Sunday, Apr 15, 2012 at 21:22
3.0turbob - Google is your friend, matey. Just get some details and type it intp the Google toolbar search menu, and you'll be stunned at what comes up.
In this case, he was dumb enough to remove the front numberplate, but not the back one.
Typing the rego into Google gives me 2 immediate hits - bingo! - straight up. Make sure you use Google toolbar, and not a Google search menu on your ISP's homepage or any other page.
The reason for this is, I've found that ISP's and other webpages will filter your Google results and miss half what the Google site finds.
I'll tell you an amazing story here. I frequent the tractor forums a lot, American and Australian, and about 10 yrs ago, a bloke came on the Antique Caterpillar
forum complaining that someone had knocked off his backhoe.
We got all the details off him, including the S/N, and I started Googling. In less than 10 mins, I found an identical backhoe for sale, with two numbers just slightly different in the S/N.
It was along the lines of S/N 583608 and S/N 588808. Now, I've been around a while, and I've seen every trick in the book. Changing letters in S/N's, such as making a '3' into an '8', and a '6' into an '8', and so on, are de riguer for thieves.
This backhoe was for sale in an adjoining U.S. State to where it had been stolen from. I went back to the Yank, and told him to suss out this backhoe for sale, that I'd found, because it looked VERY suss to me.
Well, he came back 3 days later, and said - "You were SPOT ON!!. We went and checked out the 'hoe, and it was ours, and these thieves had hammered the new numbers into place in the S/N!
We sent in the troopers and nailed them good! I owe you one!"
I don't know who was more stunned over that episode - him or me - but it alerted me to the massive power of Googles ability to track things down.
No matter what you do, it's amazing what turns up on Google, because it searches around 98% of the web pages in the world.
Cheers - Ron.
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