Believe it or not, there were nearly 1 million stolen vehicle reports last year. The issue is so common that it could happen to the most cautious person. If you’re unfortunately going through all of this, you’re not alone. Here we’ll share some immediate methods to find a stolen car without a tracker.

Not knowing the VIN? Try searching for the license plate.

Why do you need a VIN to find the stolen car?

VIN is a unique 17-digit identifier of your vehicle printed in places like the front of the engine block and driver-side doorpost. When your car is not around, you might find it from the following paperwork:

• Registration card
• Owner’s manual
• Service reports
• Insurance contract (check your email inbox)

You’ll need the VIN for identification in many scenarios during the recovering procedure. Besides, if the stolen car makes its way to the market, there’ll be traces online connected to the VIN. So you can track the stolen car by its VIN. With proper tools, it will give you a better chance to find the stolen vehicle.

1. Report the stolen car to the police

If your car’s stolen, you should call your local police department and file a stolen vehicle report as soon as possible. You might need to provide these details:

• VIN & license plate
• Make, model, and color of the vehicle
• Last-seen location

They have the expertise and resources to find stolen cars and will update you when they know more information. And make sure you get a copy of the police report and the case number because you will need them for an insurance claim. After that, just wait for the police to do their job.

2. Run a VIN Lookup to help find the stolen car

If you don’t want to sit and wait after filing the stolen car report, you can run a VIN lookup to collect more information like its recent sales details, accident records, and more. To do that, you can try the following search products.

BeenVerified

BeenVerified is a solid vehicle search engine that allows you to acquire immediate information about a vehicle by running a quick lookup by VIN or license plate number. With its access to multiple public data sources, it can retrieve details like recent sale listings, title records, theft & accident records, to help you search for the stolen car.

1. Go to BeenVerified.
2. Enter the VIN or license plate number, and click SEARCH.
   
3. Wait as BeenVerified runs the search and compiles a report.
4. On the report page, you’ll see a navigation bar on the left to help you easily access the section that you’re interested in. For example, the Sale Listings section.
   
5. Note that BeenVerified is a subscription-based service and you’ll need to purchase a membership plan to view the report.
   

What do we like about BeenVerified?
BeenVerified is an all-around search service. With one subscription, you can access its other search services like phone number, email address, and address lookups.

Bumper

Bumper is another professional vehicle search engine. As an Approved NMVTIS (National Motor Vehicle Title Information System) Data Provider, it can provide you with authentic and recent information about the stolen vehicle, like recent title records, accidents, and sale listings. All you need is a VIN.

1. Go to Bumper.
2. Enter the VIN or license plate number, and click SEARCH.
   
3. Wait for Bumper to scour through its database and then generate a report containing all the available records associated with the VIN.
   

EpicVIN

EpicVIN is also a reliable and trustworthy data provider supported by NMVTIS. The platform allows you to buy single reports, instead of ordering a subscription. Its report will include recent title records, sale listings, and accident records, all of which can help you find the stolen car.

1. Go to the EpicVIN search page.
2. Enter the VIN and click Check VIN.
   
3. Wait as EpicVIN finds the information related to the VIN. Then you’ll receive a report containing everything you need to know about the searched VIN, including but way beyond recent sale listings.
   

3. Search the license plate

If you currently don’t have access to the VIN, no worries. Because you can still find the information about a stolen car by searching its license plate. In fact, the license plate number of a car is linked to its VIN, which means it can also reveal information you need to know like recent sale listings, theft history, salvage and accident records, and more.

4. Check the parking violation database

Another way to find the stolen car is to check its parking violation reports. Sometimes the stolen car might be incorrectly parked somewhere and fined. Then you might find the tickets in the parking violation database online.

Go to your city’s Pay Parking Tickets page and enter your license plate. If there is a hit, contact the police to get the exact spot where the car was ticketed. Don’t go there by yourself, just let the police do the search.

A Redditor brings up that another possible method to gather location information using the VIN is to run a VIN lookup on CARFAX. In its report, you may find the maintenance records of the vehicle that contains which store it was serviced¹. That may be of some help although it’s hard to imagine a stolen car being put to maintenance.

Hopefully, this post can help you as you find the stolen car. Once the vehicle is recovered, notify the police and make sure the matter is resolved with your insurance company. We hope you don’t go through things like car theft ever.

1. r/cars [deleted user]. (2017, November 17). How to find a car by VIN. [Online forum post]. Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/7dh8xp/how_to_find_a_car_by_vin/ ↩︎