Car Spotting and OSINT

Looking for specific car? Next to googling it, you could try a car spotting site to find pictures that might provide further leads for your OSINT investigations.

A while back, @Wondersmith_Rae wrote a great article on maritime OSINT. In this, vessel tracking sites were mentioned, which allow us to identify ships and monitor their movements. Wouldn’t it be neat to have something similar for cars?

While we will never be able to track and identify cars just as good as we can track large ships, this article will provide some useful hints that can help with OSINT on vehicles. But which data is relevant when researching cars and motorcycles? As most vehicles are mass-produced, research based solely on the manufacturer, model and color might be a bit challenging. So, we will need unique identifiers such as the VIN or license plate.

The VIN, or vehicle identification number, is a 17-digit code which is assigned to every vehicle when it’s manufactured. The are several paid databases that will enable looking-up a VIN and retrieving information on the vehicle and possibly its history. If you don’t want to spend money, just try googling the VIN. Since it is so unique, you probably won’t receive a lot of results and thus not many false positives.

One of my favorite free sites to obtain information on VINs and vehicles in the US is Poctra. This site crawls the web for salvage vehicles and archives all available information and pictures. Let us see what Poctra reveals on the VIN I had googled.

High-res images, the location of the auction, mileage and sometimes even a license plate. There are plenty of pivot points to conduct more OSINT here.

If we have a license plate, and the car is something a car spotter might take interest in, we might find images of it on various car spotter websites. Next to PlatesMania, my favorite site is Autogespot. Both allow to search by license plate.

Enough theory, time for a practical example. Arsenal London football player Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang was often seen with a Ferrari LaFerrari. Even though he lives in London, this vehicle does not carry a British license plate. A great repository of license plates can be found at World License Plates, in case you have to figure out which country the license plate originates from first. It turns out that Aubameyang’s Ferrari is registered in Germany. His license plate is AIB-Q 1414. Let us see if we can find this car on Autogespot.

By clicking on “More Filters” on the top right of the website, we can define our query.

This leads to several results, each containing multiple high-res images. Not all images are publicly accessible if you are not a paying member of Autogespot, but there is a workaround to retrieve the pictures hidden behind the paywall. We’ll get to that in a minute.

The top left entry shows that Aubameyang’s Ferrari was spotted in London on 21 September 2019 and that this sighting contains 10 pictures. The spotter also links his Instagram account, which might lead to further images. So, make sure you always pivot your investigations to these additional profiles as well.

Sometimes, we can retrieve the other pictures from Autogespot even without paying for a premium account. Just copy the URL of the page you are on and query it in Google.  Then have a look at the image results. Here are the other nine images:

The information we now obtained is once more useful as a pivot point for further investigations. Maybe we can geolocate the exact location the vehicle was parked at and thus know where Aubamayeng was on 21 September 2019 after lunch. Maybe these pictures could provide evidence that a vehicle was damaged prior to a current insurance claim. There are many reasons why tracking and identifying vehicles may be useful. When researching license plates, keep in mind that a simple search engine query or query within social media might also lead to results. In our case, it leads us to results on Twitter, Instagram and press articles, next to the car spotter sites we have looked at already.

There are plenty of other platforms worldwide that track vehicles and allow queries by license plate, another one of my personal favorites is Nomerogram (Номерограм) in Russia. This site not only displays luxury cars, but also every-day, ordinary cars. I guess this is related to Russian’s love of dashcams, resulting in a massive amount of video and imagery on all kinds of traffic participants.

With the techniques and sources shown above, a vehicle can be manually tracked to a certain extent. This tracking, however, will rely on geolocating the image. To practice this, I recommend participating in the @quiztime geolocation challenges on Twitter. In a future blog article, I’ll look at Wigle and see how this platform could help track cars as well.

Until then, have fun looking up exotic cars on the aforementioned sites. That is, unless you prefer going through pictures of banged-up, rusty Ladas on Nomerogram. Hey, I’m not judging!

MW-OSINT / 07. December 2019