Teen revenge fools speed cams
By: Drivers.com staff
Date: 2008-12-26
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The Sentinel, a community newspaper serving Montgomery County in Maryland reports that local high school teens are printing fake license plates with their computers, placing them over license plates on cars, and then running speed cameras. The idea seems to be to have the speeding ticket mailed to a victim, which is usually someone they have a grudge against.
The Sentinel attributes the fake license plate stories to a parent and says they originated at Wootton High School in Rockville. According to the parent, the involved students were duplicating license plates of their victims by printing the plate numbers on glossy paper using fonts downloaded from the Internet.
An elaboration of the fraud, says the Sentinel, is to borrow a car similar in appearance to the victim's vehicle and attach the fake plates to that.
However, there's been some skepticism about the story on the Internet. "You do have to question how the newspaper got hold of the story" says tech blogger John Lister. "It turns out the source is a 'concerned parent', whose motivation appears to be less about the victims of the pranks and more about the politics of speed cameras themselves." Police didn't seem to be aware of the trend until questioned by The Sentinel, Lister writes.
As a prank, the fake license plate ploy could, at the very least, be a serious inconvenience for victims. Apart from the time taken to sort the matter out it has the potential for costly increases in insurance rates. If prosecuted aggressively it could also be costly for the perpetrators. If, for example, a speeding car were pulled over by police and found to have fake license plates it could take a lot of sorting out by both teens and parents. 
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