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One thing I learned in my years of driving and being a car owner is that dealing with the Land Transportation Office can be a pain. This is especially so during those times in the year you have to renew your driver’s license and your motor vehicle registration. It’s not too difficult to determine the schedule for registration (which is usually based on the last two digits of your plate number). However, sometimes you find the need to check for vehicle registration, especially in times of emergency.

For instance, when I got into an accident sometime last year, I used my mobile phone to check the registration details of both my car and the other vehicle involved. This helped determine if the plate matched with the vehicle, if the registration was valid, and if there was no LTO alarm (such as carnapping) on the vehicle. This technique for checking registration is also helpful, to some extent, when checking used cars before buying. Although the registered name does not appear, you can at least check if there are any LTO “alarms.”

The procedure is fairly straightforward. You just send an SMS to 2600 with the following keywords:

LTO VEHICLE ABC123

where ABC123 is the plate number. You will then get a response detailing the car’s brand, make, year, color, and date of last registration. Now this won’t necessarily tell you whether the registration is still current or expired, but based on the plate’s endings, you can at least estimate if it is valid for the current year.

You can also check license details by texting this to 2600:

LTO LICENSE XXXXXXXXXX

where XXXXXXXXX is the license number. This can be pretty useful when checking for the driver’s identity and validity of the license.

To get motor vehicle transactions and keywords, send “LTO MV” to 2600. For other permit and transactions, send “LTO DL” to 2600. Each message costs PhP 2.50.

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