Why Temporary License Plates are Everywhere Now
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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Have you noticed an abundance of cars with paper license plates lately? Maybe you noticed one of these mystery cars parked ambiguously next to a fire hydrant, or took note of the strange plates as the car bearing it cut you off on the highway. With so many of them on city streets and highways, it seems as if everyone has recently bought a new car, because that's how you usually use paper tags. They're temporary until you get your permanent license plates. While some of these cars may be new with owners waiting for their permanent plates, many are utilizing what is known as ghost tags, and function as a symbol of something more menacing.
With us now to give us the scoop on ghost tags, because we know a lot of you have been wondering, is Jesse Coburn, investigative reporter at Streetsblog. He recently published a three-part investigation on the topic called Ghost tags: Inside New York City’s black market for temporary license plates. Jesse, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC today.
Jesse Coburn: Hey, Brian. Thanks for having me.
Brian Lehrer: Can you first explain more than I did what a ghost tag is?
Jesse Coburn: Sure. Ghost tags, as we were defining them, are temporary license plates that are either fraudulent or fake. By fraudulent we mean temporary license plates that are real, but issued fraudulently. As you said, temp tags are only supposed to be issued as part of the sale or lease of a car, but we found that used car dealers are just straight up selling them to people without selling or leasing them a car, and that's illegal.
There are fake temporary license plates which are just temp tags that someone is drawing up in Photoshop made to look like the real thing, but it's totally fake.
Brian Lehrer: Why would somebody want to obtain a ghost tag instead of using a regular license plate?
Jesse Coburn: There's a few reasons that range from the less serious to the more serious. On the less serious end, you might want a illegal temp tag if you don't want to pay tolls or traffic tickets generated by cameras catching drivers speeding or running red lights. You might get a fake or fraudulent temp tag if you don't have car insurance and can't get a metal license plate the legal way. You might get a temp tag if you don't want to register your car so that you can avoid paying potentially thousands of dollars in sales taxes and registration fees on that vehicle purchase.
According to law enforcement, some people are using fake or fraudulent temp tags while committing more serious crimes basically as a way to mask their identities while doing whatever they're doing.
Brian Lehrer: Well, what happens when someone using a ghost tag gets into an accident or commits some sort of vehicular crime for which they come under the eye of law enforcement? Are they penalized for using the ghost tag itself?
Jesse Coburn: Yes, there is a criminal charge that drivers who use a fraudulent temp tax face. It's called criminal possession of a forged instrument. I believe it's usually charged as a misdemeanor. I spoke to a couple people who received that charge and it was processed as a desk appearance ticket, so I think they were fined and maybe that was on their record. It can carry a jail sentence of up to one year. I don't know how often that happens. I suspect it's fairly rare.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your calls on this. Interested in your experiences. Have you had experience with ghost tags? Have you been the victim of someone using a ghost tag in some way or another, or anybody want to do ghost tag true confessions? 212-433 WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer.
For Jesse Coburn, investigative reporter at Streetsblog, who's all over this, what do you consider the most serious harm? Are people getting away with murder, literally, if they have a hit-and-run accident let's say, and drive off with ghost tags? What's the worst thing that's actually happening as a result of the proliferation of these?
Jesse Coburn: Well, according to the NYPD, 25 people were killed in car crashes, in 2021 and 2022, in crashes where at least one of the cars had a temporary license plate on it. According to the NYPD, 10 of those plates were fraudulent. The number may be higher as it can be difficult to determine that a real tag was actually issued fraudulently.
There have been car crashes. There was one in Brooklyn a couple years ago in which a recent high school graduate was killed. The driver who hit that man's Lyft, because the kid was driving in a Lyft, had a fraudulent New Jersey temp tag on it and then sped off, and that driver was never caught. The problem is while real license plates and legitimate temp tags, the license plate numbers can be looked up in law enforcement databases, if that tag is fake, that number will return nothing, and so it's impossible to trace that plate number back to the person behind the wheel.
Brian Lehrer: Balfour in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hello, Balfour.
Balfour: Hey, good morning, Brian. How are you? I've always questioned that legitimacy of these temporary plates. I've always had cars that I got out of the dealer and they always issue me a real plate. Now, having said that, the city of New York needs to tamp down on these illegal temporary plates, because who ends up paying? The legitimate, honest, hardworking, tax-paying person as always pays the price. Why? Heaven forbid you go a few miles over the speed limit, boom, you get a ticket. You get a red light that just turned red, you go through the light, you get a ticket.
These guys are getting away not with murder, but with other things, and I don't think it's fair to the law-abiding citizen to pay the consequences of these policies. Why don't they make all tags that are temporary illegal? It's like a license. You cannot drive until you get your license. Why should you be able to drive until you get your plates?
Another thing is these tinted windows and these excessively loud mufflers. It's out of control. These guys know they can't get caught, so they skirt the law. They do what they want. Out-of-state guys too. I don't know why New York City permits out-of-state. They don't pay taxes to renew our roads. They don't pay a fee to get their license renewed, but the New York guy who has New York plates and a New York license, he has to pay taxes on these guys that are using our roads that come from out of state. Obviously, they live here, but they're not contributing to the cost of maintaining the roads.
Brian Lehrer: I hear you, Balfour. Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you. Call us again. Well, I don't think anybody really wants to go- or not many people want to go so far as to ban out-of-state drivers, because they don't contribute to paying for the road, but that is another question that I know I've wondered about. That is, if you have a legitimate out-of-state license plate, not a ghost tag, but you don't have toll booths anymore, it's all this electronic license plate reading if you don't have E-ZPass, then how do those people ever pay their tolls?
Jesse Coburn: I believe those drivers if they don't have E-ZPass, they get billed by mail.
Brian Lehrer: Yes, but you're passing through New York and you live in Kentucky. Do they pay? Is there data?
Jesse Coburn: I'm not familiar with that. I don't know the answer to that, but I would assume that tolling agencies are able to bill drivers from out of state, but I'm not certain about that.
Brian Lehrer: Well, roughly how many ghost tags are on the street in the five boroughs? If I were walking down the street and I saw a paper license plate on a car, what's the probability today that it's illegal?
Jesse Coburn: That's a good question and a difficult one to answer. I'm not aware of any government agency that's tracking this problem holistically, or if they are, they haven't published any numbers, giving a sense of the scope of the problem.
Brian Lehrer: One of the reasons that we're talking about this is that there seems to be a proliferation of the ghost tags these days. There's a marketplace for these fake license plates that didn't exist in the past or not to this degree. That's true?
Jesse Coburn: Yes, I think that's definitely true. What we found in our own reporting is, we looked at New Jersey and Georgia which are two states whose temp tags very commonly appear on the streets of New York City. We identified something like 300,000 temp tags issued by dealers in those states caught fraudulently issuing temps. Texas is another state that's had a huge problem with temp tag fraud. One criminal ring alone there was indicted after fraudulently issuing something like 700,000 Texas temp tags through sham dealerships. It's a widespread problem, and it did get worse during the pandemic, as you said.
Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. Here's George who says he's on the George Washington Bridge, but maybe by the time we took your call George, you've already arrived in Fort Lee or Washington Heights. Hi, you're on WNYC.
George: Not a chance. I'm still looking at the Hudson. How are you?
Brian Lehrer: [laughs] Another day on the GW. Okay, what do you got?
George: Well, the one thing I wanted to bring up was, picking up a temporary tag from a dealer, used car, and someone else had a ghost tag that matched mine. You talked a little bit about E-ZPass and the fact that things are photographed now. I got thousands and thousands of dollars- [background noise] sorry for the noise, thousands of dollars in bills and the only way to get rid of these bills is to call E-ZPass day by day because they won't aggregate them together.
I went to the police, basically, with another New Jersey car. There's a tremendous amount of work in getting these things taken off, let's say, your record, and avoiding having to pay E-ZPass.
Brian Lehrer: Wow, so they used your license plate number on the fake tag?
George: Yes, different car. You could zoom in and see that it was doctored, but because of the proliferation of all of these cameras now, it's so much easier to get away with that, and a heck of a lot of work if you have to try to undo it.
Brian Lehrer: How'd you get your record cleared?
George: Just about three months of constant phone calls.
Brian Lehrer: George, safe driving. Thank you for checking in. We don't usually take calls from people who are actually operating a motor vehicle at the moment because we don't actually think it's safe to concentrate to the extent that you have to concentrate to talk on the air on a live radio show while you're driving a car, but we made an exception in that case because it was so relevant.
Jesse, I guess I assumed naively that fake license plates are made-up numbers, but we see what happened. This is identity theft of poor George-on-the-George-Washington-Bridge's license plate.
Jesse Coburn: Yes, and that's not the first time I've heard of something like that happening to somebody. The really insidious thing about this problem, I think, is that, okay, so there's fake tags, which are just fake numbers made by someone in Photoshop, but then there are real temporary license plates that are being issued by dealers illegally. Those are being produced in DMV-created web portals to print temp tags where you're supposed to be plugging in the legitimate information about the vehicle buyer, their insurance policy, the VIN number, all of that stuff.
What I found is that in New Jersey in Georgia, you can basically plug fake information into those systems and print out a real tag that shows up as real in law enforcement databases. To illustrate this, one Jersey City dealer created a temp tag for New Jersey governor, Phil Murphy, as if Phil Murphy had just bought a car from this dealer. He had not. All of the information was fake, the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission system for printing temp tags allowed this transaction to proceed.
Brian Lehrer: That's brazen. Andre in Rahway, you're on WNYC. Hi, Andre.
Andre: Good morning, Brian. I have a question, how is someone supposed to be able to tell if a tag is fake? I'm an attorney and I had a client come to me. I got him off but when I did the research on how to determine whether it was fake or not, it was difficult. My client had a trucking business. He took one of his trucks to a shop and he saw another truck that the owner had for sale and already had temp tags on it. When one of his drivers took the truck out, he was stopped for having fake tags.
Brian Lehrer: Andre, thank you. There's a story like the other story. We're going to run out of time in a couple of minutes. How much money have state agencies like the MTA or the Port Authority lost due to the prevalence of ghosts tags? Do you have a number?
Jesse Coburn: Some agencies do, others don't. The MTA lost around $11 million last year due to unpaid tolls, that is bridges and tunnels, because of bad temp tags. The Port Authority loses around $40 million a year but that number also includes missing and obscured plates, I believe. New York City Department of Transportation loses around $60 million a year due to fraudulent or missing tags, and then there's the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles which loses presumably significant amounts of money in unpaid sales tax and registration fees. The agency told me they don't have any estimate of that figure.
Brian Lehrer: Yes, because that gets back to what the first caller, Balfour in Queens, was saying. It's the legitimate driver who pays their fees, pays for their license plates, who has to then, in effect, pay more if we assume that the Port Authority or the MTA have to spend the same amount of money to do their work, but some people are getting away. It's like fair-beating in a certain respect. To compensate for that same amount of money, the law-abiding people have to be taxed more.
How have elected officials responded to this issue? What government agency is responsible for regulating used car dealerships or these black market ghost tag dealers who you interviewed? Who enforces it, and how do they?
Jesse Coburn: In the states that we looked at, it's the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission in the Georgia Department of Revenue that are responsible for regulating used car dealers. I should say, it's really used car dealers, not new car dealers, who are selling temp tags illegally when it is happening. Those agencies told me that they're aware of the problem and that they're working on it. They were a bit mum about what specifically they're doing to combat the problem.
There have been no major legislative or regulatory reforms to used car dealer licensing or the temp tag systems in those states since the black market for these tags exploded during the pandemic. New York City has tried to crack down on the problem but their efforts have primarily focused on drivers driving with these bad tags which is dealing with the symptom of the problem and not the root of it.
I will say Bronx council-member, Oswald Feliz, I believe yesterday, announced that he will be introducing legislation to try to tackle this issue, which I believe would create fines for New-Yorkers selling temp tags illegally, it would increase fines for people driving with these tags.
Brian Lehrer: I saw in your reporting that you spoke with a number of ghost tag dealers, some denying that they engage in this activity, but some openly admitting it, and a few of your encounters with them were quite hostile. Did you ever feel endangered?
Jesse Coburn: I had an interesting visit to a used car dealership in Staten Island under the Bayonne Bridge, where when I introduced myself as a journalist and inquired about the large number of temp tags that one of their sister dealerships in New Jersey was issuing, the manager asked me if I worked with the government and threatened to sue Streetsblog, and told me not to look into his dealership.
Brian Lehrer: Let me sneak in one more listener story, because I think we have one more good one on the board that's worth extending for by a minute. Liz, you're on WNYC, hi.
Liz: Hi. Can you hear me?
Brian Lehrer: I can hear you all the way from Westchester.
Liz: Oh, okay. Right. I jumped on this call because it happened to me in New York City. A couple of years ago, I got into an accident, a guy hit my car. When I got out, usual thing you do, ask for registration. I have my smartphone, I even took pictures of his tags and everything, and the guy was like, "Yes." I called the cops so they can come and record this. The guy said, "I'm looking for something." He acted like he was looking for something, he jumped in his car and he took off. I didn't care because I was like, "I got his registration, I got the tags, I'm set."
The cops come up and I give them the information. They run it through their grid, it was fake. Everything he gave me was fake, everything, including the tags that I photographed. They could not find any of that data in their system. I was like, "Oh my god." I'm glad to hear this show today because I didn't even know there was a name for it. I heard something called ghost tags.
Brian Lehrer: Yes, ghost tags. They never got the guy?
Liz: No, they never did. He took off before the cops arrived. He waited around, acted like he was looking for something in his car, jumped into his very nice-looking Mercedes car, and took off and left me there. [laughs] [unintelligible 00:18:20]
Brian Lehrer: I'm sorry. At least you could laugh about it now. Call us again. Thank you. Real quick, 30 seconds, what about the NYPD? How can they respond when they encounter a car that turns out to have ghosts plates?
Jesse Coburn: Well, they can ticket the driver, they can impound the car as they have done many times in recent years. Again, to deal with the source of the problem, legislators in New Jersey and Georgia are going to have to take action on this issue. I believe there's only so much the NYPD can do about licensed dealerships out of state producing these tags.
Brian Lehrer: We leave it there with Jesse Coburn, investigative reporter at Streetsblog. Jesse, thanks for joining us.
Jesse Coburn: Thanks so much, Brian.
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