Welcome back, aspiring cyberwarriors!
Today, vehicles are everywhere, and overlooking them during an OSINT investigation would be a serious mistake. Every car leaves behind a trail of digital and photographic evidence through its license plates, identification numbers, and physical presence in public spaces. Unlike traditional methods that rely on privileged access to government records, modern vehicle OSINT utilizes publicly available resources, community-sourced data, and open registries to construct detailed intelligence profiles.
In this article, we will look at four services that can help you jump-start your vehicle OSINT investigation. Let’s get rolling!
Understanding License Plate Intelligence
The first thing we’ll see during car OSINT is the license plate. Plates are one of the most recognizable vehicle identifiers worldwide, but their formats, designs, and information structures vary from one region to another. To determine which country a license plate belongs to, we can use the website worldlicenseplates.com.
This website serves as a visual reference, cataloging plate designs from nearly every country and region. For instance, let’s check Russian license plates.
On this site you can view different license plate types and how they evolved over time. It also displays government, police, military, and other unique plate styles for easier identification during OSINT work.
Aggregating Search Tools for Plate Research
There are many databases that allow you to gather information about vehicles by entering a plate number, but instead of searching multiple services across different jurisdictions, you can use a tool created by Cyber Detective called Vehicle Number Search Toolbox. It serves as a navigation hub that directs investigators to the most relevant lookup tools for each country.
By selecting a country and entering a license plate number, the website redirects you to the appropriate database for that jurisdiction. Below, for example, is a sample report for a vehicle registered in the United Kingdom.
In addition to plate lookup tools, it is worth mentioning a service called Nomerogram. This is a community driven platform where users upload and share photographs and sightings of license plates across Russia.
Unlike Western equivalents that focus primarily on vehicle specifications or collector interests, Nomerogram emphasizes geolocation and movement tracking. Users upload photographs of vehicles they encounter, tagging them with location and timestamp information, gradually building a distributed surveillance network that maps vehicle movements across vast geographic areas.
Crowdsourced Vehicle Photography and Tracking
Another useful platform for finding vehicle images by license plate is Platesmania. It functions as a global community of car enthusiasts who photograph and upload interesting or unique plates along with the vehicles they belong to. The site works much like a social network focused on automotive photography, where users contribute photos from daily observations and explore uploads from others.
The search functionality allows anyone to query specific plate numbers and retrieve all associated photographs uploaded to the platform. Each photograph includes the location where it was taken, the date and time, and typically shows the complete vehicle along with surrounding context.
Interestingly, government vehicles, diplomatic plates, and personalized or unique registrations often receive special attention from contributors, which can inadvertently result in detailed tracking datasets over time.
Summary
In this article we explored how to identify license plates by visual characteristics, access jurisdiction-specific databases, and utilize crowdsourced photography platforms to track vehicle movements across different regions.
To continue learning and sharpening your investigative abilities, be sure to explore our OSINT Investigator Bundle.
Source: HackersArise
Source Link: https://hackers-arise.com/open-source-intelligence-osint-tools-and-techniques-for-vehicle-investigation-part-1/