Police Officers in Kyle will be using LPR to identify individuals with outstanding warrants. When identified, the individual will have the option of paying the outstanding warrant, plus a 25% fee that is sent to the company providing the LPR technology, Vigilant Solutions.Police cars in Texas are allowed to have debit and credit card readers in their vehicles, so individuals can make their payment when stopped by an officer.

For those who choose not to pay on the spot, the officers are then instructed to take the individuals to court to make their payment, or to jail.

The police also now have an incentive to look for debt as a way to pay for their program,” said a Texas civil rights lawyer.

Capital Adjusters has been using License-Plate Recognition technology since 2010 to help locate cars out for repossession and this technology has been sweeping the repossession industry since that time. In 2010, LPR repossessions were 10% of our total volume. Last year LPR accounted for 28% of our total repossession volume.

But this doesn't tell the whole story because that 28% figure is only the cars that we found with our cameras. Many of our clients have contracted directly with an LPR  company to find their collateral and, once found through that company's LPR database, they then assign the account out for repossession. So my guess is that the percentage of units recovered through the use of LPR is quite a bit higher than what we can track here directly.

Years ago we used to use pretexting (misrepresenting ourselves by phone to trick the debtor into revealing the location of the collateral) and breaking phone numbers to find where the debtor was. Today pretexting is illegal and debtors have cell phones that aren't tied to any one address or even a state. With LPR we've been able to balance the scales and have a good tool to use in locating collateral that in some cases would never be found again.

Another tool used by used car dealerships is to place GPS trackers in the cars they finance. This works great until the customer has the GPS disabled. In this case, LPR to the rescue again. Several car lots who use GPS trackers in their cars turn to us to help find their missing collateral when the tracker has been disabled.

If your not using LPR as part of your skip tracing and repossession arsenal, you should look into it. If you are unfamiliar with this technology or how it works, read mytwo parts series on How Does License Plate Recognition Technology Really Work? Part 1 and Part 2.

Does LPR have an advantage for the consumer? Yes. The faster and more cost effectively a lender can repossess on a defaulted loan contract, the lower the fees that lender can charge for new loans. It can save a lender hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars in skip tracing fees and written off bad loans. These savings are then passed along to the consumer in the form of lower loan fees.