Can you find the owner of a personalised registration?

Many people who ask us for assistance have already got their perfect registration mark in mind and they wonder what we can do to locate it.
30/05/2019 Blog
Legalities of finding an owner of a plate

We always try to help our customers to the best of our abilities. However, when it comes to sourcing a specific registration mark, there are restrictions and limitations that you need to be aware of. To help you, we have written a guide which will explain what is involved.

There are two main things that you need to consider when looking to source a specific registration mark:

Firstly, all registrations issued by the Department for Transport follow specific formats. You can find information on this here. If a registration that you want does not follow a set format that has been used by the licensing authority, it will not be available.

Secondly, you can only purchase a registration if it is available for sale. Data Protection laws ensure that no one can access an individual’s vehicle data without their express permission and so unless someone has listed their registration for sale, it is unavailable. We update our website daily to ensure that we have the most comprehensive list of available registrations possible.

You may find that some companies will offer to source a registration mark for a finder’s fee. There is no legal way to find the whereabouts of vehicle registration marks unless you have a law enforcement reason for checking the DVLA database. Checking the data base for any other reason is illegal under the GDPR laws and many people (including police officers) have been convicted for locating and contacting the owners of registration marks to try to buy them. We recommend that you do not trust these companies.