A New York driver discovered that a clever vanity plate can become a legal liability when the plate reads "BLANK" and ticketing systems have used that same word as a placeholder.
Melanie Blank Brown, a New York resident, had no idea what was accumulating until a recent move. When her vehicle 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 held records in which the license plate number had been entered simply as "Blank."
She was immediately told she had two outstanding tickets. That number eventually climbed to more than 400 violations, with fines totaling more than $40,000. Because the tickets had been issued across the city, they could not be handled all at once; Blank had to make repeated visits to multiple judges to get them voided.
A plate pulled from circulation
To keep the pile from growing further, Blank surrendered the vanity plate. The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has since removed the sequence from its pool of potential vanity plates, so no other driver can repeat the experiment.
According to reporting cited in the article, her replacement plate reads "KNALB."
The case also runs against the popular notion that certain plate choices let owners slip past automated ticketing. Stories along those lines are typically embellished or false, and the widely repeated "Null" tale reportedly played out as the opposite of a shortcut.