Advice on ‘74 Duster

diymirage said
its called title jumping and best i know its illegal in the US (of course commiefornia is a backward place anyway, so it could be perfectly legal there, of they could have a 5 year sentence on it, who knows)
my point is, be cautious, if he is willing to do illegal things to the title to sell this car, i would trust his word

ledman said
I appreciate your concern thank you
As far as I know it’s not technically illegal in California. I’ve bought a car from another person who still had the title in the previous owners name from Arizona and he gave me a bill of sale and the California dmv was ok with it. They just did what they called a double transfer and only made me pay my portion of the fees as the car was registered in Arizona still.
Car flippers do this so they don’t have to pay the registration and transfer fees because once they pay it they don’t get any credit back in California if they sell the car right away. In Nevada, you get a credit for the balance of your registration towards your next vehicle when you sell a car or trade one in.
BUT, he now says he has the clean California title in his name so we should be good.

He didn’t know allot about this car, he learned everything he knows now about it from me, via help from FABO members and the internet. He really didn’t know what he had, he thought he had a real H code 340 the way he advertised the car but the 360 underhood badging was a dead give away something didn’t jive,along with the fender tag and vin number. He was shocked it was originally a 6 cyl car.

It's illegal in California too.

Dealers have different rules they can work from, so if a person has a dealer's license they can avoid some of the title transfer stuff for a period of time. But for a private party it's illegal just like everywhere else. If someone is actually flipping cars as a business they legally need to have a dealer's license (at least in CA), and if they sell more than a couple cars a year they can be fined for not having one. Which is another reason to skip the title, if they never put their name on the title then they didn't own it and sell it, so it can't be tracked to them or count against the number of car sales they have in a year. So doing that keeps them under the DMV's radar for a dealer's license, and possible also allows them to skip the income taxes if they're really shady.

Of course, the problem is proving that it happened. If the current "owner" hands you a title with a previous owner's name and signature with an open buyer's info, date, and signature line there's no paperwork to show the current guy actually owned it. From the title it just looks like you bought it from the last owner that held the title. Now, if anything happened along the way to leave a paper trail you could have issues. But typically what "issues" means is back registration to the original sale date from the last owner of record, not criminal charges or anything. I suppose depending on how things happened fraud charges would be possible, but hard to prove in court. But even the back registration could be a big chunk of money if the last owner of record sold the car years ago. Although depending on the car, the person at the window, the sale price etc sometimes the DMV will waive back registration. I've had it happen before when I bought a car from a seller that represented the car as being "out of the system", only to find when I showed up with the bill of sale at the DMV that the car was NOT out of the system and had significant back registration. In my case the car was a a project, ie, not running and driving, and worth less than the back registration. The DMV clerk took pity on me, mostly because the car wasn't currently operable (that's a big part of it) and I was willing to sign a statement of facts saying the car hadn't been operated on the road. So they waved the fees. But that's definitely not always how it goes.