Finding the owner of an abandoned car

February 17th, 2007 | Bob Brown | Property Issues

The beauty above was left in the church parking lot over New Years weekend, and by Sunday night we were already checking it out. Below are the general steps.

1. Cautiously make sure there is nobody around the vehicle and them make sure nobody is in the vehicle.
2. Note the license plate (it was missing), take pictures if possible and record the VIN.
3. You can find out general information about the vehicle in question  through CarFax.com and other sites. If someone is sending the VIN to me I ask that they use these sites to verify that they recorded the number correctly.
   
4. We are registered with PublicData.com for basic preliminary background checks and for tracking down vehicles such as this. You can see more information about that here: About PublicData.com.
5. By now you should know the registered owner of the vehicle. Online people finder sites like AnyWho.com or Yahoo People Search can help you locate the identified owner. Since we are a church with lots of members I also make use of the member database. It is very likely that the car belongs to someone connected with the church.
6. Document your research. Since you are using web pages the most you can  usually do is print the page, bookmarking doesn’t work for searches like this. I recommend using PDFCreator . This free program allows you to print any page directly to a PDF document, this is far more useful than just having a piece of paper.
7. Check with church staff to find out if anyone knows about the vehicle or the owner. There may be a good story behind it that you need to know about.
8. If you are unable to locate the owner, contact the police and report the vehicle. They will know if it was reported stolen and will provide you with further instructions. Make sure you have the information from your research available if needed.

The information about the vehicle shown above was passed along to the church administrator and it was quickly discovered that the owner had inquired about donating the vehicle in question. Because the vehicle did not meet the criteria for vehicle donations the owner removed it from the premises.