Follow that Car! - OSINT for Identifying Vehicle Information

Most classic private investigator movies have a "follow that car" scene; it's an all too common trope. While moving surveillance is still practiced by private investigators, on the OSINT research/corporate investigations side of the industry, we tend to do most of our "following" via sources like social media.

To that end, below we survey some jurisdictions that offer interesting possibilities for obtaining further public information using a vehicle registration/license plate number. This isn't exhaustive, naturally, just a couple of examples. The overarching point is that sometimes what fees like a "dead end" in your research isn't a dead end and you shouldn't assume it is.

Peru

One of my favorite stories involves a case I worked a years ago. An international hospitality firm believed some top executives in its Peruvian subsidiary might be running a competing business "on the side" in addition to poaching employees from the subsidiary's ranks.

We began digging in public records and found that, in fact, the executives were directors of quite a few companies that were competing with our client. We then began efforts to map the activities of said companies.

Then we ran into a problem.

A key property we suspected was owned by one of the competitor companies was located in rural Peru. We didn't have an address, because, there are no "addresses" to speak of, and even if we did, we couldn't waltz into the property registry and obtain anything with that information. We didn't have the budget to try every single company name at a remote registry office and we couldn't send someone out to the property. We had one proverbial bullet left, and the result had to be a bull's eye. The hunt seemed to have reached a dead end.

The break in the case came when we found an archived Google Street View image that showed a truck entering the property through an access road. Only, this time, Google had not blurred its license plate. Luckily for us, in Peru, you can search a license plate number and obtain vehicle ownership information; it's a matter of public record. That's all it took to tie the truck to a company and, from there, the company to ownership of the property at the local registry.

Let's say you want to confirm a vehicle in an image you found online from Peru belongs to a certain person. I've provided an example found online below but obscured the license plate number, which was visible in the original.

A vehicle in Lima, Peru

Start by navigating to the National Superintendent of Public Registries' vehicle search page. Here you can enter the license plate number and receive a result that looks as follows.

Vehicle Ownership Result in Peru

Again, I have redacted the information, but we can see that a license plate number in Peru will allows us to verify the color, make, model, VIN number, and owner of the vehicle as well as the location where it is registered.

Colombia

In Colombia we can navigate to the National Transit Registry (RUNT) portal. This search offers a variety of possibilities. The search for foreign and diplomatic vehicles only requires an input of a license plate number.

However, the search for Colombian vehicles requires a license plate number and owner identification number (see below).

Colombia National Transit Registry search page

This is not as bad as it sounds, the options for identification number include a Tax Identification Number (NIT), which is normally fairly easy to find in other public records and is issued to both individuals and corporations. In other words, this can serve as a means of checking whether a vehicle you suspect is owned by your subject is actually registered to them.

If you really want the additional vehicle information as reflected in RUNT files, you can order a vehicle history report (it costs about USD 9.00) by license plate number and use the car insurance information (SOAT) to search RUNT at the page referenced above. There are other possibilities at the local Mobility Services Offices (some of which offer online searches), but these are beyond the scope of this post.

Again, this is not an exhaustive post. Ecuador, Mexico, India, and even Kenya offer some possibilities for obtaining information based on license plate numbers.

The point here is that we should be aware that there are some places in world where it's possible to leverage license plate numbers in order to extract further public information, sometimes including vehicle ownership. More awareness of all the possibilities makes for more robust research and, ultimately, better results.