by fern12 on 5/19/18, 8:01 PM with 86 comments
by nimbius on 5/20/18, 11:04 PM
Ive had repo agents posing as customers looking to "get their car," which is pretty funny, but ive also seen agents harassing the front office staff with demands for a vehicle being worked on. Sometimes a driver will park their car to suddenly find theyve been "hitched up" to a seedy looking tow apparatus on the back of an often ironically leased light duty truck. Repo agents in this case show up as "innocent" middle men while a driver pleads and begs over the phone with a lender to not tow their car for any number of humiliating excuses.
Ive also had cars towed to the shop i work at complaining that the vehicle does not start, which are sometimes the saddest jobs to work on as automotive dealerships typically install an ECU interlock somewhere in the vehicle to remotely disable or neuter certain features of the car if you dont make a payment. I usually remove the devices, not out of a kindness to the customer but because they can make diagnosing real problems with vehicles infuriatingly difficult. They can also be triggered to honk the horn at random or odd intervals as a reminder to pay the piper, which turns a regular shift in the garage into a massive headache trying to track down the upset BMW or Mercedes that wont stop making racket in the lot.
by nostromo on 5/20/18, 10:47 PM
That's horrifying.
It reminds me of how social security numbers evolved from something narrow in purpose to something that can be used to track an individual's every detail. Now license plates are evolving into a tool that is used to build databases of every individual's movement.
by wallflower on 5/21/18, 1:22 AM
by djrogers on 5/21/18, 1:44 AM
Besides, hoopties can be charming :-)
by alexpotato on 5/21/18, 1:43 AM
by saagarjha on 5/20/18, 11:26 PM
> the rising deployment of remote engine cutoffs and GPS locators in cars
Wait, so people can remotely track my car or turn it off? This doesn't sound like a hack away from disaster at all.
> The companyʼs goal is to capture every plate in Ohio and use that information to reveal patterns…“Itʼs kind of scary, but itʼs amazing,” said Alana Ferrante, chief executive of Relentless.
No, it's just scary.
> Repo agents are responsible for the majority of the billions of license plate scans produced nationwide. But they donʼt control the information. Most of that data is owned by Digital Recognition Network (DRN), a Fort Worth company that is the largest provider of license-plate-recognition systems. And DRN sells the information to insurance companies, private investigators — even other repo agents.
As if you couldn't make a bad situation worse: let's give all the information to a private company that has every reason to resell all that data.
by clumsysmurf on 5/21/18, 1:53 AM
I wonder if anyone in the insurance industry could comment on how this data is used by them.
by iampims on 5/20/18, 11:55 PM
by anfilt on 5/22/18, 6:37 AM
by modzu on 5/21/18, 12:52 AM