willy

A bloke at work recently got a speeding ticket... it was a gatso camera and it was from somewhere he`d never been before.
He told the police that he didnt drive anywhere near the place and sent a picture of his car...a Cupra R.
Apparently some criminals had cloned the reg onto another normal model cupra,but it was the same colour.
If it had been the same model it would have been very difficult to prove otherwise.
They also on that same day had been rammed off the road by police after a prolonged chase.

Beware of the cloners.

*****

Floyd

iTrader: (9)

So what can you do? Nothing to stop anyone from cloning your car.

F

S.B.

Make sure you blank out your reg plate on scoobynet photos

willy

SB you have made a valid point.
It seems that dodgy people are making plates up without V5 docs.

RS Grant

Still though....These dodgy people can walk down the street and spy an almost identical car to the one they have stolen.. take the reg number, write it down, or put it in their mobile and clone it that way.

So in reality, there isnt really any way to stop them is there?!

Cheers,
Grant

willy

Er no..
I thought making number plates without a V5 was supposed to be a) illegal and b) difficult.
Obviously not.

*****

SupaMiniCupa

Very easy to get a set of plates made up without a V5 I would have thought?

I'm sure my local sign shop would knock up some 'show plates' to standard spec without a V5. Its how I got my black plates for my 1996 car. I Just change them for official ones come MOT time.

chris's scooby

Nope, it's very easy.

TaviaRS

Dead easy to get plates made up on tinterwebnet thingy.

One way to aid identification, distinguishing marks on the car ie my car has a map of the Isle of Wight ( ) on the boot along with a Swedish Rally sticker. Also a slogan on the plate. I have digital photos of my car from March showing these items on it, so unless it is a proper / full clone job I'm in the clear.

<crosses fingers and touches wood>

richardg

a guy who worked for us had his golf cloned. he haad numerous speeding tickets, parking fines etc sent to him at home and over the course of about a year couldn't convince the police that he wasn't responsible for the offences. eventually a traffic warden located the car in the usual place in southend (where the majority of the tickets were issued) and the problem went away. not sure what happened to the guy with the cloned car but my colleague almost ended up in court for repeated non payment of fines. not really much you can do except cover your registration in photos and be careful who gets hold of your VIN (although this is clearly visible in windscreens on a number of cars these days).

thecirsch

Or you can short circuit the whole system by nicking the plates off the genuine car

gregjd

Happened on my wife's car too. It's a huge problem in and around London as cloning sidesteps the congestion charge. We finally proved it wasn't us by asking for the Tax disc info recorded on one of the parking fines we got..the details didn't match to our disc and this helped us clear our name with all the other London Borough's parking/gatso/congestion charge fines. It was all a major pain in the **** though and in the end the DVLA issued us with a fresh reg. number (although we had to pay for the new plates..which ironically I found were easy to get made up without anyone asking me for any info!!)

Vegescoob

So yet again the Government introduces legislation which, supposed to deal with criminal activity, turns out to be pretty useless.
No change there then.