Ok, so you need a clean car to do anonymous things in. You don't need security cameras and PI's tracking you by your car. You value your privacy. This is a proposed method to legally (mostly) obtain a totally clean and untraceable (to you) car. Please point out the holes in the plan so they may be corrected! Plan costs approximately $15,000 that we will assume you also got from a clean method. (For this, I'm in favor of breaking $100 bills from your bank at different gas stations around town by buying a pack of gum. Will take a while to accomplish, but if privacy is paramount then it is worth the time.)
Thanks!
First, go to a mall. Find a group of teenagers. Teenagers should match your outward gender appearance to decrease public suspicion. Ask the teenagers if they want to make $1000. They will presumably say, “yes.” Say, “OK, let’s go to Best Buy.”
Once you get to Best Buy give them instructions to go inside and buy a Chromebook. Give them $500. When they come back out trade them the Chromebook for $1000. Tell them to keep the change.
Take your new Chromebook and go to local community colleges until you find one with open access visitor Wifi that you can access from your car. Hit up craigslist and find a car from a private seller for about $5,000 in a city at least 100 miles away and preferably in another state.
Head down to the place in your chosen town where day-laborers hang out. Hire one who has a cell phone. Tell them to arrange to buy the car you found with a public meet up for later that day. You are going to give them the money and you are going to give them $7,500 when they bring the car back with the title. Drop the day-laborer a few blocks away from the arranged meet. Tell them to haggle but accept the $5000 if the seller won’t budge. Tell them to bring the car to a Walmart parking lot. Park your car in another large parking lot a few blocks away. Walk to the Walmart.
When they show up with the car, keys, and the title give them the $7,500. Tell them to keep the change. Take the laptop, wipe it down, and run it over with the car a few times. Put on cotton gloves, pull the hard drive out and throw the rest of the laptop into a lake. Preferably the middle of a lake, but spillways, or long docks will be OK. Take the hard drive, beat it with a sledge hammer until you split the casing. Squirt lighter fluid in and light it up. Take it to a wooded area in the middle of the night, dig a hole at least 4 feet deep somewhere without grass. Toss the hard drive in. Soak the cotton gloves in lighter fluid and burn them in the bottom of the hole. Fill the hole back in.
Drive the car back to a place near your town. Find a major strip shopping center. The kind with a Home Depot, Grocery Store, Hobby Lobby, you get the idea. Lots of heavy traffic stores. Preferably with one or two open 24 hours. Park the car toward the middle-back of the lot, between the two biggest stores areas. Don’t park it near a cart return.
Walk a few blocks away and try to find a pay phone. If you can’t then go into a non-corporate gas station and ask to use the phone and phone book. Call a taxi. Have the taxi take you back to the Walmart in the other town. Give the cabby $1000. Tell them to keep the change. Walk the few blocks back to your car. Drive your car home.
You now have clean car. If it will be a while before you need the clean car you should make sure to move it every couple of days. Always walking up to it from a few blocks off in a relatively busy time and then leaving it in a busy parking lot.
This is actually for a modern game I'm running, but the thought experiment is more interesting than the game so I posted it in the off-topic on purpose.
Is there any particular reason you can't just, you know, go out in the country and look for a car for sale in somebody's driveway? Pay in cash, no security cameras nearby, and the seller doesn't even really have to know who you are.
RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32, RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32
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So you want me to hand a teenager $500 in cash, then expect them to go buy me something with it for the verbal promise of more money upon completion, when they could instead just walk away with the $500 I've just handed them so they don't have to do any work or trust my word?
And then you want me to do the same thing with a "day laborer", except this time I'm handing him enough cash for several months worth of rent and food and inviting him to leave my sight with it?
Are you serious?
EDIT: And that's before we even touch on the idea that they might not be total idiots and realize there might be something up with a guy paying fat stacks of cash for relatively trivial errands. Anyone with half a brain, upon being sent on the errand, would immediately contact the police. Unless, of course, they're really desperate for cash, in which case we're right back to "take what you give them up front and leave". And then possibly still call the police, just anonymously.
This plan is terrible.
Gotta admit my first thought was "this seems to be an awful lot of work for an electric car."
The car won't be registered to you. So if you get pulled over, get into an accident, or need to replace the liscense plates and asked for liscense and registration, its going to look stolen.
So you have a title in the name of the original owner?
What about license plates (registration)? Very few owners will leave the plates on a car, and it is generally considered a VERY BAD idea. Also, to cancel insurance in NY, you are required to hand in at least one plate.
What about insurance? In NY, operating a motor vehicle that has been uninsured for about a month or more (10 days even?) is a felony. In order to get plates, you are required to show proof of insurance.
What about inspection? Most owners won't scrape the sticker off, but you are technically required to have the car inspected within 10 days of getting plates.
The trouble I'm seeing with the plan is that you are going through all this trouble to have no physical/digital connection with this car, but if you get in it and turn the key, you are likely committing several crimes, serious ones if you use plates, stickers, etc that don't belong to you.
My general thoughts on getting an "unknown car".
Avoid anything new or expensive. These cars are MUCH more likely to have all manner of security measures, including "black box" type recorders.
Go down South, to the rural Midwest, or maybe New Hampshire. These states are much less likely to require all kinds of proof of this and that.
Go to the most rural, middle of nowhere spot you can, and buy some old pick-up with "farm" plates from 1982. There is a good chance that this vehicle has never existed on a computer. You might even be able to get a registration at some county level that is still paper.
Estate sale - buying a car from someone who is deceased, or perhaps even better about to be deceased is a way to add all kinds of gray areas to a sale.
Other options include salvage titles, "clips" (large chunks of a vehicle), kit cars, or various other ways to piece a working vehicle from various parts. I have also heard that with some dirt bikes and such, people are afraid to report them stolen, because anyone can wait a few months, then file a request for title, and end up the "legal" new owner.
In terms of registering the car, that is probably best done through some form of shell corporation.
The bottom line is that getting the physical car is very easy. The hard part is getting a car that you could get through a police checkpoint with.
Also, if the former owner doesn't want to keep paying for your insurance, they'll be turning their plates in.
Also, if the former owner doesn't want to keep paying for your insurance, they'll be turning their plates in.
How hard could it be to fake one of those temporary tags you get when you buy from a dealer? At least well enough to fool a casual observer.
Some more thoughts.
-Assuming the teens don't rob you as the above people suggest, you will probably end up all over their facebook page as they retweet the story of the weird dude who paid them $500 to walk into Best Buy. Probably complete with pictures, because, you know, smartphones.
-If anyone does happen to spot you sneaking into the woods in the middle of the night, with a can of lighter fluid, a shovel, and a bag full of laptop parts, you're not entirely unlikely to get pegged in their mind as a murderer trying to hide a body and have the cops called on you. Nobody will see someone going into the woods with a shovel at night and assume anything wholesome is happening.
(Also, digging a four foot deep hole in the woods, in the dark, with hand tools, will be a pain in the ass. F###ing roots, man. I used to work on a trail crew digging such holes, and even with light and help it is a long sweaty job. Alone and without light to work by, sunrise may catch you before you are done.)
Most of your actions in this scenario - start to finish - are such as will draw attention to you because of their strangeness and furthermore will likely cause any witnesses to your behavior, including but not limited to your desired helpers, to assume that you are a criminal.
I think a more practical approach is to avoid enlisting strangers to help you and simply rely on mundanity.
Proposed solution:
Part A.
Avoid the whole laptop crap. If you are determined to locate the vehicle on the Internet without leaving behind any personal data, then use a publicly accessible computer at a small-town library. My library has four such computers that are permanently logged on to a guest user profile, and each is used by maybe twenty or thirty people on any given day. Looking for cars for sale is not going to raise any flags, that's the sort of thing a regular person who doesn't own a computer might go to the library to do.
Part B.
Adopt a name out of the phone book. Go buy the car with cash yourself. If buying from owner, act normally, make small talk about the weather, whatever. The suggestion above to buy from an estate sale is a good one.
Part C.
Leave, and wait a while for anyone involved to forget most things about you before you use the car for anything sinister.
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I get that you're trying to keep yourself out of direct transactions by involving anonymous labor (teenagers, day laborers, etc) but you're creating additional loose ends. These are human beings who will immediately realize there is something weird going on. Do your business in cash, wearing generic clothes, and no one will remember you.
It's like how you can walk into a lot of buildings in broad daylight just by looking like you know where you're going, but you'll be noticed pretty quickly if you're trying to act like Solid Snake.
If you're worried about being on the security camera at Best Buy if the Chromebook is somehow traced, then keep it in the box for 30 days. Or 90 days. NO ONE outside the government keeps security footage going back forever when there hasn't been an incident. By then the footage will be taped over and a cash transaction at a big retail store will be a dead end.
Likewise, a charred and mangled Chromebook is unnecessary destruction. If your trail is traced back to the Chromebook, it doesn't matter because all you ever did with it it look up the car (which is how they found it in the first place.) If you're worried about the temptation of using it again, just drop in a 'recycle electronics' bin somewhere.
Likewise, massively overpaying for things with regular fixed prices (like giving a cabbie $1000) is suspicious. If I drove a cab and that happened, I'd 1) leave before you murdered me 2) Call the cops 3) Be thankful for the big tip. You gain NOTHING from doing this. You called a cab, they drove you, that's how it works. Pay the listed fair with a reasonable tip. Disappear into the thousands of customers before and after you. Don't stand out.
It looks like you want to reuse this car, which means the weakest link is accessing it without being noticed. What do you actually need the car for? When are you going to be using it? If you're mostly doing night jobs, you can steal cars, use them, then return them without the owners ever noticing something missing. No loose ends, no reported thefts, and anyone who is trying to match license plates on you is going to be confused by the fact you're using a number of different cars.
Or, since you have a stated budget of $15,000, I'll point out that will buy approximately 15 sort-of-reliable clunkers that can be purchased day-of your job, under a false name, then parked in the back of a long term parking lot, abandoned in a ditch, or whatever, without ever actually filing paperwork for the title and before they have a chance to fully break down.
Indeed, what Jiggy and Ross said. The original plan is horrid.
If by clean you mean legal to drive but with no attachments to you than no it isn't possible.
The BEST you can do is a false set of out of state temporary numbers... which might be enough to keep the cop from running your plate randomly.
As to buying it just buy it out of state (preferably a different state than your fake license numbers) from a private seller using cash while wearing a disguise (a nondescript one).
Nondescript disguise? You know, use a temporary hair dye to make your hair a different but normal looking color. Get color contacts to change your eye color. Wear a different hair style than normal. Buy very real looking fake glasses. Change your clothing to something poor class and different than something you would normally wear. If you are a boy then shave your face (if you normally have a beard) or get a beard. Also fake identifying marks such as beauty marks or tattoos are a good choice.
A note of caution: Fake face tattoos never work.
Pretty soon the cops cameras are all going to just read and run your plates as you drive by
When criminals need a car for a job, as I understand it they steal cars and then dump them when they are done, torched if they are afraid to leave evidence. Three conclusions you can draw from this:
Stealing a car is far easier than getting a car you could legally drive but is not tied to you.
When you do get a car for doing something, you do not hang on to it. Like, ever.
It works at least often enough to be worth it to them.
I know nothing about cars and especially not stealing them, but it seems to me that when you want to do something right, you should probably check how people who do that thing often do it.
Is the turtlewax and rags in the hole. Do the holes have flags, or do you provide clues or coordinates.
You want to make sure people remember your face? Give them too much money for too little in return.
For some reason, I've been thinking more about this. Your exact course of action really does depend on what you're planning to use the car FOR and how much you're willing to skirt the law in doing so.So I'm going to stop giving specific advice in that direction unless BigDTBone tells us what he's actually trying to accomplish. It could be anywhere between 'steal disposable cars' to 'create an elaborate fake identity to own your "untraceable" car'.
But now, some general commentary -
It's appealing to try to go unseen. But it's often easier to go unnoticed (To paraphrase Rodrick from the Liar's Blade series, 'Why sneak in and steal something in the dead of night when you can just talk them into giving it to you and thank you for the privilege?')
More importantly, sometimes it is impossible to go unseen.
Going unnoticed also allows better chances to talk your way out if something goes wrong - if you get caught following someone through a 'Authorized Personnel Only' door, you were confused or looking for a backroom. If you get caught trying to pick the same door in the dead of night, wearing a ski mask, you're just trespassing.
It isn't illegal to get a proxy buy a Chromebook for you - but it is weird as hell. If the authorities are contacted at this point, they probably won't arrest you, but they'll certainly be alert for your name and face in the near future. If the authorities instead trace your trail backward this far, the witness will remember more detail, because it stands out. Both of these are bad.
It doesn't matter if you haven't done anything illegal (or have plausible deniability of anything illegal) if it brings scrutiny.
But it also depends on what your baseline level of scrutiny is - is someone actively trying to tail you? Are you trying to preemptively stymie an eventual investigation that will have to work backwards from an obviously illegal thing? Or do your documents just have to resist casual inspection if you happen to get pulled over?