Yesterday, a strange car swept over Minneapolis’s social media pages due to its unique look. At first glance, it’s just a regular, older car. However, there is also something odd on the back which prompted one Minneapolis local to get their phone out and take a quick snap.

Specifically, they noticed the black cameras on the sides which had wires going into the trunk. Understandably, you may be a little shocked to see something like this driving around, as it’s not your everyday occurrence. So, what was it exactly?

The most likely explanation is that these aren’t typical cameras. Instead, they’re actually license plate scanners. These work by scanning plates that are outdated. In other words, this car looks like a scout for a repo company. In fact, this technology has been around for over a decade and is regularly used by repo companies who are on the lookout for outdated plates. Nonetheless, seeing one of these cars out in the wild is still a rarity.

This process works whereby the car in question goes around tagging every license plate and the GPS location and then putting them into a database. It also turns out that police cars often use this technology, albeit their cars use the scanners in a subtler way which is less obvious. Although this car was spotted in Minneapolis, as you may expect they’re also nationwide and these days act as a profession for the drivers that cruise round in them.