A New York driver's personalized license plate turned into an unexpected legal headache after automated ticketing systems apparently treated the word "Blank" as an empty field rather than a plate number.
Melanie Blank Brown, a New York resident, had no idea what had been building behind the scenes until a recent move, according to the report. When her registration was updated with her new address, the new entry for her plate sequence was taken in by local registration and ticketing systems, many of which held records where the license plate number had been entered as "Blank."
She was immediately told she had two outstanding tickets. That count eventually grew to more than 400 violations with fines totaling more than $40,000, the article states. Because the tickets had been issued across the city, they could not be resolved in one pass; Brown had to make repeated visits to multiple judges to have them voided.
To keep the pile from growing further, Brown gave up the vanity plate. The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has since removed it from the pool of available vanity plates. Her replacement plate now reads "KNALB," according to the New York Times account cited in the article.
The article also notes that the widely repeated "Null" plate story, often presented as a way to dodge tickets, did not play out the way the popular version suggests.