My buddie was looking on Craigslist for his first car, we only had about $1000 so we were pretty limited on choices. We came across this cool Nissan 300zx, some early 90's one. The guy lived right down the street so we went to go check it out. From the start things seemed shady because the guy was only asking $700 and said he had the title on hand, here it is two 16 year olds, buying a car, no signing of anything. 5 min later after a quick look around we drove off with the car title in hand.
Since no official paperwork went down the car wasn't really legal, and had no plates. We took the plates off my jeep and stick them in the nissian so we could "appear" legal.
(yes I know how many laws I broke, but all of this is in hindsight)
We drove the car around for about an hour when all of the sudden we see the oil pressure go from 40 to 0 in about 2 seconds. We are sitting in the car, and smoke comes billowing out of the air vents, gear stick, hood, floorbords, etc. I quickly scan for a place to pull over and I see a dirt road 50ft ahead of us, before we could get there the engine burst into flames. So we jump out and run because we were terrified the thing would explode. As we admire our car, burning away I realize "shit, I will be in loads of trouble If I'm connected to this" , I had no license, driving a car with false plates, no registration, title with no proper sigh over, etc. So in a mad dash I run in the car, grab everything with our names on it, rip off my plates, and toss them in the woods. Not 10 seconds later a police officer turns down the road to see two boys, stairing at a blazing car, in the middle of a dirt road. The police officer starts to question us and I start playing dumb, "Me and my buddie here were just walking to my uncles house, and we came across this car... We were gonna call the police but my phone is dead (was actually dead), so we were waiting here to see if anyone needed help"...
5 min later we were walking down the road, back home, car-less, down $700, but most importantly not tied to this whatsoever.
TL:DR Bought a shady junk car, burst into flames on road, miraculously didn't get in any trouble.