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" Ever buy a used car from an individual\u2013a stranger\u2013that you had never seen before? If it worked out, you were lucky. It doesn&amp;#039;t always. A woman called my law office with a problem. She had bought a used car from a gentleman who had advertised it online. They spoke on the phone and then he brought the car to a mutually agreed-upon place for her to inspect. She test drove it. Everything seemed fine and they agreed on a price. He handed her the keys and the title.  The transaction took place in Michigan but the title was from Wisconsin. He explained that the title was signed by the previous owner and that he was simply passing the title along to her. She could take it in to the Michigan Secretary of State&amp;#039;s office and get the car titled to her. This process is called title-skipping and although it is a common practice, it is illegal in most states. Be that as it may, she took the keys and the title and they parted ways. When she took the title to the Secretary of State&amp;#039;s office they said there was something wrong with the way it was filled out. She would need to get the seller to fix it.  Who does she call?    She called the man who sold her the car and, this going the way you&amp;#039;d expect, he would not answer his phone. She emailed him and he ignored her. He removed the ad from the internet. She also did not know where he lived since they had met somewhere else. She did not even know his full name. So, she did some research to find the woman whose name was on the title. After poking around a bit and making some phone calls, she discovered that the woman whose name was on the title was dead. Deceased. No more. When she called my office she had a title to a car, purportedly signed by a now-dead person, and the car. But she could not title or register it in Michigan. My advice to her? Call a Wisconsin attorney and see if it is even economically feasible to have a representative of the woman&amp;#039;s estate fix the title. And that is assuming that the sale to the Michigan woman was on the up-and-up. What if the people in Wisconsin say the car was stolen? I have no idea how the story turned out but this is the example I like to point to when people tell me they are comfortable buying and selling cars with skipped titles. &amp;quot;A&amp;quot; sells a car to &amp;quot;B&amp;quot; but B does not retitle it. He simply hands the title\u2013signed by A\u2013to C and tells C to retitle it (or sell it to D!) When C or D has a problem, they want to complain to the person who sold them the car but that person is not the one whose name is on the title. And what if they need the person on the title to fix something?    I mentioned earlier that title-skipping is illegal in most states. The primary reason that people skip titles is so they can avoid paying taxes on the sale. Our title skipper in the above scenario\u2013&amp;quot;B&amp;quot;\u2013would not appear in the chain of title and would never pay any sales tax to the state. Many people also skip titles because they are not licensed to sell cars and they are selling too many. In Michigan, you can only sell four cars a year legally without a dealer&amp;#039;s license. That number may vary from state to state but most states will require you to be licensed at some point if you buy and sell too many cars in a given year. Many people break this law but, since I am an attorney, I feel the need to simply point it out to you. I advise all my clients to take the seller to the Secretary of State&amp;#039;s office and transfer the title the same day you buy the car. It&amp;#039;s even what the Secretary of State in Michigan recommends you do. If the seller will not do that with you, you may want to rethink the deal. The price might be right but you cannot predict the problems you may have later. Otherwise, you might find yourself somewhere down the road with a car which cannot be retitled until you do some detective work. And possibly trying to track down dead people in other states.  Steve Lehto is a writer and attorney from Michigan. He specializes in Lemon Law and frequently writes about cars and the law. His most recent books include Preston Tucker and His Battle to Build the Car of Tomorrow, and Dodge Daytona and Plymouth Superbird: Design, Development, Production and Competition. He also has a podcast where he talks about these things.      "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a29831/beware-of-title-skippers/>