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The TLO That Stings
TLO and Delvepoint are both offering Vehicle Sightings and Motorola has bought Vigilant Solutions which operates DRN, MVTrac, and PlaceLocate. Those databases are said to have already merged making this the most robust LPR data source available.
You should wait to sign your new TLO contract. At least wait until after January 1, 2019, when Digital Recognition Network is rumored to end TLOxp’s access to their data which powers the Vehicle Sightings search. A move that TLO has declined to acknowledge, or at least they haven’t informed their sales staff of the contractual split.
If you’ve recently signed a contract with TLO and the hard sell was the search for license plate vehicle locations, then you may have an easy out by citing the failure to disclose this detail. It’s my opinion that TLO isn’t worth the monthly fee without it, and other databases such as Delvepoint and IRBfocus outperform TLO by leaps and bounds (at least in my region of the southern states). Also, that monthly fee is going to double after the new year begins.
A short chat with DRN’s Andy Cameron leads me to believe that there are no plans for a special deal for investigators or process servers. These professions are considered high risk and there has been abuse observed with investigators buying historical tag data for vehicles already out for repossession.
The options are still there for investigators and process servers, other companies that are open to selling data directly to licensed professionals are MVtrac and PlateLocate. You can still expect to fork out between $100 and $200 per search with no expectation of a refund if you don’t like the results.
