Look up a US license plate and see what the vehicle actually is.
Need help, found a bug, or want a refund?
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PlateID currently covers US plates only. Our data provider covers all 50 states, though coverage of individual vehicles varies. If you enter a plate from another country you will get no match, because the data behind the app is US registration data.
Because it would be illegal. The US Driver's Privacy Protection Act restricts access to personal information from motor vehicle records — names, addresses, phone numbers — and PlateID is deliberately built so that data never enters the app at all. If you need owner details for a legitimate legal purpose such as an accident claim, that request goes through your state DMV or an attorney, not through an app.
Not necessarily. NHTSA publishes recall campaigns by year, make and model, not by individual vehicle, so what you are seeing is every campaign issued for that model — not a list of unrepaired faults on that specific car. Many will already have been fixed, and some may not apply to that particular build at all.
The useful move is to take the campaign number to a dealer for the manufacturer and ask whether that work was completed on the VIN. Recall repairs are free of charge, even if you do not own the car yet — which makes this a genuinely good question to ask a seller.
The most common cause is the wrong state. A plate number can exist in several states at once and will only match in the right one. Check the state selector at the top of the plate, and check for characters that look alike — 0 and O, 1 and I, 5 and S.
The other possibility is simply that the record isn't there. Not every issued plate appears in the data, and a plate that looks perfectly valid for a state can still come back with nothing. If you're confident the plate and state are right, that's what has happened — and you won't have been charged for it.
You should not have been. A credit is only spent when a lookup returns a result. If your balance dropped without a result appearing, email us with the rough time it happened and we will put the credit back.
Purchases are handled by Apple, so refunds go through them: visit reportaproblem.apple.com and sign in with your Apple ID. If something went wrong on our side, email us as well and we will help.
No. Vehicle specifications and recall data come from the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Plate-to-VIN lookups come from a commercial vehicle data provider. We present what they return and do not edit it.
Coverage varies, particularly for older vehicles, motorcycles and imports. Where a field is genuinely unknown we leave it out rather than show a placeholder, so a shorter list means less data exists — not that the app failed.
Almost nowhere. Your lookup history stays on your device, camera images never leave your phone, and plate numbers are not stored in readable form on our server. The full detail is in our privacy policy.
The more of this you can include, the faster it gets fixed: