[kube-system]

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]

I have no photos of my vehicles to initiate a search this way. Am I an outlier and it’s normal for people to keep vehicle pictures handy?

[kube-system]

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.

[jaredhallen]

That seems like a pretty rare situation compared to any number of alternative use cases. Most of which are decidedly less wholesome.

[kube-system]

It is literally the “real world example” from the article.

[conductr]

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 useful… it’s 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 “some rando posted a selfie at Zilker Park 20 minutes ago on insta and that car was in the background”.

[kube-system]

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.

[pkaeding]

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)?

[defrost]

> 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:-

  “Each year, hundreds of thousands of vehicles are stolen around the world, yet the initial theft is often only the beginning of a vehicle’s journey into the global criminal underworld.

  “Stolen vehicles are trafficked across the globe, traded for drugs and other illicit commodities, enriching organized crime groups and even terrorists. 

https://www.interpol.int/en/News-and-Events/News/2025/INTERP...

[conductr]

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.

[kube-system]

When an insured vehicle is stolen, it soon belongs to the insurance company. I think it would be helpful for insurance to know whether a stolen vehicle is across town or in Columbia. If it's nearby they can recover it and the salvage value for it, and if it's in Columbia they have some evidence that their resources are better spent elsewhere.

[olyjohn]

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]

> 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]

Sometime the sellers of stolen cars are inconsiderate to the buyers in this way. Or they sell to buyers who also don’t care to register their vehicle.