By Steven Symes 
It used to be that having your license plates out in plain view carried zero risk, but ghost car scams have changed everything. Criminals are stealing people’s physical plates, putting them on a different car in an effort to avoid paying road tolls, tickets from traffic enforcement cameras, and other fees.
Creative two-way car tampering scam busted.
To guard against that, the answer is to secure the license plates on your vehicle. There are a number of products designed to make your plate hard to remove, like tamper-proof screws or an anti-theft plate cover.
Also, parking your vehicle in the garage whenever possible is a good move.
Sadly, there’s another, growing, trend of criminals taking your license plate info to manufacture fake plates they use or sell to others. This has resulted in innocent people receiving notices of fees from places they’ve never even visited.
Sometimes, criminals even make fake temporary plates based off an innocent victim’s. Those are even easier to manufacture since it pretty much just requires a printer and the image of the paper plate.
That’s in part why Texas is in the process of doing away with paper tags entirely. Other states might follow, if that proves doable. But it sadly won’t completely stop the problems, although it should help.
But there are things you can do to fight a toll or speeding fee sent in the mail. There’s always a way to dispute those charges, plus you can request the image from the enforcement camera. That should show the vehicle using your plate number isn’t the one you own, helping to establish it was a ghost car and not yours.
Some people have had to go to investigative reporters for help because state agencies are used to dealing with people who just try to weasel out of fees. So you could have a battle on your hands.
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