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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Locating a Photo of a Vehicle in 30 Seconds with GeoSpy
LocalH wrote 10 hours 57 min ago:
Further and further into hyper-surveillance hell
mercora wrote 20 hours 49 min ago:
If a thief is selling your stolen car, would that not be very easy to
locate by showing interest in buying it? Am I missing something?
potato3732842 wrote 19 hours 25 min ago:
A lot of people lack the ability to do or credibly threaten
sufficient violence for that to be actionable. Serving all the
details up to the cops, who have nearly infinite ability to threaten
violence, on a silver platter "here's your open and shut auto theft
case, now go pad your stats" is the more tractable solution.
mercora wrote 17 hours 31 min ago:
that is not that either though or is it? i mean say i found my
vehicle on some platform for sale and then located it with their
service, now what? i call the cops i suppose, i dont see how this
is much different to calling them once they agreed to meet
somewhere.
motbus3 wrote 21 hours 13 min ago:
Even if this was a real application, it is wrong
toss1 wrote 1 day ago:
Nice idea. Maybe do it for bicycles which are often more
unique/personalized. Also, how are they going to identify identical
model/trim/color cars when the license plates have been removed or
switched?
badfuture wrote 1 day ago:
TrashFuture recently did a show on this company with the guy from Blood
Work. Unfortunately it it's behind a paywall, but it's a great episode.
[1] Go to 5:30 for a taste
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo0gualrJa4
daniel_heinen wrote 1 day ago:
Founder of GeoSpy here,
Thanks for the post, AMA for anyone into computer vision or AI.
:)
blks wrote 20 hours 54 min ago:
Why do you have a folder called âthotDBSmashâ? What were you
collecting there and why?
tonyhart7 wrote 1 day ago:
how much legal fund you prepare
kachapopopow wrote 1 day ago:
Articles seem to only go back to around 2024, how about 1.0? What was
major enough to finally reach 1.0? Would be great to have a more
technical blog post about what kind of major breakthroughs were
discovered while developing this since the first discovery of this in
2022.
jojobas wrote 1 day ago:
So you can find the place where car thieves took it to take pictures,
already knowing which city it was in from the ad. How useful is that!
ibejoeb wrote 1 day ago:
"law enforcement could quickly locate and recover the stolen vehicle"
geospy.ai: the real technology seems to be that they invented the
world's thinnest veil
ImPostingOnHN wrote 1 day ago:
I think Flock beat them to it
Aachen wrote 1 day ago:
Clearview seems even worse to me, but yeah this is a good candidate
for second place on the list of undesirable businesses
ibejoeb wrote 1 day ago:
Hah. Good point. Allow me to counter: the name alone.
Clearview could be eye drops. GeoSpy: well...
toephu2 wrote 1 day ago:
"law enforcement could quickly locate and recover the stolen vehicle"
"law enforcement agencies can achieve faster resolutions, greater
efficiency, and better outcomes for vehicle theft cases"
Could and would are two very different things in America.
In most cases, the police would simply do nothing.
Facial recognition technology (see Facebook auto-detecting your friends
when uploading a photo) has existed for decades. Why do the police
still post photos of suspects asking the public in help identifying
so-and-so?* Can't they cross-reference with the DMV database or even
Facebook to see if there are any matches?
*Although these days they even stopped doing that, I've seen cases
where they blurred out the suspects face and then asked the public in
help identifying them. They do this to protect the criminal's identity.
Sigh. I wish we could bring back name and shame.
xp84 wrote 1 day ago:
> Can't they cross-reference with the DMV database or even Facebook
to see if there are any matches?
I think there are laws that bar them from doing that.
fassssst wrote 1 day ago:
Thieves will just ask their favorite chat bot to change the background
of the photo.
hhh wrote 1 day ago:
Last time I looked at this company they just dumped your uploads into
an unauthenticated gcp bucket. They just ran your photo thru an llm and
asked for its location at the time, and the founder was doing something
very weird (in my opinion) with scraping Tinder profiles.
URI [1]: https://x.com/i/status/1786030866214326651
bbor wrote 1 day ago:
Wow â that is probably the most suspicious set of three details
ever shared on this forum. Thank you for enlightening us!
Sophira wrote 1 day ago:
Back when GeoSpy was available for everyone to use, I did a test
where I just uploaded an image that had a black background and white
text saying the location of a place and a textual description.
GeoSpy told me that it was the place mentioned in the picture, with
the textual description as evidence.
hhh wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, I have done the same and also used it to prompt inject to give
some info about the prompt, but I donât have that data anymore.
leobg wrote 1 day ago:
What were the jpgs in tge thotDBSmash folder? Did the founder use
that bucket to collect photos of women? Or was that geolocation
material, tooâ¦
hhh wrote 1 day ago:
You upload photos to tinder, and tinder has rough data on location
provided (distance to you) i believe, the photos were the photos
people posted on their tinder profile.
cameronh90 wrote 1 day ago:
> Or was that geolocation material, tooâ¦
Yeah I think we've figured out what inspired him to build the tool.
:/
tonyhart7 wrote 1 day ago:
if creep and tech nerd was a person:
momojo wrote 1 day ago:
Reminds me of the Clearview AI controversy[0].
I'm not diminishing the ethics debate, but it's crazy to me how easy it
was for two non-technical rich dudes in a garage to build Clearview AI
(And before vibe-coding!):
1. scrape billions of faces from the internet
2. `git clone` any off the shelf facial-recognition repo
It was just a matter of when.
[0]
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI#History
DrScientist wrote 18 hours 43 min ago:
Am I the only one that finds it amusing that conpanies like Google
and Facebook sent Clearview legal letters complaining about scraping
data from their sites?
ngcc_hk wrote 1 day ago:
Concerned but given the use can it be stopped ?
motbus3 wrote 21 hours 6 min ago:
Yes. If one knows that someone has their identifiable data without
consent it is a problem.
While they are pictures on the internet it is one thing, when you
gather them all and put a label with a number then it is
problematic.
Remember that FaceApp to make you older, younger etc? Imagine how
much data those guys collected?
I know someone who submitted the face of a member of my family
without consent. You could not even complain without agreeing with
the TOS first
KaiserPro wrote 1 day ago:
Ok so this looks like bullshit.
First things first, its entirely possible to geolocate using just
visual markers.
A bunch of startups did it around 2018 (most got bought by facebook, ie
mapillary) They work by extracting keypoints from pictures and building
a massive point cloud of identifiable key points.
But
That picture they use with supposed keypoint matching is wrong. None
of those keypoints are reliable feature descriptors. They all are on
foliage, which changes depending on season and wind. Geolocating that
picture accurately _automatically_ using features is next to
impossible.
Now, they might have a vibe based matcher which does some basic spatial
comparison, but I'm not sure how reliable they are, especially given a
large search radius.
The other interesting question is, where did they get their data from?
I'm pretty sure google spent a lot of time making it really difficult
to train from street view (lord knows we've tried.)
Edit the demo here: [1] is much more what I recognise a bog standard
VPS system does. Note that the user is matching buildings. Thats far
more reliable way to do feature matching.
URI [1]: https://geospy.ai/
MontyCarloHall wrote 1 day ago:
>They all are on foliage, which changes depending on season and wind.
Geolocating that picture accurately _automatically_ using features is
next to impossible.
Seems plausible enough to me. The trees are evergreens in a place
that doesn't get snow, and the keypoints are mostly grounded on
stable parts of the trees (trunks or thick branches), which barring
gale-force winds probably don't fluctuate all that much.
The part that gives me pause are the keypoints that map the hood of
the car to the pavement, and the point on the far right that maps the
ledge to the pavement. How can a system robust enough to map foliage
also return such blatant false matches?
KaiserPro wrote 1 day ago:
> return such blatant false matches
long answer, have a try on this demo: [1] short answer is that they
are similar enough features to match. think of them as homophones
(ie words that sound the same but have different meanings) in
language. You need context to be able to filter them out. ( [2] )
> don't fluctuate all that much.
Over time that doesn't bear out. Good features are areas of high
contrast with nice clearly defined edges (text is great, so are
buildings). branches move, which means they create lots of diffrent
features depending on the wind, even light wind. when we were
building out maps, we filtered as much greenery out as possible
URI [1]: https://docs.opencv.org/4.x/dc/dc3/tutorial_py_matcher.htm...
URI [2]: https://github.com/polygon-software/python-visual-odometry...
searine wrote 1 day ago:
This entire demo is just a surveillance state dog-whistle.
"It's used for car theft!" except the intended use is obviously target
government buyers for tracking citizens.
paganel wrote 1 day ago:
Nothing like an OSINT company like Bellingcat hasn't done before,
it's just that in those cases it was done on citizens belonging to
adversary countries. It was just a matter of time, I guess.
nubg wrote 1 day ago:
What?
paganel wrote 1 day ago:
See how Bellingcat was "reverse" finding the identities of
Russian citizens based on the cars they were owning. Too lazy to
search for the exact links, this was around 2020-2021, something
like that.
Later edit: Something like this [1], from late 2020: "Russian
Vehicle Registration Leak Reveals Additional GRU Hackers". There
were also some other articles with Google StreetView screenshots
and the like, I won't search for them because even finding this
one reference means I'm not doing something better with my time
right now.
URI [1]: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2020/10/22/russ...
chris_engel wrote 1 day ago:
Unless someone posts a photo of the stolen car with the numberplate
still on, how would you identify YOUR car that way? Its not like cars
are unique pieces. Same for bikes or anything else...
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
You don't have to precisely identify it, you only need to narrow it
down to a high likelihood of being your vehicle. Then you can verify
the VIN in person.
It wouldn't be hard to narrow things down:
Year/make/model/trim/color/region/timeliness will narrow down to a
very small if not already unique subset of vehicles. And on top of
that vehicles may often have unique stickers, accessories, or
scratches which can further strengthen the case. Flock e.g. uses
this data in their vehicle identification algo.
conductr wrote 1 day ago:
I have no photos of my vehicles to initiate a search this way. Am I
an outlier and itâs normal for people to keep vehicle pictures
handy?
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
If you had photos of your vehicle, presumably you'd know where
you took it.
The idea here is that you find a picture of your vehicle that the
thief took, and use this to find the location of where the thief
has your vehicle.
pkaeding wrote 20 hours 42 min ago:
Why would a thief post a photo of a stolen vehicle? Are they
trying to sell it whole? I can't imagine that is very common,
since the buyer won't be able to register it, right? Aren't
most stolen vehicles disassembled (chop shops, etc)?
olyjohn wrote 13 hours 0 min ago:
They will often sell it to someone for super cheap. They
don't care about getting fair market value. $1000 for a
$10000 van with no title isn't a loss to a thief. It's still
$1000. And there are a lot of desperate people who are
willing to pay $1000 for any type of transportation, and are
willing to drive around until they get caught. They'll just
steal some plates and run them with valid tabs. Maybe pass it
onto someone else for $1000 later on down the road, and get
another from their favorite stolen car supplier.
conductr wrote 11 hours 36 min ago:
> often
Really? Not that anyone has any data on any of this but
since you're measuring it as "often" I'm going to disagree
and say this is a very tiny percentage of stolen vehicles
that are being used this way.
If they are, it's probably being bought from a hookup you
know and not randomly on marketplace.
kube-system wrote 18 hours 49 min ago:
Sometime the sellers of stolen cars are inconsiderate to the
buyers in this way. Or they sell to buyers who also donât
care to register their vehicle.
defrost wrote 20 hours 29 min ago:
> Why would a thief post a photo of a stolen vehicle?
Casual small time occassional car thieves might do this,
receivers of stolen cars as payment for other debts owed by a
thief may do this ... but it's somewhat atypical.
> Aren't most stolen vehicles disassembled (chop shops, etc)?
In the organised bigger scale operations vehicles are dealt
with for the greatest profit with least risk. A good many are
stripped for the parts - the more popular the car, the larger
the parts after market.
A suprising number of cars from developed countries are
shunted whole into containers and sold elsewhere about the
globe. eg:-
âEach year, hundreds of thousands of vehicles are stolen
around the world, yet the initial theft is often only the
beginning of a vehicleâs journey into the global criminal
underworld.
âStolen vehicles are trafficked across the globe, traded
for drugs and other illicit commodities, enriching organized
crime groups and even terrorists.
URI [1]: https://www.interpol.int/en/News-and-Events/News/202...
conductr wrote 11 hours 31 min ago:
Going back to the the article, you have to find a picture
of your exact car online somewhere, then use GeoSpy to tell
you it was stolen in the US and was photographed in
Columbia, then you go to that place in Columbia to find
it's not parked there anymore, so you contact the person
who made the post/listing and try to arrange a meeting,
then you confirm it's your vehicle, then... what exactly?
Local police are doing none of this btw.
jaredhallen wrote 1 day ago:
That seems like a pretty rare situation compared to any number
of alternative use cases. Most of which are decidedly less
wholesome.
kube-system wrote 20 hours 50 min ago:
It is literally the âreal world exampleâ from the
article.
conductr wrote 18 hours 56 min ago:
I may have misunderstood, admittedly I just scanned it, but
if you or law enforcement have to scan the universe of
apps/internet to find a picture before this is usefulâ¦
itâs not useful. Your starting point is a needle in a
haystack.
I thought you uploaded a picture you already had, it does
the scanning, and a hit might look like âsome rando
posted a selfie at Zilker Park 20 minutes ago on insta and
that car was in the backgroundâ.
kube-system wrote 18 hours 44 min ago:
Again, the example in the article is to find the vehicle
being resold online. There are only a few popular
websites where people sell vehicles secondhand in any
particular area, and you can easily filter to the
characteristics of the car you are looking for. To
search all of them is a 15 minute exercise.
Although your example may be quite viable in a
repossession scenario where the possessor is known but
the location is not.
conductr wrote 17 hours 27 min ago:
Right, see that is the example they went in depth on. I
thought it was helping identify the chopshops and
hideouts more directly as they indicated in the
bullets.
This part still is the sticking point;
> When browsing Craigslist, I came across a regular car
listing that showed a vehicle with buildings visible in
the background. The listing claimed the vehicle was
located in San Francisco. ...... Superbolt returned
precise latitude and longitude coordinates that, when
entered into Google Maps, revealed an exact match to
the buildings visible in the listing photos.
How often do people find their stolen vehicles posted
on CL/marketplace? Do police have resources to
constantly browse hoping they see a similar picture of
their stolen vehicles? How do they match it to the one
they are looking for? Eg. if this was a cop, they may
think, this vehicle matches the description of the
stolen car. And this AI tells me the picture was taken
at these exact coordinates (not super useful as this
looks like a public place and I'm sure not where the
vehicle is being stored). They still have to go out,
meet the "seller", check the VIN or otherwise confirm
it is the correct stolen vehicle they are looking for,
then they get an arrest and recovery.
But, what if there are a dozen vehicles for sale
matching said description. They now have to arrange to
visit them all until they find the match or exhaust
their options. How is this AI adding any value given
with & without it the process looks the same; find
listing, ask "seller" to meet, meet, evaluate. You
don't need this AI to ask the "seller" to meet up and
pretend to be an interested buyer.
FWIW, this looks like it could be a white VW Jetta to
me. There are 118 in SF bay area right now just on
Autotrader (granted, the hatchback is a further
narrowing feature, but that's not super common either).
No police department I've ever heard of has the
resources to check on all these listings. If the thief
stole it in SF but listed it for sale in Seattle or LA
or anywhere else, how would anyone know? That's the
haystack part, it's a big haystack.
kube-system wrote 16 hours 56 min ago:
Police probably do not care much unless you are in a
small town. Insurance has a financial incentive to
care.
> They still have to go out, meet the "seller", check
the VIN
You do not have to meet the seller to check the VIN
of a vehicle sitting on the street.
> But, what if there are a dozen vehicles for sale
matching said description.
There might be a few vehicles in an area matching
make/model/year. But it is trivial when looking at a
photo to filter on further criteria... and once you
look at the photo you can observe trim, exterior
color, interior color, stickers, inspection sticker,
etc, you will have a very high degree of certainty
even on a common model.
> white VW Jetta to me. There are 118 in SF bay area
right now just on Autotrader
Well yeah, because you only filtered on 2 of the
dozen or so attributes that you might know.
Within a whole 500 mi of the bay area there are only
5 white VW Jetta Wagons listed. All you need to know
is what year it is, to narrow it down to 2 or 3. If
you know the trim, approximate mileage, any visually
distinctive feature, etc, you are guaranteed a match.
Even if it wasn't a wagon, it is not hard to filter
down to a unique vehicle.
conductr wrote 11 hours 44 min ago:
> You do not have to meet the seller to check the
VIN of a vehicle sitting on the street.
You're assuming the vehicle remains where the photo
was taken.
> Well yeah, because you only filtered on 2 of the
dozen or so attributes that you might know.
Those were the only attributes that were apparent
in the photo. I said I ignored Wagon because that
was a cherry picked unique filter. If it wasn't a
wagon, your analysis is the same as mine, >100
vehicles in the SF bay area (I only filtered on 100
mile radius). But again, why steal a vehicle and
post it for sale in the same city you stole it
from? Criminals already move stolen vehicles, this
is all but obvious.
Basically, this helps you catch the dumbest of the
dumb criminals. Someone that steals a very unique
car and posts it for sale in the same area they
stole it from and also leaves the car parked in the
same place they took the photo. There's also a time
element, if they hide the vehicle for a few weeks,
then post it for sale it's more likely the initial
active investigation has faded and the cops aren't
actively hitting refresh on marketplace.
Glad you believe this is useful, I'll continue to
disagree - it might have some value but it's
usefulness is being exaggerated in the article.
TACIXAT wrote 1 day ago:
Did I completely miss the technical aspect of this blog? They list an
improvement but no details on how they achieved it. It sounds like a
trained embedding model and a vector search. All told though this just
reads as boring product talk.
adinisom wrote 1 day ago:
The picture in the article shows what looks like keypoint matching
(ie, SIFT, SURF, FAST) between the query picture and the database.
This can give an exact location if a picture of the location exists
in their database.
They contrasted this with their prior technique which is more of an
image classifier that can identify general location from image
features. This approach does not require their database to contain a
picture of the exact location.
zamadatix wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think you missed anything, but I don't think it's intended to
be a technical blog either.
ErroneousBosh wrote 1 day ago:
"Try our demo!"
Okay then, thinks EB, mentally trying to decide which photos to try it
with.
"Look here's a picture of a place, and here's a pin on a map that shows
you where it is!"
Yeah, I can do that without AI.
fedreg wrote 1 day ago:
can we use this to finally prove the moon landing is a hoax!!!
voidUpdate wrote 1 day ago:
I mean comparisons already exist showing matching landmarks between
apollo photos and topography from orbiting satellites
moltar wrote 1 day ago:
But who takes the photo of the stolen car?
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
The thief, when selling it.
Scoundreller wrote 1 day ago:
Iâd be lying if I said I never ripped photos from listings on a
certain popular online auction platform when selling stuff online
(before the ubiquity of digital cameras and smartphones)
mellosouls wrote 1 day ago:
More from this company:
Why Americaâs Heroes Deserve the Most Advanced AI
our goal was to build technology to safeguard American freedom and
prosperity...
...America deserves more. While Silicon Valley hype centers around
LLMs, AGI, and SSI, our focus remains on visual
intelligenceâunderstanding the world we see with our eyes, what we
call Visual Super Intelligence
URI [1]: https://geospy.ai/blog/why-america-s-heroes-deserve-the-visual...
nancyminusone wrote 1 day ago:
'Americas heros' deserve oversight.
Services like this (Flock, etc.) should either be illegal or
accessible to everyone.
fusslo wrote 1 day ago:
It's kinda shocking to me how people are so willing to give tools
to government agencies to track, spy, find, dox, and identify
fellow citizens.
I guess I grew up drinking the 'American culture is one of mistrust
of government' cool-aide, rather than 'American government has deep
pockets' fruit punch.
I'm not sure if it's just an evolution of the times, or an actual
erosion of principals (since when? 9/11?)
conductr wrote 1 day ago:
Started much earlier than 9/11. Probably the drug âwarâ that
had things going towards the police state thing. Police
departments buying military grade weapons and equipment to arm
their swat teams. Then compounded by the fact US citizens are
extremely armed themselves and use automatic rifles in their
crime. So the police were outgunned. I think the North Hollywood
shootout was pivotal in that regard, in the mid-late 90s.
kennethrc wrote 1 day ago:
> I grew up drinking the 'American culture ...'
> misspells "Kool-Aid"
fusslo wrote 1 day ago:
you could afford the real stuff??
kevin_thibedeau wrote 1 day ago:
Oh yeah.
yutyut wrote 1 day ago:
Many people are willing to disregard their morals in exchange for
a bag of money.
BobbyTables2 wrote 1 day ago:
Not even a bag. A discount or free shipping is often enough.
pugworthy wrote 1 day ago:
Sure, an impressive bit of tech, but the potential for misuse is
immense.
To mock their user reviews...
> âGraylark helped me find the person I'm stalking in under 20
minutes. This tool is unbelievable â a true game-changer for those
with restraining orders like me who just want to get back at them for
that court order."
hulitu wrote 1 day ago:
> the potential for misuse is immense.
Who do you think is "sponsoring" this ? /s
downrightmike wrote 1 day ago:
It will never not be misused. These types of apps should be illegal
readthenotes1 wrote 1 day ago:
Do you think criminalizing an activity will stop criminals from
highly lucrative criminal activity without going to North Korea
levels of societal control?
motbus3 wrote 21 hours 11 min ago:
Yes. Blackmailing exists since the dawn of humanity (probably).
It doesn't mean that we should make it easier.
bbor wrote 1 day ago:
1. Theyâre not talking about any lucrative activity â the
primary worry is longterm sexual harassment via stalking.
2. Why outlaw bombs if criminals have obtained them anyway?
Youâre just arguing against he concept of laws at this point.
3. A type of app is not synonymous with âan activityâ
potato3732842 wrote 22 hours 35 min ago:
>1. Theyâre not talking about any lucrative activity â the
primary worry is longterm sexual harassment via stalking.
There's potential for far more, and far more lucrative
corporate and state harassment here. Think like low effort red
light camera mail ticket but for the general case.
"We see that someone has posted a picture of X at your
location. Here is a copy. This is a violation of a) your leas
b) the zoning code, please pay us $1000, if you would like to
appeal please fill out the attached form and include the $500
appeal fee and if you lose the fine will be $2000. Reminder:
you agreed to this in subsection ABC of "
array_key_first wrote 1 day ago:
I mean, yes, generally, for most things.
This mentality is kind of dumb, no offense. We have a bunch of
laws. You could just as easily use your argument to say murder
should be legal, or rape, and certainly people have.
Laws do, actually, work, for the most part. No they're not
perfect, but they don't need to be.
potato3732842 wrote 22 hours 44 min ago:
Legalizing capital crimes would barely make them increase in
prevalence. The state punishes people for those things mostly
so that other people don't.
Laws are basically codified morals, but shitty because they
need to be written to be some semblance of objectivity. You
typically get stupid results when you try and surgically codify
niche things or try and legislate controversial things.
I'd much rather live in a world with LLM image location
stalking than one where people just punt everything to the
state.
diogocp wrote 1 day ago:
> Laws do, actually, work, for the most part.
"No-one charged in 9 out of 10 crimes"
URI [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-44884113
potato3732842 wrote 22 hours 43 min ago:
I'm not disagreeing, but that article reeks of "we counted
all the petty BS we don't even try to solve to make the
numbers look bad to justify asking for more resources"
xp84 wrote 1 day ago:
no, it's not, those things are illegal but cars and trains are
not illegal even though you can use them to run over people.
Knives, same thing. Alcohol is not illegal even though you can
use them to get people too drunk to resist you.
Criminalizing everything that could be used to do bad things is
an extreme position. Instead of jumping right to "ban it" you
should probably first have a discussion where you consider
whether (A) that ban will make any difference to its
availability to most people who are criminally-minded anyway
and (B) whether it has positive benefits to the law-abiding.
motbus3 wrote 21 hours 9 min ago:
On most sane societies guns are illegal, drugs are illegal
and blackmailing is illegal
ehnto wrote 1 day ago:
And what legitimate purpose are we balancing against the
negative purposes in this circumstance?
potato3732842 wrote 22 hours 42 min ago:
I don't think there's a legitimate purpose for this. I do
think no legislature is capable of outlawing this in a way
that's both enforceable with some degree of impartiality
(i.e. does not provide plausible deniability for a
prosecutor to drag a legitimate service through a courtroom
for political reasons) and incurs acceptable collateral
damages (e.g. doesn't outlaw unrelated stuff that's fine).
inanutshellus wrote 1 day ago:
... therefore what, exactly?
kotaKat wrote 1 day ago:
Sounds more like âvehicle recoveryâ for the repossession market
first and foremost.
A repo investigator for the bank locates the target vehicle via
ownerâs social media, takes photo of the car, shoots it into GeoSpy,
then ganks the car based on given locations in the ownerâs photos.
Pair it up with ALPR hits across a city from national ALPR networks (to
help correlate home/business/work patterns) and⦠wellp, there you go!
catapart wrote 1 day ago:
You can even skip the investigator in a lot of places, thanks to
Flock. Dystopian.
reaperducer wrote 1 day ago:
You can even skip the investigator in a lot of places, thanks to
Flock. Dystopian.
Flock is an ALPR.
breppp wrote 1 day ago:
wouldn't it be cheaper to just buy your location from a data
broker?
stronglikedan wrote 1 day ago:
> Thieves often post stolen vehicles for sale on platforms like
Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist
That seems like a stretch. That wouldn't even make sense for them to
do. Strange claim to make.
burkaman wrote 1 day ago:
It's very common with bikes, it wouldn't surprise me if they do it
with cars too. I found my own stolen bike for sale on Facebook but
still wasn't able to recover it. They just use a stolen or anonymized
Facebook account so you can't easily figure out who is selling it.
prmoustache wrote 1 day ago:
I once saw a story about someone who saw her bike on sale even
before it was stolen. The thieves announce the bikes they see
regularly in the same place in the street and only steal them if
they have a potential buyer.
That way they only take the risk when they need to, they don't need
any storage area, and if they are caught it is only for 1 bike, not
tens or hundreds.
xp84 wrote 1 day ago:
I have to say, I'm quite impressed with the intelligence of those
particular bastards. I don't approve, but I have to admit that's
so smart.
ronsor wrote 1 day ago:
I can't believe we're dropshipping stolen goods now.
dylan604 wrote 1 day ago:
What did you think Amazon resellers platform is for?
ronsor wrote 1 day ago:
Dropshipping goods from China
dylan604 wrote 1 day ago:
No, that's what Fulfilled by Amazon is for
DANmode wrote 1 day ago:
When you or a friend show up to a public place to buy it, itâs
usually pretty clear whoâs selling it.
burkaman wrote 1 day ago:
Tried that but I guess they got suspicious and didn't show up, or
sold it to someone else before me.
PSA for anyone with a bike: register it on [1] . I registered
mine there the day it was stolen and almost immediately got
emails from several people who were monitoring a known bike
thief's Marketplace account and saw mine listed.
URI [1]: https://bikeindex.org/
tokai wrote 1 day ago:
>The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is urging New
York City residents to exercise caution when purchasing cars online,
as they have recently identified a surge in the sale of stolen
vehicles.
>As of Oct. 15 (2024), the DMV reports that it has recovered 228
stolen vehicles amounting to a value of $6.35 million. Of the 228
vehicles recovered this year, 149 were purchased by an unsuspecting
victim after seeing a post on Facebook Marketplace or a similar site.
That is 65% of recovered stolen vehicles in New York was sold through
online marked places.
URI [1]: https://www.silive.com/crime-safety/2024/10/stolen-vehicles-...
galleywest200 wrote 1 day ago:
I am curious of
1) How many total stolen vehicles there were
And
2) If 65% of recovered ones being from Marketplace means only the
low-hanging fruit were found.
snypher wrote 1 day ago:
"From 1997 through 2022,
reported thefts decreased 67 percent. In 2022, however, there was
a dramatic increase in vehicles
reported stolen: 26,653, representing a 112 percent increase from
the 12,573 reported stolen in 2019."
From
URI [1]: https://apps.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/docs/FINAL%2...
w-ll wrote 1 day ago:
Ha, the first photo is Alamo Square looking up Fulton.
avidiax wrote 1 day ago:
Wondering how theives can sell a stolen car. Do they have fake
paperwork?
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
The easiest way is to sell it at a steep discount to a buyer willing
to accept the lack of paperwork for a good deal.
lukax wrote 1 day ago:
You can buy a totaled car for cheap and use its VIN.
hangonhn wrote 1 day ago:
Are VINs not tied to the make, model, and year?
xp84 wrote 1 day ago:
Sure, but that's not that hard to find a match of. And if you
cover all your bases, you can probably get away with a year or
two plus or minus in most cases.
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
Ultimately they are tied to an individual vehicle in its original
configuration in every way.
But thieves don't really really care about what it technically
represents, they are more interested in what they can get away
with. That would be solely dependent on how stringent the
inspection is to get a rebuilt title.
hattmall wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, the term is strykers. Which can refer to the person that does
it, or the actual stolen car that has been legitimized.
The stryker will find or buy from somewhere, a pool of unissued VINs
that don't flag anything in the state registration system and match
various vehicles (Dodge Chargers, Kias, Hyundais). Then when someone
comes with that vehicle, they will strike a new Vin plate. Sometimes
if they buy the VINs it will come in a package with plates. From
there it's possible to get the vehicle registered, most likely under
someone else's name that has no idea and they will sell / rent the
car with tag etc. Though sometimes they will just make a fake plate
too and then steal a real plate, swap it with the fake plate and put
the real plate on the stolen car and sell it like that. In some
cases / states they can actually get a title reissued.
Boats are even better, but much smaller market, just look up coast
guard plates on Amazon.
Stiker vs Styker, is regional.
For Reference: Striker Music
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaTxkD5JFpg
avidiax wrote 1 day ago:
So the only way to know that this has been done is to read the OBD2
VIN or check all the resaleable parts for VINs?
It sounds like this scam would only get discovered when you go to
the dealer for service, perhaps.
aiiotnoodle wrote 1 day ago:
Yes and no. In a video I watched on YouTube the people fencing
the car had scratched off VINs in the bonnet, door and
windscreen, painted and re-etched the exported car's VIN and gone
out of their way to find a reasonable fake V5 certificate (UK
equivalent of a DMV cert I think) with similar specification as
the stolen car (or found the docs first).
The car was sold on, eventually went to Copart with a blown
engine and then the YouTuber found out through his videos that
the car he owned was stolen and the original had been exported
because the interior color was not the same as the decoded VIN.
Only when he took the engine out of the car and compared the
engine number with the one in BMW's database and the reported VIN
in the infotainment was he confident that the car was stolen,
same for Copart (who wouldn't entertain the car was stolen).
I think if it wasn't a famous YouTuber who bought the car, it's
highly possible that the stolen car would go nu-noticed
throughout its lifetime as stolen, even if taken to a main
dealer. If I recall correctly the car reports he used (maybe
car-vertical) also didn't pick up any discrepancy.
For the criminals its good business, you find a 30k plus car, pay
for a clean VIN from cypress or somewhere and then do the damage
to the car to re-new it as a different car, even if it costs 10k
to do, its a lucrative 20k "profit" and thats on the high end,
seems like cars can be stolen overnight, especially ones the
criminals specialize in.
edit:
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI4S2LT_ntE
aiiotnoodle wrote 1 day ago:
Just to add to this, the "clean" exported car's VINs were
bought off snapchat for ~4k per car. (for high end cars.)
vablings wrote 1 day ago:
Usually in the sophisticated thieves, it's the case that they buy a
VIN from a car that was exported and not recorded as such. They
then get a new copy of the title for a car that is no longer in the
country and can request new factory stamped vin parts such as the
suspension pillar.
The car looks completely legitimate to your average person with
matching VINs it's just there are now two cars in two different
places
hattmall wrote 1 day ago:
These aren't high end cars and essentially there is a formula for
VINs but not all of them that get issued get used for various
reasons so there are excess valid but not circulating VINs out
there. It's just like social security and CPNs. Same people are
sellers.
barbazoo wrote 1 day ago:
Exported but not recorded, wouldnât that be a stolen car? If so
the VIN prolly canât be reused. Or is there a legit way this
would happen?
Who else exports their car, doesnât report it and then offers
their VIN?
xp84 wrote 1 day ago:
I happened to see a video yesterday, unsourced though, which
said that for cars that fetch a high premium overseas,
exporters hire "straw buyers" to buy the cars and register
them, then immediately take them to the port to be exported.
So, those seem like they'd be pretty good ones to use, as the
straw buyer would certainly not report it as stolen. Though I
bet they don't renew the tags, so you might owe a couple years
of back registration depending on how old the 'source' car is.
Scoundreller wrote 1 day ago:
Plenty of brands sell vehicles for less in some markets than
others.
They get all cranky about people arbitraging it but it is
blatant price discrimination.
Manufacturers were starting to require proof of insurance
before handing over the keys and then people would get it and
cancel+refund the insurance. Cat meet mouse.
URI [1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/icbc...
RobotToaster wrote 1 day ago:
In some cases the car is completely disassembled and the parts are
sold.
kachapopopow wrote 1 day ago:
from what I know they sell it to other criminals which use it to
commit further crimes or ship it off the continent
most commonly it is used for drugs in canada since every case I hear
about ends up in forensics
kachapopopow wrote 1 day ago:
Looking back it used to be way less advanced than what they have now,
makes me wonder how this compares with flock.
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