In April 2013, Jason Torchinsky walked outside his Los Angeles home and discovered that his yellow 1973 Volkswagen Beetle was missing. He had owned the car since he was 18 and had kept it for more than a decade, making its disappearance particularly distressing. At first, he wondered whether it had been towed, but he soon realised that the vehicle had been stolen. What followed was an unusual internet-assisted search that used a single photograph, a handful of visual clues and Google Street View to locate the missing car within five days.
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