Melanie Blank Brown, a New York resident, picked her surname for her license plate. The plate read “BLANK,” and it turned out to be a costly coincidence.
Until a recent move, Brown had no idea what was building behind the scenes. When her 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 records listed the license plate number as “Blank.”
Almost immediately, she was told she had two outstanding tickets. The count 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; Brown had to make repeated visits to multiple judges to get them voided.
To keep the pile from growing, Brown surrendered the vanity plate. The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has since removed “BLANK” from the pool of available vanity plates. According to the New York Times, her replacement plate reads “KNALB.”
The episode points to a matching failure rather than a shortcut: a legitimate plate colliding with records in which no plate number had been properly entered. Widely shared stories about drivers using clever plates to dodge automated tickets are usually false or embellished.