Motorists utilizing ‘easy’ hack to make their automobiles ‘invisible’ to hurry cameras

Sneaky drivers are said to have attempted to dodge fines by making their licence plates “invisible” to cameras – and authorities are clamping down.

These crafty road users reportedly tweak their number plates so they become undetectable to speed traps and CCTV. Dubbed “ghost plates”, these 3D or 4D plates also give the slip to bus lane cameras. Police are now supposedly on the hunt with new tech to bust these illegal plates.

Previously, an expert in charge of the UK’s Automatic Number Plate Recognition system revealed that about one in 15 drivers were outwitting the surveillance, a problem termed ‘staggeringly simple’ by Prof Fraser Sampson. In his resignation letter to then Transport Secretary Mark Harper, he lamented the scant response to this growing trickery.

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Wolverhampton is leading the pack with fancy gear designed to catch the culprits and slap them with a £100 fine. Councillor Craig Collingswood, tasked with environment and climate change, told BirminghamLive: “Wolverhampton is leading the way as the first council investing in this state-of-the-art technology to deter and detect offenders.”, reports the Mirror.

Professor Sampson has laid bare the sneaky methods some drivers use to skip out on fines. Revealing these dodges in a letter, he detailed how some motorists clone number plates, slap on reflective tape and purchase “stealthy” plates to escape speeding fines and evade low-emission zone charges.

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Despite technology that correctly identifies number plates 97 percent of the time, an astounding 2.4 million plates are still misread daily, sparking worries that blameless drivers might be wrongly penalised. Current data indicates that approximately 15,400 traffic cameras are constantly monitoring UK roads on any given day, churning out between 75 and 80 million readings – sometimes hitting over 80 million.

Prof Sampson warned: “Bus lanes are essential for the public transport network to operate efficiently and speed cameras help to keep the public safe from speeding vehicles and reduce the likelihood of a crash. All motorists can expect to pay a fine if found to be using these illegal methods to avoid cameras and taxi drivers licensed by Wolverhampton may have their licence suspended or revoked.”

He has also previously flagged issues regarding the susceptibility of Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) systems to exploitation, despite them being increasingly sophisticated and playing a pivotal role in law enforcement tasks.

He added: “For all its technological advancement and operational indispensability, the ANPR system still relies ultimately on a piece of plastic affixed to either end of a vehicle. Served by a wholly unregulated market, what my predecessor termed the humble number plate represents a single and readily assailable point of failure with the ANPR network being easily defeated by the manufacture and sale of stealth plates, cloned registration marks and other rudimentary obscurant tactics.”

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