I’ve been looking at used cars, and I’ve noticed that many of them have the license plate blurred are removed. What are they concerned about? I see hundreds of license plates a day, on the road.
I’ll wager a guess that it’s because you’re not just seeing the plate number, but will be able to associate it with a phone number, address, and perhaps a name (possibly through reverse lookup), thus increasing the risk of theft or identity theft for the seller.
In the UK copycat registration plates are becoming a big problem with even talks of the DVLA introducing some sort of chipping system to uniquely identify a plate. The problem seems to have been recently increased with things like eBay motors. If Mr X is regularly getting nicked for speeding by cameras. He can look on ebay motors or any other used car site for a car that matches his own and colour, simply take note of the registration and go to a garage and have the copycat registration number plate made up. voila, some poor guy is now paying for Mr X’s speeding tickets.
Can’t he just look around on the street for a similar car and do the same thing? I know that they do it on TV shows to protect identity but a seller wants you to know who they are. You can just as easiliy steal someones ID with name and phone number as with their car plate number. In other words I don’t know why they do it on car sale websites.
Now if the car is being sold through a third party they may not want you to be able to look up the owner and make an independant purchase.
why have I been quoted here ? I didn’t mention anything about stealing someones ID.
The purpose is to get hold of a resgitration plate from a car that looks very similar to yours. To hide your ID. You wont care who the seller is, what his bank details are or how old he is.
Absolutely, you could look for a similar car on the street, but it is alot quicker to use the internet or an autotrader magazine.
Same reason people lost their shit when Google Street View came out.
I do it to:
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protect the identity of the people for whom I’m selling cars (as techinically, since they are repos, they really don’t want them to be sold ANYWAY)
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If I was concerned about my well being, I might assume someone would use my plate to track me – by knowing my residence, they could make a pretense to look at the car whereas their true motives are actually to rape / pillage / plunder.
It’s very easy to find out everything about anyone, simply by starting with their plate number.
Just to be on the safe side I expect. They probably don’t know if it would be easy for anyone who happens to see the photo to look up their plate number and get their name and address. I’ve posted 2 different plate numbers on the Internet with no ill effects.
It took several readings before I realized the OP was talking about plate-blurring on pictures of used cars. For some reason I pictured him checking out cars at used car lots with salespeople running around smearing Vaseline on the plates.
Of course, this doesn’t make sense on several levels, hence my confusion.
People always tell me they can find someone from there license plate.
Someone mind telling me how? I know if you ring vic roads (the guys who u pay your registration & who gives you your plates) and tried to get them to give u some details on some plates they wont give you any info.
Googling “license plate reverse lookup” yields 366,000 results. Try it.
I saw a small thing in the news last week that Google Street View was not allowed for Canadian places until the Privacy Commissioner had made a deal with Google to blur out license plates and peoples’ faces.
Hey! There’s my parked car. Creepy. So, some Google consultant drove down my street in August with a camera on their car?
Ditto
Are any of them free though? If you have to pay that greatly lessens the number of people that might give you trouble.
In theory, yes. But in practicality, it would probably take somebody hours and hours of work on the street to duplicate what they could do in a few minutes with a sales book or website.
It’s incredibly rare for car thieves to stalk their victims on the internet – it’s really a crime of opportunity. The ONLY case I see it having any merit is when people post pictures of cars with high-dollar aftermarket parts on the internet (either to sell the car, or just to show it off). I have heard of cases where people will look up that specific car’s location and steal it to sell all the aftermarket parts. If you just want to steal a Lexus, you can just walk down the street until you find a Lexus. But if you want to steal a car with lots of expensive, untraceable parts, you might be looking for a while.
I also think it’s silly to do it for regular cars for sale on the internet because most of those people (after blurring the plates) will freely give out their name, phone number, and address to anyone who seems remotely interested in buying the car.