I work as an automotive mechanic, and while I maintain a relatively neutral opinion on repo men, sometimes the amateurs that crawl out of the weeds are absurd.<p>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.<p>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.
> The company’s goal is to capture every plate in Ohio and use that information to reveal patterns.<p>That's horrifying.<p>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.
At least 10 years ago, a friend forgot where he parked his car in the Airport parking lot after a long trip. When he went to the booth embarrassed to tell them this, they said it was no big deal and did a quick tap-tap-tap on the keyboard using his license plate number to determine its exact location. They apparently scanned all the license plates in all their lots twice a day.
I honestly don’t get why anyone goes in to debt to buy a car in this day and age. You can buy a car (or truck) for $3000 that will last several years without requiring any huge mechanic bills or exotic maintenance - heck, I’ve done it. I would much rather take the bus/bike/walk and save up $500/mo for 6 months to be a free man than buy or lease a car for $500/mo and be a space to my creditors.<p>Besides, hoopties can be charming :-)
Wow, everything in this article is horrifying:<p>> the rising deployment of remote engine cutoffs and GPS locators in cars<p>Wait, so people can remotely track my car or turn it off? This doesn't sound like a hack away from disaster at all.<p>> 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.<p>No, it's just scary.<p>> 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.<p>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.
> DRN sells the information to insurance companies, private investigators ...<p>I wonder if anyone in the insurance industry could comment on how this data is used by them.