A New York driver's attempt at a clever license plate turned into a drawn-out administrative ordeal, according to a report in the New York Times. Melanie Blank Brown, a New York resident, chose a vanity plate reading "BLANK." Until a recent move, she had no idea what was building in the background.
When her 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 field had been entered as "Blank." Her plate matched them.
She was told immediately that she had two outstanding tickets. That number eventually spiraled to more than 400 violations, with fines totaling more than $40,000. Because the tickets had been issued all over the city, they could not be handled all at once; Brown had to make repeated visits to multiple judges to have them voided.
To keep the pile from growing further, Brown surrendered the vanity plate. The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has since removed "BLANK" from its pool of potential vanity plates, according to the report, so that no other driver can repeat the experiment. Her replacement plate reads "KNALB."
The case runs against a persistent genre of online lore in which custom plates are said to help owners dodge automated tickets. The article notes that most such stories are likely false at worst or embellished at best, and that the widely retold "Null" case turned out to be the exact opposite of a life hack.