A South St. Paul car dealer used Minneapolis license plate tracking data to find and repossess a car in South Minneapolis Thursday, likely the first time the records have been used by a business in Minnesota.
Jake Ingebrigtson, co-owner of Car and Credit Connection, sought information on four cars after reading in the Star Tribune that data stored by city license plate readers is retained for one year and available to the public. Ingebrigtson's company sells cars to people with bad credit, and the owners of the cars had stopped making payments.
Minneapolis has 10 license plate readers, most of them mounted on police and traffic cars, that scan thousands of license plates a day and store their location. The city has captured 4.9 million plates in 2012 alone.
Ingebrigtson received his data on Thursday morning and noticed one car had been spotted seven times at the same location. At 9 a.m. he input the coordinates into Google Maps on his Blackberry. By 9:30, he was standing in front of the car near Lake Street and Interstate 35W in south Minneapolis.
"It was comical. I've been looking for this car for two months," Ingebrigtson said, adding that it was clear they were "hiding the car there."
The company had previously visited the owner's house in St. Paul, only to find a "for rent" sign in the window. "They fall off the face of the Earth," Ingebrigtson said. "They won't return your calls."
Fifteen minutes after locating the car, which was parked on a city street, Ingebrigtson's repo man arrived to tow it back to his lot.
"This is a thousand dollars that just got put in my pocket because of this, basically," Ingebrigtson said.
