You’ve probably heard stories about car owners coming up with slick vanity plates that help them dodge automated tickets. Most of those stories are likely false, at worst, or embellished, at best. Remember the story of “Null?” Probably not—or if you do, you probably didn’t hear it the way it really went down, which turned out to be the exact opposite of a life-hack.
But what if your name just so happens to be “Blank,” and you decide to be clever and choose that as your license plate? As New York resident Melanie Blank Brown found out the hard way, it’s a one-way ticket to absolute legal chaos.
Until a recent move, Blank had no idea what was brewing behind the scenes. When her registration was updated with her new address, the new entry for her license plate sequence was ingested by all of the local registration and ticketing systems, many of which had entries where the license plate number had been entered as—you guessed it—Blank.
Immediately, she was told she had two outstanding tickets. That number eventually spiraled to more than 400 violations with fines totaling more than $40,000. And of course, because they had been issued all over the city, they couldn’t be handled all at once. Brown had to endure repeated visits to multiple judges in order to void all of the tickets.
And to keep the pile from growing further, Brown surrendered her vanity plate. The NY State Department of Motor Vehicles has since removed it from the pool of potential vanity plates, lest somebody else feel clever enough to take a stab at the experience.
According to the New York Times, Brown’s new vanity plate reads “KNALB.” Obviously, somebody likes to live dangerously.
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