[HN Gopher] Locating a Photo of a Vehicle in 30 Seconds with GeoSpy
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Locating a Photo of a Vehicle in 30 Seconds with GeoSpy
Author : kachapopopow
Score : 76 points
Date : 2026-01-06 18:00 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (geospy.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (geospy.ai)
| kachapopopow wrote:
| Looking back it used to be way less advanced than what they have
| now, makes me wonder how this compares with flock.
| avidiax wrote:
| Wondering how theives can sell a stolen car. Do they have fake
| paperwork?
| kachapopopow wrote:
| 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
| RobotToaster wrote:
| In some cases the car is completely disassembled and the parts
| are sold.
| hattmall wrote:
| 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
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaTxkD5JFpg
| vablings wrote:
| 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
| barbazoo wrote:
| Exported but not recorded, wouldn't that be a stolen car?
| If so the VIN prolly can't be reused. Or is there a legit
| way this would happen?
|
| Who else exports their car, doesn't report it and then
| offers their VIN?
| avidiax wrote:
| 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:
| 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI4S2LT_ntE
| aiiotnoodle wrote:
| Just to add to this, the "clean" exported car's VINs were
| bought off snapchat for ~4k per car. (for high end cars.)
| lukax wrote:
| You can buy a totaled car for cheap and use its VIN.
| hangonhn wrote:
| Are VINs not tied to the make, model, and year?
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
| w-ll wrote:
| Ha, the first photo is Alamo Square looking up Fulton.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > 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.
| tokai wrote:
| >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.
|
| https://www.silive.com/crime-safety/2024/10/stolen-vehicles-...
| galleywest200 wrote:
| 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.
| burkaman wrote:
| 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.
| DANmode wrote:
| When you or a friend show up to a public place to buy it,
| it's usually pretty clear who's selling it.
| burkaman wrote:
| 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
| https://bikeindex.org/. 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| 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.
| ronsor wrote:
| I can't believe we're dropshipping stolen goods now.
| dylan604 wrote:
| What did you think Amazon resellers platform is for?
| ronsor wrote:
| Dropshipping goods from China
| dylan604 wrote:
| No, that's what Fulfilled by Amazon is for
| DANmode wrote:
| Strange to speak so definitively about a world you clearly
| aren't familiar with.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| You're speaking pretty definitely too. Got any citations to
| back up your claims?
| DANmode wrote:
| What claims?
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > Strange to speak so definitively about a world you
| clearly aren't familiar with.
|
| I'm guessing you know the OP with great familiarity?
| DANmode wrote:
| Their boldly wrong comment tells their lack of experience
| (and indeed knowledge) within this topic.
|
| You can tell because...the immediate reply (from other
| users) included government notices indicating the reality
| they weren't aware of.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| My point was that your comment was a low effort personal
| attack and contributed nothing. As well as itself being
| ironic.
|
| The HN guidelines explicitly say one should avoid such
| comments:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| tokai wrote:
| >Don't be snarky
| DANmode wrote:
| Your point wasn't subtle - just wrong.
|
| The comment _I replied to_ did nothing but detract from
| the conversation,
|
| and attack the original commenter's sense and logic -
| despite the original commenter being correct!
|
| > That seems like a stretch. That wouldn't even make
| sense for them to do. Strange claim to make.
|
| Not a stretch.
|
| Makes perfect sense.
|
| Not strange, unusual, or uncommon!
|
| & a quick search would have shown them the blind spot
|
| Maybe it was a blind spot for you, too - based on your
| responses.
|
| (^THAT'S what getting personal and off-topic looks like)
|
| Link the guidelines to the commenter I replied to,
| instead of users following them.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Sounds more like "vehicle recovery" for the repossession market
| first and foremost.
|
| A repo investigator for the bank locates the target vehicle via
| owner's social media, takes photo of the car, shoots it into
| GeoSpy, then ganks the car based on given locations in the
| owner's 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:
| You can even skip the investigator in a lot of places, thanks
| to Flock. Dystopian.
| breppp wrote:
| wouldn't it be cheaper to just buy your location from a data
| broker?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _You can even skip the investigator in a lot of places,
| thanks to Flock. Dystopian._
|
| Flock is an ALPR.
| pugworthy wrote:
| Sure, an impressive bit of tech, but the potential for misuse is
| immense.
|
| To mock their user reviews...
|
| > "Graylark helped me find the person I'm stalking in under 20
| minutes. This tool is unbelievable -- a true game-changer for
| those with restraining orders like me who just want to get back
| at them for that court order."
| downrightmike wrote:
| It will never not be misused. These types of apps should be
| illegal
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Do you think criminalizing an activity will stop criminals
| from highly lucrative criminal activity without going to
| North Korea levels of societal control?
| inanutshellus wrote:
| ... therefore what, exactly?
| hulitu wrote:
| > the potential for misuse is immense.
|
| Who do you think is "sponsoring" this ? /s
| mellosouls wrote:
| More from this company:
|
| _Why America's 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
| intelligence--understanding the world we see with our eyes, what
| we call Visual Super Intelligence_
|
| https://geospy.ai/blog/why-america-s-heroes-deserve-the-visu...
| nancyminusone wrote:
| 'Americas heros' deserve oversight.
|
| Services like this (Flock, etc.) should either be illegal or
| accessible to everyone.
| fusslo wrote:
| 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?)
| yutyut wrote:
| Many people are willing to disregard their morals in
| exchange for a bag of money.
| kennethrc wrote:
| > I grew up drinking the 'American culture ...'
|
| > misspells "Kool-Aid"
| fusslo wrote:
| you could afford the real stuff??
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Oh yeah.
| moltar wrote:
| But who takes the photo of the stolen car?
| kube-system wrote:
| The thief, when selling it.
| fedreg wrote:
| can we use this to finally prove the moon landing is a hoax!!!
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| "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.
| TACIXAT wrote:
| 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.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I don't think you missed anything, but I don't think it's
| intended to be a technical blog either.
| adinisom wrote:
| 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.
| chris_engel wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| searine wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| What?
| KaiserPro wrote:
| 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: https://geospy.ai/ 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.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >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:
| > return such blatant false matches
|
| long answer, have a try on this demo:
| https://docs.opencv.org/4.x/dc/dc3/tutorial_py_matcher.html
|
| 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.
| (https://github.com/polygon-software/python-visual-
| odometry/b...)
|
| > 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
| momojo wrote:
| 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] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI#History
| hhh wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://x.com/i/status/1786030866214326651
| leobg wrote:
| What were the jpgs in tge thotDBSmash folder? Did the founder
| use that bucket to collect photos of women? Or was that
| geolocation material, too...
| cameronh90 wrote:
| > Or was that geolocation material, too...
|
| Yeah I think we've figured out what inspired him to build the
| tool. :/
| Sophira wrote:
| 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.
| fassssst wrote:
| Thieves will just ask their favorite chat bot to change the
| background of the photo.
| toephu2 wrote:
| "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.
| nubg wrote:
| I hereby accuse you of raping me. Could you send me your face
| and name so it can be posted online?
| ibejoeb wrote:
| "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
| Aachen wrote:
| Clearview seems even worse to me, but yeah this is a good
| candidate for second place on the list of undesirable
| businesses
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Hah. Good point. Allow me to counter: the name alone.
|
| Clearview could be eye drops. GeoSpy: well...
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