How to buy a car from a private seller

• Facebook Marketplace. The largest private-party market in most cities, and the one where the seller has a profile you can look at. That profile is worth thirty seconds: an account created last month, with no history and three cars listed, is telling you something.
• Craigslist. Anonymous by design, no seller history, and cheap to post. Still where a lot of genuine private cars are sold, and still where the oldest scams live.
• OfferUp. Sits between the two, with a rating system and in-app messaging that keeps a record of what was agreed.
• eBay Motors. An auction structure, which means bidding commitments and a payment flow the platform is involved in. Read the listing's terms before you bid, not after.
• The private-seller sections of the big listing sites. More structured listings, often with a history report attached, and often with dealers mixed in among the private sellers.

Two things travel with you across all of them. Nothing on any of these platforms verifies that the seller owns the car, and nothing prevents a listing from being deleted the moment a sale goes wrong. Treat a marketplace as a way to find cars, never as a way to vet them.

Curbstoning is the practice of selling cars for profit while posing as a private owner. It matters to you for a simple reason: the rules that apply to licensed dealers, meaning the disclosures, the record-keeping and the recourse, do not follow a car sold out of a parking lot by somebody pretending it is their own.

Arizona sets the line at six. A person may sell, or offer for sale, no more than six vehicles in twelve consecutive months without a used motor vehicle dealer license; the seventh makes them an unlicensed dealer. ADOT's Office of Inspector General explains the rule and takes reports at azdot.gov. Federally, the FTC's Used Car Rule requires dealers to post a Buyers Guide in the window of every used vehicle they offer, and treats a person as a dealer once they offer a sixth used vehicle in twelve months.

The tells are consistent:

• The title is not in their name, or is signed but with the buyer's section blank.
• The same phone number appears on other listings for other cars.
• They want to meet in a parking lot rather than at the car's home address.
• They are "selling it for a friend", a relative, or an estate.
• They know the car's features but nothing about owning it.

A title signed by an owner who is not the person selling it to you is called an open title, and it is the curbstoner's basic tool. It leaves you buying a car from somebody who never registered it and cannot legally transfer it.

A title brand is a permanent note on a vehicle's record that something serious happened to it. The ones you will meet:

• Salvage. An insurer declared the vehicle a total loss. In Arizona a salvage vehicle cannot be registered and driven in that state.
• Restored salvage. A salvage vehicle repaired and re-inspected. Arizona requires a Level III inspection before a restored salvage title is issued, which is a check that the vehicle and its parts are what the paperwork says, not a statement that the repair was good.
• Flood, hail and fire. Water damage in particular keeps surfacing for years afterwards, in the electronics rather than the bodywork.
• Lemon law / manufacturer buyback. Bought back by the manufacturer after repeated unresolved faults.

Title washing is the practice of moving a branded vehicle through states until the brand drops off the paperwork, leaving a clean-looking title on a car that was written off somewhere else. The federal system built to stop it is NMVTIS, at vehiclehistory.bja.ojp.gov, which pools title records across states. That is why a report drawn from it is worth more than the piece of paper in the seller's hand.

A branded car is not automatically a bad buy. It is a car whose price should reflect the brand, whose repair history you should be able to see, and which almost nobody should buy without an inspection.

Do this in the daylight, before anything else, and do it every time.

• Find the VIN on the car. Through the base of the windshield on the driver's side, and on the sticker inside the driver's door jamb. They should match each other.
• Match it to the title. Character for character. A mismatch, or a plate or sticker that looks disturbed, ends the viewing.
• Match the title to the seller. The name on the title and the name on their photo ID should be the same name. If it is not, you are not buying from the owner.
• Check for a lien. If a lender is recorded on the title, the loan has to be paid off and the lien released as part of the sale. The clean way is to complete the transaction at the lender's branch.

Arizona holds most titles electronically, so a private seller may legitimately have no paper title in their hand. In that case they can show you the record in their AZ MVD Now account, and they can request a paper title if the sale needs one. "I've lost it, I'll send it on" is not a version of this.

• Daylight, and somewhere public. A bank parking lot works twice over, because it is where the money will change hands later. Some police departments provide a monitored exchange area, and your local department's website will say whether yours does.
• Take somebody with you. A second set of eyes on the car, and a second person present for the transaction.
• Tell someone where you are going, and share the listing with them.
• Agree the test drive in advance. Who drives, where, and for how long. A seller who wants to keep your keys or your phone while you drive is proposing something you did not agree to.
• Do not bring cash to a first viewing. It changes the dynamic of every conversation that follows, including the one where you decide to leave.

There is a version of this that applies to the car's address, too. A seller who will not let you see the car at the home it is kept at, in a sale where everything else is normal, is worth a second thought.

This is the step the whole sequence is built around. Once you pay a private seller, the car is yours in the condition it is in: there is no warranty behind it, no Buyers Guide on the glass, and no returning it on Monday.

So the neutral opinion has to arrive before the money does. An independent inspection is somebody with no stake in the sale going to the car, working through it, driving it and writing down what they found, which is a different exercise from the seller's mechanic confirming that the car the seller owns is fine.

Ask on the first phone call, not after you have negotiated. Most honest sellers say yes without much thought, because they have nothing to lose and a sale to make. A seller who refuses has given you information that cost you nothing, and the right response is to thank them and go and look at another car.

The safe shape. Meet at a bank branch during business hours, ideally the seller's if their title is held there or their loan is with them. Have the signed title in front of you. Pay with a cashier's check drawn at that counter, or with a transfer between accounts the teller can witness. Both of you leave with a record, and the bank can verify the instrument on the spot.

The refusals. Anything that moves value where a bank cannot reverse it or trace it: gift cards, cryptocurrency, a wire to an account you cannot verify, a payment app to a stranger, or an escrow service the seller introduces to you. Fake escrow sites are a standard vehicle-sale fraud, and they look exactly like real ones.

Cashier's checks cut both ways. A seller is right to be wary of one handed to them at their kitchen table, because forgeries exist. Drawing it in the branch, in front of them, removes the problem for both of you.

Pay for the car, not for the story. A deposit to hold a car you have not seen, a shipping fee for a car in another state, or a payment to a "third-party agent" are all the same fraud in different clothes. If the seller cannot meet you and the car cannot be seen, there is no car.

A bill of sale should record, at a minimum:

• The full names and addresses of the buyer and the seller.
• The year, make, model and VIN of the vehicle.
• The sale price and the date of the sale.
• The odometer reading at the time of sale.
• That the vehicle is sold as-is, unless you have genuinely agreed something else in writing.
• Both signatures, and a copy for each of you.

Arizona publishes a Title Transfer Bill of Sale, form 38-1306, at apps.azdot.gov. MVD accepts it in place of a signed title for a vehicle already titled in Arizona, which is exactly the situation most private buyers here are in. Fill it in at the sale rather than afterwards, while both of you are present and the odometer is in front of you.

Your side. Arizona gives you 15 days from the date of purchase to apply for a new certificate of title. You will need a completed Title and Registration Application (form 96-0236), the signed title or an accepted bill of sale, a lien release if one was recorded, and the fees. Arizona MVD sets all of this out at azdot.gov, and much of it can be done through an AZ MVD Now account rather than in person.

The registration does not come with the car. It stops being valid at the sale, and the plates stay with the seller. If you need to drive the car before the registration is complete, MVD sells a Restricted Use 3-Day Permit for that gap.

Emissions first, if you are in the Tucson area. Most vehicles registered in the Tucson and Phoenix areas need an emissions test, with exemptions that include the newest model years and electric vehicles. Test before you register, not after.

The seller's side. They have their own deadline: a sold notice to MVD within 10 days of the sale, which releases them from responsibility for what happens to the car afterwards. It is in their interest, and it is worth reminding them at the point of sale, because an unsubmitted sold notice is how a previous owner ends up with your parking tickets.

Every deadline, form number and fee in this section is on the ADOT pages listed in the sources below. Check them before you rely on them: fees change, and the official page is always the current one.