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Or paper tags (thank you, Texas!). Texas finally passed some legislation to get rid of the tags recently and force real ones, but that is going to take some tim

Or paper tags (thank you, Texas!). Texas finally passed some legislation to get rid of the tags recently and force real ones, but that is going to take some time to implement (2 years) For those that weren’t aware, Texas has had such a massive problem with its paper tags in how easy they are to fraudulently produce that criminals in all 50 states use them: https://www.nbcdfw.com/investigations/how-texas-paper-tags-became-a-200m-criminal-enterprise-nbc-5-investigates/2808043/?amp=1 https://www.nbcdfw.com/investigations/how-texas-paper-tags-b... It’s actually a decently cool story because it was directly the result of a newspapers (the Statesman) reporting about the problem that led to the investigation, prosecution of criminals and legislation that’s fixing it. A great reminder of how important actual journalism is

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Washington now requires laminated paper temp plates that are displayed outside before the real plates can arrive.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
  Texas’ problem was not really the fact that you can print them easily, but the fact that you could produce “legitimate” ones without any verification whatsoever that the car actually existed. The DPS also had some limitations in what they could do enforce anything for several years which made the problem worse (legislative red tape). So all these tags were actual legitimate tags that showed up in a legit tag database, they just never were real cars that corresponded to sales. So even something like a license plate reader wouldn’t have caught these. Although I will say anything that a layman producing with a printer that has value is always going to have a counterfeit risk. It just wasn’t counterfeit in the typical sense here.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Even metallic license plates can be counterfeited, I assume its just not worth the effort yet. If you have a database of legit license plate numbers to VIN, you should be able to (a) detect that the license plate is on a vehicle that matches the VIN, and (b) detect if the same legit license plate number is being used at the same time (flagging it).
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
      Precisely, and that’s why it was even more wild that it wasn’t implemented like that. I think now the right laws have been passed that let DPS do that now correctly. But for a long they they either wouldn’t or couldn’t

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

Washington now requires laminated paper temp plates that are displayed outside before the real plates can arrive.

SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
Texas’ problem was not really the fact that you can print them easily, but the fact that you could produce “legitimate” ones without any verification whatsoever that the car actually existed. The DPS also had some limitations in what they could do enforce anything for several years which made the problem worse (legislative red tape). So all these tags were actual legitimate tags that showed up in a legit tag database, they just never were real cars that corresponded to sales. So even something like a license plate reader wouldn’t have caught these. Although I will say anything that a layman producing with a printer that has value is always going to have a counterfeit risk. It just wasn’t counterfeit in the typical sense here.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Even metallic license plates can be counterfeited, I assume its just not worth the effort yet. If you have a database of legit license plate numbers to VIN, you should be able to (a) detect that the license plate is on a vehicle that matches the VIN, and (b) detect if the same legit license plate number is being used at the same time (flagging it).
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
    Precisely, and that’s why it was even more wild that it wasn’t implemented like that. I think now the right laws have been passed that let DPS do that now correctly. But for a long they they either wouldn’t or couldn’t