License Plate Scams and How to Avoid Them

You’ve seen it a million times: someone has license plates as decoration in their home, on the wall of a restaurant, etc.  Seems totally harmless right?  It may well be harmless, (if the license plates are old) but there is important personal information on your license plates.  Read on for what to do and what not to do when it’s time for those license plates not to live on your vehicle anymore.

Your License Plate Contains Your Personal Information

Whether they are issued by a state, territory, tribal government, or the federal government, license plates contain unique personal information that connects you to your vehicle.  This is why law enforcement can find out who is driving a car, truck, or motorcycle by entering its plate information into their computer database.  (More on this later!)

The information contained in license plates is personal enough that European Union law considers license plates to be a protected form of personal data similar to your phone number, email and mailing address.  Here in the US, there’s a federal law called the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, which prohibits the DMV from releasing peoples’ private addresses, which are connected to their license plates in DMV records.  This means that any place where you’ve ever had a vehicle registered may still have a record of the address that you provided when you registered the vehicle.

How to be careful of license plates - and why you should!

Swap out your old license plate bolts for something like this Torx bolt to help ensure no one swipes your tags!

Torx-Schraube mit Außenrund-Kopf by S.Wetzel is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

The most important takeaway here is simple: don’t lose your license plates!

Make sure that they are securely attached to your vehicle in a way that makes it hard to remove them.  Consider swapping out the traditional screws that attach your plates and attaching them with something like Torx bolts instead.  Removing Torx bolts requires a less common tool that most people are less likely to have on-hand.

If you ever sell your vehicle, contact your local DMV and report the sale.  When you do this, you are making an official record that any crimes that get committed using the license plates or vehicle have nothing to do with you.  Different states have slightly different rules for what to do with license plates.  In Texas, you don’t have to return old license plates, but you do have to deface them so that they can’t be used improperly later on and pass as valid license plates.  (This blogger thinks this is such a fun way to handle old license plates!  How often do you get told by the government to deface something.  Texas rocks!)  In New Jersey on the other hand, you have to surrender old license plates, and the state gives you a receipt to prove that you followed the proper process and that the plates no longer trace back to you.

One of our goals at Dirt Legal is to help folks make as few trips to the DMV as humanly possible.  Check out our titling and vehicle registration services to see how easy we make it to get the required paperwork for any vehicle.

If you ever lose your license plates, report the loss right away to your local DMV.  Remember that, unless you tell the DMV otherwise, your license plates are a way to identify your name, address, and probably even your photo.  The internet is full of scary stories of people who ended up paying for crimes that were committed by someone else using license plates connected to them.  See below for some examples and remember, if you want to know important information about the history of your vehicle, the best way is to use our cheap, accurate, and reliable VIN Check service.

Being the victim of a license plate scam can make run-ins with law enforcement even less pleasant!

California Highway Patrol Dodge Charger conducting traffic stop by Chris Yarzab is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The Bank Robber

Someone robs a bank and uses a getaway car.  The bank robber doesn’t use license plates that can be traced back to themself, and they know better than to drive a vehicle without license plates on a public road (a surefire way to get pulled over even if you aren’t robbing a bank).  The bank robber puts someone else’s plates on their getaway car, and if you don’t take good care of them, those license plates might be yours.

E-Z Pass is convenient, but it connects to your license plate!

Pennsylvania Turnpike ramp to US 1 in Bensalem Township, PA by Otto Yamamoto is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The E-Z Pass Scammer

19 states use the E-Z Pass system to make it easy and quick to pay tolls on state highways, and at least 49 million vehicles use the system altogether.  When you go through a toll, the E-Z Pass reader scans a small device (called a transponder) that most drivers have stuck to their dashboards.  Some places, like Maryland, will even allow you to go through an E-Z Pass toll without your transponder and will bill your account using - you guessed it - your license plate.  E-Z Pass highways use license plate readers to capture the information of any car that goes through an E-Z Pass toll lane.

Let’s say you sold a car recently.  You knew better than to hand over your license plates when the buyer took possession of your car.  You took those old plates and put them in your garage.  You haven’t driven on an E-Z Pass highway recently, but you start receiving toll bills in the mail.  The bills are higher than the cost of normal tolls because license plate readers have recorded your car going through E-Z Pass toll stations and have billed your account even though your E-Z Pass transponder wasn’t in the vehicle.  (By the way, vehicles get charged at a higher toll rate in most places when they go through an E-Z Pass checkpoint without a transponder in the vehicle.)  You go looking for those old license plates and can’t lay your hands on them.  Someone must have taken them!  You realize that, because you never notified the DMV that you had sold your old car or had the license plates invalidated, the plates still trace back to you when the reader scans them.  Get ready for bureaucratic headaches with no easy solution.

We even came across a story where someone had gotten hold of actual license plate numbers and had generated fake temporary tags (those paper license plates that hang in the windows of recently-sold vehicles) using the stolen license plate info.  People started getting E-Z Pass bills for tolls they had never driven through, all because the sensitive info on their license plates had fallen into the wrong hands.

Law Enforcement Running Your Plate Info

Police officers do not need probable cause to use their computers to pull information from your license plates.

Police cruiser setting speed trap by Ildar Sagdejev is Free Content

Law Enforcement Running Your Plate Info

We have tons of respect for the hardworking people of law enforcement, but the simple fact is that police officers don’t need probable cause to run your license plate information through their computers.  This means that your personal information is at the fingertips of anyone with access to a police computer.  I used to have a small pontoon boat that I carried to and from my favorite fishing spot on a rooftop rack on my car.  I drove past a police officer who was sitting roadside, and although I didn’t get pulled over or anything, a few weeks later I got a ticket in the mail for having expired registration.  My working theory is that the police officer noticed my unique boat-carrying rig and ran my info just because he could.  The moral of the story is that your license plate can tell law enforcement anything there is to know about your vehicle.  Remember that this is still true even if the license plates are no longer attached to your vehicle!  Anything your license plates do can be traced back to you even if they aren't in your possession, unless and until you tell the DMV that they aren't yours anymore.

Summing Up

By now, hopefully you understand how much important information can be found using your license plates, how to be careful of your plates, and some things that can happen if your license plate info falls into the wrong hands.  As long as you protect your tags and file paperwork with the DMV when you are no longer using them, you will most likely never have some of the scarier problems named above.  If you do ever find yourself in a bureaucratic jam related to your vehicle, Dirt Legal is here to help.  We’ve helped thousands avoid trips to the DMV and get the paperwork they need to enjoy the road.