to the Honda. Did I lose the plate? Did I leave it on the bike? The buyer didn’t respond to my messages and I had no other way of contacting them or finding them. If this hasn’t happened to you, the big risk here is that the buyer can break a bunch of traffic laws with the vehicle you sold them and you will be the person on the hook for it, not them.
Thankfully, Illinois has safeguards for stuff like this. At the bottom of every Illinois title is a white slip that you fill out and then send in, confirming that you sold your vehicle. It’s also wise to fill out a bill of sale, which I did at the time of the sale.
I was frustrated that there was almost certainly going to be tickets coming in the mail, but they never came. Days turned into months and months turned into years. I never received anything from the state or any city, so it seemed that the buyer did the right thing and didn’t ride the motorcycle with my license plate. Either that, or the state must have received the white slip, right?
The Nightmare
I’ve now owned 60 or so vehicles in my life and all of the ones I no longer have were sold on Facebook. I regularly search Facebook for my old vehicles to see what’s up with them. I’m always curious to see if the person I sold my vehicle to actually fixed it or somehow made it worse.
Back in April, I found my old Honda by accident. At first, I was excited to see that my old Honda was running. I then laughed at the fact that while the starter and head gasket issues were fixed, many more issues cropped up over the four years the bike was no longer in my care.
Then I was shocked. The photos showed the old Honda still wearing my old license plate. I finally had the answer to the question of what happened to my plate. The subsequent owners didn’t even make an effort to hide the fact that the plate expired in 2019, right around the time the head gasket blew. My heart sank.
I did some digging and found out that my poor motorcycle was subject to a lot of title jumping, or the act of selling a vehicle more than once without titling it first. Title jumping is illegal in Illinois. The state doesn’t want you to sell a vehicle to one person and for that person to sell it to another person without the state getting its tax money first.
I have been able to follow the chain of ownership of my Honda to a certain extent. I know the guy who bought it from me gave it to another guy. Neither of the guys were the guy who was selling it in April. Of course, he then sold it to someone else. That’s at least four people who were legally required to title the motorcycle in their name before selling it again. And none of these guys ever bothered to remove the license plate from the bike.
Weirdly, I still wasn’t getting tickets in the mail, so I took screenshots, built up an ownership trail, and kept monitoring the situation. Sure enough, I started getting tickets in May. It still blows my mind that things were great for four whole years until some jerk bought the bike and started causing trouble in Chicago with a motorcycle that was still titled in my name. First, the guy got a speeding warning, then he got two speeding tickets, a street cleaning parking ticket, and an expired plate ticket. Then he blasted down the Interstate, racking up unpaid toll violations.
The City of Chicago Department of Finance started sending me letters. At first I was frustrated, thinking that I must have triggered one of the city’s infamously shady red light cameras. Then I remembered that I haven’t driven one of my own vehicles into Chicago in about a year. Even weirder was the fact that the letters were addressed to my old name, which hadn’t been my legal name for five years.
By my last count, the guy with my old Honda racked up over $200 in tickets owed to Chicago and perhaps a couple of hundred more owed to the Illinois Tollway. Paying these tickets isn’t a real option as the jerk with your plates will almost certainly keep on racking up tickets. Technically, you’re on the hook for their bad behavior, so of course they’re going to continue making your life hell.
You also cannot just ignore these tickets. Chicago will happily boot any vehicle that’s in your name. They’ll boot any car registered in your name, not just the one that has tickets piling up. And the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority has the state-granted power to suck you dry.
Now, I don’t like getting into the business of others, so I don’t care if you’re breaking the law if you’re not hurting someone. But this crosses the line.
Beating The Tickets
Thankfully, both Chicago and the Illinois Tollway have processes for situations like this, but as I can now tell you, it’s not easy or fun. It was even worse for me because it’s been years since I sold this vehicle. I could not find the bill of sale and it seems to be clear that Illinois either didn’t receive my white slip or it didn’t process it. This is a known problem with the Illinois Secretary of State and you should never bet on the state properly processing the little white slip.
Alright, so the white slip was sent into the ether and I don’t have a bill of sale. How do I prove that I haven’t owned this motorcycle in years?
First, I initiated the dispute process with Chicago. My lawyer and wife Sheryl recommends doing the dispute in person to have a greater chance at success. It’s easier to argue your case to an Administrative Law Judge’s face rather than through the Internet. So, that’s what we did. Now, Chicago is vague about how this process works. The city will give you “hearing options” which consist of a week in which you can visit the city and get a hearing. Now, the wording of this is poor. It makes you think that you have to choose a day in that week for your hearing, but the website doesn’t give you an option to do that. In reality, you just show up to a hearing facility during that week block.
Since I didn’t have the bill of sale anymore, I built up my case on other documents. I archived the timestamped conversation I had with the buyer. Thankfully, the buyer indicated in his messages that he enjoyed the motorcycle after buying it. I also had screenshots of the vehicle’s latest for sale ad, which clearly shows my old license plate and someone who isn’t me selling it. The listing even showed someone who wasn’t me riding it. I also reported the license plate as missing to my local police department. I even had an insurance document showing that I removed the vehicle from my policy in early 2020.
I proudly walked into one Chicago’s hearing facilities and that alone gave me a migraine. You have to visit clerk before you’re approved to go into a hearing room. The clerk I got on my hearing day didn’t seem to know what she was doing. I gave her the license plate number and she somehow pulled up a Ford F-150 owned by someone named Gonzales. Well, it’s a Honda and I’m not Gonzales. She put the plate in again and somehow produced a dozen tickets for various vehicles, none of them owned by me. From my observation, the issue was that she was entering in the plate as a passenger vehicle plate. She even showed amazement that my license plate was so short. I kept on telling her to enter the plate number as a motorcycle plate, but she dismissed that, assuming that I didn’t know what I was talking about.
Somehow, this continued for a whole 30 minutes or longer. Eventually, she figured out that I knew what I was talking about and I finally got a hearing room. Sadly, the proof I brought wasn’t enough. As I was told by a person representing the City of Chicago, if it is true that my title was jumped four times, both the city and the state will want to go after those four people.
Thus, simply reporting it to the local police wasn’t enough. The city wanted me to report it to the Secretary Of State Police. Further, the city also wanted me to go to a DMV facility to revoke the license plate. Apparently, the plate being four years expired isn’t enough.
Admittedly, I knew these were options, but I didn’t want to take them at first. As I said before, title jumping is illegal and both Chicago and the state seem to want heads to roll over this. I just want the tickets gone, I don’t necessarily want something bad to happen to these guys. But both the city and the state gave me no choice, so I revoked the plates and reported the situation to the Secretary Of State Police.
Bad News For An Old Honda
I then returned to Chicago this week, brought in receipts for everything, and the Administrative Law Judge dropped all of the tickets. In theory, my nightmare is over with Chicago. Next, I take the ruling I got from Chicago and give it to the state, hopefully releasing me from the toll violations.
However, this is not where the story will end. Revoking my old license plate and reporting it to the Secretary Of State Police puts a target on the motorcycle. The next time cops find the bike it’s not just getting a ticket, but impounded. The bike is worth about $900 and it’ll cost nearly that to get it out of the impound. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the bike in a police auction later on down the road.
Worse is likely coming for the guys involved. The state seems to be quite serious about investigating the title jumping and they have at least two names and locations from me to help facilitate it. I’ve been told that the consequences of title jumping range from fines to as hard as jail time depending on how bad things are. One thing’s for sure, if the state actually follows through with this, the subsequent owners of my old Honda are in for a bad time. Amazingly, it’s still titled in my name as of publishing.
What’s next for me? As I noted earlier, I take the decision from Chicago and give it to Illinois, hopefully absolving me of this nightmare. However, Sheryl is quick to point out that the governments of Chicago and Illinois are pretty incompetent, so I shouldn’t be surprised if another ticket comes in and I have to do this song and dance all over again.
One thing’s for sure. If you live in a place where plates do not follow the car, remove them before you sell the vehicle. If you screw everything else up in your sale, always remove the plate. If you don’t, you’ll be following my footsteps.
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No sympathy for the buyers at all. None.
There are responsible steps to follow when you buy a vehicle. They are not optional. Even if the vehicle has plates on it, you know they’re not yours, and you know you’re skipping unskippable steps. Sorry, not sorry. You can’t do that.
I sold a 1992 Honda Del Sol autocross project car to a guy at night, and he asked if he could put my plates in the mailbox the next day. I should have said no but let it drive off. Next I know I have the county sheriff calling and stopping by since the guy robbed a supermarket with my old car and plates. Always keep the tags. lesson learned.
I once had this happen with a trade-in at a dealer. The transaction was all above-board, and one of the documents that you get in the stack of paperwork in California is a proof of ownership transfer (with the dealership being shown as the new owner).
The trouble was, after they took possession of my trade-in, the dealer just parked it on a side street for a couple of weeks, where it racked-up some parking tickets that automatically went to me because the DMV hadn’t received the paperwork yet.
At the bottom of each ticket is a clause that says, “If you are no longer the owner of this vehicle, just send us a copy of the ownership transfer document.”. I did so, and as far as the city & state were concerned, I was off the hook. Presumably they forwarded the accumulated fines to the dealer, being the newly-registered owner.
I’ve bought and sold a lot of cars and motorcycles on Ebay, Craigslist, and Marketplace.
Here’s what I’ve learned from diligent sellers about how to do it right/avoid personal liability/issues. I’ve hated it every time a seller has required one or more of these things, and I also acknowledge these sellers are 100% correct.
You should require a signed bill of sale with all the regular details, a liability waiver, and the following agreements to be completed before possession transfers:
It is a giant pain. It requires legwork and foresight to get everything lined up. Many buyers, including myself, are impulsive and want to buy and take possession then work out the details. Many buyers will not buy the car with these stipulations. But I’ve had several sellers require these for various sales and it is honestly the best for all parties. For the seller it ensures you don’t get stuck with liability or the issues detailed in the piece above. For the buyer it ensures that the vehicle’s title is good and that you can get it insured and on the road. I anticipate complaints from those buying parts cars, projects, out of state transactions, etc. I appreciate the sentiments. I’ll hear ’em, and I don’t disagree that money may be lost or wasted, and potential buyers will definitely be lost, but at the end of the day I am now one of those prickly people who require these things.
In San Francisco 2007 I sold my girlfriends 1997 Civic to somebody in San Jose. In California you sell the car with the old plates to the new owner.
For weeks after the sale I saw our old car street parked two blocks down from us. Im assuming he drove up in his old car and simply street parked the new car, I dont think there was malicious intent, just needed someone to help him out. Street parking in San Francisco will rake you up 50 tickets per week easily; there are odd and even days, street cleaning and all kinds of things to make you hate your car. Sure enough mail from SF Dept of parking enforcement kept coming. I soon took all the copies of paperwork and photos taken during the sale such as his drivers license and transfer of ownership and release of liability, and of course the bill of sale. He ended up having to pay several hundred dollars for all the tickets and we ended up paying nothing but had to go through the DMV to have the tickets received after date of sale removed.
I’m just imagining the look on the guy’s face as he’s reading this article, knowing he can never ride his (your, LOL) bike again.
Good on you for going through all the trouble of getting it sorted. I haven’t sold a vehicle to another person for years, but if I had to, I’d record it and show the other person signing the docs.
When I lived in Atlanta, I sold a Saab 9-3 convertible to a young guy. Signed over the title, and I DID remove my tags. About a year later, I got a message from the guy asking if I wanted to buy it back. I had been little nostalgic about the car, so I jumped on it, and bought it back for $1K less than I sold it.
That’s when it got weird. When we met to do the deal, I noticed the car had an expired Michigan license plate on it. Hmm. He admitted he had never registered the car, and had been driving it around for a year with “one of his old tags” on it, and no insurance. He then handed me back the title I had signed over to him a year earlier. As in, he had never even transferred ownership. Wow.
State of GA did not take any of this kindly, and forced me to pay a fine for the car being uninsured during that year. Since I could not completely prove someone else owned the car, they treated it like I owned it and had not had state required liability insurance on it. In retrospect, I’m relieved that he had not been in an accident and killed/hurt someone, there is a decent chance I may have had some exposure, since, officially, it was my car that entire time.
Should have just said it was off the road being repaired.
GA doesn’t care. You still have to keep insurance unless you actively go to the office to cancel the plates/registration.
I don’t know what the point is of the Report of Sale if some dumbass can still rack up parking tickets on my shitty old Volvo and leave me clueless until I get a letter from the city saying I’m having my debt sent to collections.
The report is so the state can proactively go after the buyer who fails to title it. In theory it provides you some protection, but let’s face the fact that the primary use is for the see state and a deterrent to open titles.
This happened to me once.
I sold my old Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec V before leaving the continental US to go back to school in Puerto Rico. The new owner put my old plate on an old work van, and proceeded to drive through seemingly every toll between Tampa, Orlando, and Miami.
Fortunately, I was able to retroactively report the plate as lost/stolen, and the fines were all dismissed.
In March 2018 I sold my 03 Altima that had a rebuilt Kentucky title in NC to a nice couple for $900. I got a bill of sale and gave him the title, 2 weeks later he had sold it to a woman who contacted me, for some reason she needed the title of the vehicle and paid me the fee to have one mailed to me from KY and to meet her to hand it over. She never did title it and on New Years Eve her boyfriend was arrested for a DUI and the car was impounded. NC State police sent me a letter with the charge and how to get it out of the yard. I let it go to action just to be rid of it.
When I sold a summer project car I had been working on, the buyer gave me tons of grief about not keeping the plates on. Sorry buddy, but they were classic plates I had to pay $25 more for, you’re not keeping them!
I wish CarFaxs were free, or a lot cheaper, so I could keep up with has happened to all of my summer cars I’ve sold on…
Along with removing your license plate(a) it would also be a great idea to remove your registration sticker. In New York state the sticker is barcoded and you will still get tickets even without a plate. I would take the inspection sticker off at the same time.
When I sell a vehicle I have the buyer fill out their portion of the title right there. Then I take a picture of it. Makes title jumping a lot harder and you have proof of the sale plus their information.
As someone who’s been on the hook for impound fees before, I have a bad feeling about this…
Can you legally force someone to sign the title when you sell a vehicle?
Backstory: I sold my minivan and signed the title over as the seller. Four years later someone tracked me down. It had been traded in to a car lot and resold. It was in an impound lot for a parking violation, and the police would only release it to the person on the signed title in the glovebox. None of the owners had signed the title. This person had possessions in the car they claimed to need, and they asked me to get it out of hock.
I refused, due to the time involved and potential liability for those impound and other fees.
Would I have been on the hook? Could I have claimed it as mine?
I didn’t want it, but am curious.
The new US interpretation of “Yes, Minister” just got another episode…
I had a similar situation when I sold my 1982 Buick Skylard (yes, spelling is intentional) to a dodgy, shady guy who was too happy to buy the car with cash in 1989. My father and I didn’t think much of it when I signed the title over to him and allowed him to drive with the numberplates still attached to the car.
A several months later, I received a very unsettling letter from US Immigration and Naturalization Service about “my” car being impounded for unlawful transportation of illegal aliens across the border. We regretted not demanding the bill of sales and contacting the DMV about the sale ourselves. Good thing, my car insurance agent typed up a letter, proving that I no longer owned the car since then.
INS hasn’t pursued any further on this matter, thankfully.
Unpopular Opinion: I feel bad for people getting in trouble for title jumping. Sometimes you buy a project, you don’t even work on it, and you need to bail. The law says that person should have titled it, but cmon. It’s just the tax man with their hands out, demanding more coin for something they didn’t contribute to.
I have sold a lot of vehicles that I flipped and jumped titles, and I don’t feel guilty about it. The government gives out basically unlimited military spending, free PPP loans to businesses during covid that never needed to be paid back, bails out banks responsible for causing a recession, yet they want to harass some gearheads trying to fix stuff up to make a quick buck?
Cmon…. the real crap thing is the guys who will probably get in trouble over this, didn’t do any harm or damage (not the one getting tickets, the other 3), and who knows, maybe the original buyer drove it once or twice then had other things come up in life. It never made sense to me why we need to pay taxes on vehicles WHEN THE TAXES WERE ALREADY PAID WHEN THE VEHICLE WAS NEW.
The government contributed by creating infrastructure to ship the parts to the factory, money to facilitate the exchange of goods and law to enforce property rights, all of which made that bike’s manufacture possible. I agree that the rich get unfair benefits from the system, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have to pay in.
As far as “the taxes being paid when new”, that’s like saying “I already paid ‘the taxes’ on my income, why do I have to pay again when purchasing something?”. There’s no rule that you can only be taxed once. The cost of running a government is what it is, even if you didn’t have to pay taxes on a title, the cost would just have to shift somewhere else, like income tax or sales tax. Look at states with no income tax, they just have a higher sales tax and property tax and so on.
Until they pay their fair share, I want to pay as little as possible. The income gap is widening larger and larger, and the government just wants more and more handouts and fees and forms. It’s dumb.
Yeah, the cost of “running the gov” is what it is, but maybe it should shift back to the ultra wealthy like it used to be during the best decades for the middle class:
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/16782.jpeg
Ah yes, the C’mon defense
Someone buying a second-hand car and having to pay a new set of taxes, is one of those ideas that’s clearly too American for my European brain to understand.
Although I suppose we do have an annual road tax, so the government gets paid whatever.
I don’t know where in Europe you are writing from, but where I am you have to pay tax to the regional government on a second hand vehicle if it is less than 10 years old. It is usually between 4 and 8% of the market value of the vehicle at the date of the sale. This “market value” is calculated using obscure and complicated factors, and is usually quite low (it is also the value insurers use as reference to pay out claims).
We don’t have that in the UK. Off the top of my head, the only thing I can think of where you’d pay taxes on a second sale* would be houses/land.
*as a private seller. Businesses might get taxed
We have those too.
At least in Michigan, you pay sales tax on the purchase price, so if you buy a junker to fix up, you pay junker priced taxes on it. Also first thing I ask when looking at something on Facebook MP….Does it have a clean and valid title in your name? If that comes back as any form of NO, end of conversation. Was buying a 4 wheeler earlier this year and had to explain to MANY sellers, that yes your 4 wheeler needs a valid title if it’s newer than 1991 and it is in fact ILLEGAL to sell it without a title. Please go to the SOS and get titles when you buy something, both for yourself but also for the person you purchased it from and for the person who will eventually buy it from you. Taxes suck, but so do title issues and theft.
I’m not anti-tax, but agree with you on title jumping or open titles. I’ve flipped several projects this way. Buy a car with a dead engine for a few hundred bucks. Previous owner signs title but doesn’t date it or write in buyer details. Swap engine and fix any other issues, then sell to new buyer and hand over that already signed title. There are risks involved along the way, but this is how things have happened in the cheap end of the auto world for decades.
Of course, it’s perfectly legal for a dealer to reassign a title, which means they don’t have to take in the paperwork, pay sales tax, or wait for the new title. But dealers don’t mess with cars like this.
Friend has a car that the plates were stolen off of 20 years ago. Recently, started getting tickets in the mail about going thru a toll plaza at the border. Shows me the pic in the violation, and I said “that’s a Kia Soul; you have a Ford Mustang”. He ignores it. Later,gets another one for the ticket plus penalties for not paying it. Turns out someone got a hold of that stolen plate and recently was using it to go through toll plazas. He had to work with two states DMVs plus get a copy of the police report that was filed decades ago to show that no, this is not his car/plate, and no, he isn’t paying this. They eventually quit sending him notices, but I know what a pain in the butt it was, so I can only imagine what you were dealing with!
Someone mentioned suing the subsequent owners.I’d (only half jokingly)add the receptionist to that list.What a willful moron
Bless you Mercedes, been there and done that. Sadly pulling the plate doesn’t always make it go away. I traded mom’s 04 Cavalier on a new Forte in 2018. Granted her old chevy still ran great, but the paint was gone and anytime you touched any interior part it instantly turned to dust. Sad, as the car only had 46k miles (you go GM quality!). LSS, (long story short) we traded it for her new Forte, I did pull the plates on the Chevy cadaver. 8 months after the fact she gets these calls from an impound lot in another state over storage fees. Needless to say after a few calls, many a people woke up with a brand new A hole the next day after I got the issue resolved! Pulling the plate will save you from cameras and parking tickets, but make damm damm sure the title was transferred. Rant over. BTW, Mercedes, you are one of my favorite contributors to Autopian. Small favor, when you review new RV’s, can you slide in a floor plan or two?