A Stat.vin page usually carries the photos taken while the car stood at a Copart or IAAI yard — often a dozen or more — next to its VIN, the price it sold for and the damage on record. The text says what happened to the car; the pictures show it, and they can stay public for years. This article is only about those pictures: what they can give away, where copies of them are kept, and what happens to each copy when we take the page down.
What the gallery can give away
Auction photos are taken to sell a car, not with anyone’s privacy in mind. Look through them the way a stranger would:
- The plate. If it was still on the car, it links the pictures to a car that may be back on the road.
- Documents. Papers left inside the car can end up in a photo.
- Personal belongings. Whatever was in the car when it reached the yard can be in the frame.
- The damage, up close. The car at its worst, filed under the 17 characters that identify it.
The car’s history sits in official records anyway — the title, NMVTIS, insurance claims — and no removal changes them. What a gallery adds is a public link between that history, the pictures, the plate and whoever drives the car today. That link is what owners ask us to take down.
Where copies of the photos are kept
Taking a page down does not make every copy of its pictures vanish at the same moment, because the copies are kept in different places:
- On the Stat.vin page, as the gallery.
- In cached image copies, kept apart from the page. This is why a photo can stay visible on Stat.vin for up to 3 days after the page is gone.
- In Google, as thumbnails in web results and in Google Images, until Google refreshes them.
- On other websites that copied the same auction record. Those are separate pages, outside a Stat.vin order.
- In the auctions’ own records at Copart or IAAI. Nothing we do reaches them, and they are the reason a new page can appear somewhere later.
What the Stat.vin order does with them
The order takes the page down as a whole: the gallery leaves together with the sale price and the listing details. We file the request with Stat.vin, follow it up until the page is gone and confirm to you when it has been processed. The promised time is 12–24 hours; during Google updates or technical problems on the servers it can take 1–2 days longer. Then we ask Google to drop the old result for eligible links — a step included in the Stat.vin price, $75.
On the list above, copies 1 and 2 are covered by the order, although the cached copies can take up to 3 days longer to disappear. Copy 3 follows on Google’s schedule. Copies 4 and 5 are outside the order. The whole sequence, from finding the page to our confirmation, is in our guide.
The first three days
Right after our confirmation there can be a short overlap: the page is gone, yet one of its photos still opens from a saved link or still shows as a thumbnail. During that window:
- a picture that loads from Stat.vin is the separately cached copy, not a sign that the page is back;
- a thumbnail in Google Images is Google’s copy and changes when Google refreshes;
- a quick test is to open the old page address — if the car is no longer there, the page is gone.
If a photo still opens from Stat.vin once those 3 days have passed, write to us with your order number, the VIN and the address of the image.
When the car goes back to auction
A page we remove stays gone. A car that goes through Copart or IAAI again, though, gets a new set of yard photos, and a new record with those pictures can appear on Stat.vin. That is a new case and a new order. Before you sell the car, run the free check again, so you know which pictures a search for its VIN brings up at that point. How the search result itself leaves Google is covered in a separate article.