Vanity plates are sometimes presented as a way to confuse automated ticketing systems, but such stories are often false or embellished. For Melanie Blank Brown, a New York resident, the problem was not a loophole but a naming coincidence that exposed her to a mass of violations tied to records that used “Blank” as the plate entry.
After a recent move, Blank Brown learned what had been building behind the scenes. When her registration was updated with her new address, the new entry for her license plate sequence was ingested by local registration and ticketing systems. Many of those systems contained records in which the license plate number had been entered as “Blank.”
She was immediately told she had two outstanding tickets. The count eventually rose to more than 400 violations, with fines totaling more than $40,000. Because the tickets had been issued all over the city, they could not be handled all at once; Blank Brown had to make repeated visits to multiple judges to void them.
To keep the pile from growing, she surrendered the vanity plate. The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has since removed “BLANK” from the pool of potential vanity plates, preventing another driver from choosing the same sequence. The New York Times reported that her replacement plate reads “KNALB.”