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 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

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

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kube-system 2 days ago | parent [-]

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

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conductr 2 days ago | parent [-]

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”.

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kube-system 2 days ago | parent [-]

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.

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conductr 2 days ago | parent [-]

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.

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kube-system 2 days ago | parent [-]

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 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> 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.

▲ pkaeding 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> 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...

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conductr 2 days ago | parent [-]

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 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> 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 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.