Woman's Car Registration Tangled in Dead Grandfather's Name

Imagine trying to renew your car registration and hitting a wall because your dead grandfather technically owns it. That’s the Kafkaesque nightmare TikTok user Kayla (@kayvanoo) found herself navigating when a leasing company released her vehicle title to her deceased grandfather in 2023—three years after he passed away in 2020.

The ordeal began simply enough. Kayla’s registration was expiring, so she attempted to renew it online. Denied. She headed to the DMV, where staff informed her that a leasing company still held the title. Not true, she insisted—she’d been financing the vehicle through PNC Bank since 2023. But the leasing company’s name was on the paperwork, and that was what mattered to the system.

What followed was a bureaucratic maze that would make anyone’s head spin. PNC claimed they didn’t have the title. The leasing company said they’d closed her account in 2023 but promised to send it over. Weeks turned into months with no document. When Kayla finally got someone on the phone who could actually help, she discovered the real problem: the title had been released to her grandfather back in April 2023—years after his death. The agent even asked if she could contact him to ask where it was. When she explained, multiple times, that he had passed away, the company’s response was essentially a shrug. They couldn’t help because the account was closed.

Undeterred, Kayla assembled a dossier of documents. She obtained a bill of sale, a power of attorney, and had her grandmother sign papers granting her authority over her grandfather’s possessions. Everything got notarized. She brought it all back to the DMV, only to be told those documents weren’t needed—just a power of attorney from the leasing company itself.

Eventually, after multiple rounds of escalation, Kayla reached someone in the leasing company’s executive office who expressed genuine shock at the situation. They agreed to obtain a duplicate title from the DMV, though she’d still need to wait 14 business days. What should have been a 15-minute online transaction became a months-long saga of circular conversations and bureaucratic dead ends—all because someone issued a title to a man who’d been deceased for three years. Some commenters have suggested this debacle might warrant legal action, especially given that Kayla’s been making payments to PNC for three years while they supposedly didn’t possess the document securing the loan.