A New York resident's personalized license plate turned into a legal tangle after automated ticketing systems read the plate as a missing-data placeholder instead of a real registration.
Melanie Blank Brown held a vanity plate reading "BLANK." Until a recent move, she had no idea what was building behind the scenes. When her vehicle registration was updated with her new address, the new entry for her plate sequence was ingested by local registration and ticketing systems. Many of those systems held records in which the license plate field had been entered as, simply, "Blank."
Almost immediately, Brown was told she had two outstanding tickets. That count spiraled into more than 400 violations with fines totaling more than $40,000.
Clearing them was not a single transaction. Because the tickets had been issued all over the city, they could not be handled at once. Brown had to appear before multiple judges, repeatedly, to have each violation voided.
To keep the pile from growing further, she gave up the plate. The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has since removed it from the pool of potential vanity plates, so no other driver can repeat the experiment.
According to the New York Times, her replacement plate reads "KNALB." The case echoes earlier tales of drivers choosing placeholder-style strings such as "Null" to slip past automated tickets — stories that have generally turned out to be the opposite of the shortcut they were sold as.