California man’s plan to avoid tickets with special license plate backfired

What would your reaction be if the DMV charged you thousands of dollars worth of fines if your vanity license plate caused their systems to malfunction? Well, that’s precisely what once happened to this California ‘hacker.’

Vanity license plates aren’t uncommon in California, and you might spot one every day.

However, this security researcher decided to get a special license plate that broke the DMV’s backend systems.

He ended up with over $12,000 in traffic fines in no time.

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California man’s plan to avoid tickets with license plate

The security researcher — Joseph Tartaro — got a vanity plate that read ‘NULL’ back in 2016.

Shortly after he paid his first legitimate ticket in 2018, he started receiving hundreds of citations to his name.

It obviously wasn’t him rampaging around the city — but an error from ticket issuing systems.

You see, he chose the word ‘Null’ for his license plate.

For context, the word is a special entry for programmed computer systems that basically tells the system that a value is empty or undefined.

Now, there were several traffic fines registered that didn’t have a license plate entry and had the value ‘null.’

As soon as Tartaro paid his fine in 2018, the system associated his car with all those undefined fines and sent them his way.

What started as a way to prank the DMV to avoid fines (in the hope of breaking their systems) turned out to backfire.

Although Tartaro did break their systems, it didn’t exactly turn out the way he hoped it would.

Getting out of the situation

As odd as it may be, it wasn’t his fault by any means.

It’s certainly a karma lesson if there ever was one, but the problem essentially lay in badly programmed software.

After he got $12,000 in fines mailed to his home, the security researcher contacted the DMV and LAPD to get it resolved.

‘Change your license plate’ was the only solution he got from them.

However, he got lucky, and the DMV cleared the false fines.

But the problem didn’t fix itself, so he kept receiving more fines for the years to come.

He could have switched his special license plate, but the man chose to avoid the fines because they weren’t his to pay.

As for us, it certainly makes for an interesting tale.

Some images used in this story were generated using AI.