- Plate cloning is on the rise with a 689% increase in 10 years
A Kent motorist realised her car registration plate was cloned after her insurance company said she’d been in an accident 280 miles away, in a case highlighting the increasing menace of car cloning.
Shelli Birkett, of Herne Bay, fell victim to number plate fraud – when plates are copied or stolen – when she was accused of being involved in a crash in Liverpool, despite actually being in her home town at the time.
Ms Birkett told the BBC she’d ‘never been to Liverpool in my life’ and that she’d ‘had to fight’ to prove she hadn’t been in the city at the time.
The ‘scary’ turn of events left Ms Birkett having to prove she was in Herne Bay the day it happened, until eventually her case was closed.
This is Money readers have also been targeted by fraudsters after the alarming rise in plate cloning. In a recent case we investigated a cloning victim paid £708 to a debt collection agency off the back of a huge pile of fraudulent ULEZ penalties.
A Freedom of Information request by CarWow found that number plate cloning rose 26 per cent last year resulting in car owners receiving nearly 10,000 unexpected notifications.
Shelli Birkett from Herne Bay had her plate cloned and had to prove she wasn’t involved in an accident 280 miles away in Liverpool
Ms Birkett’s not the only person this has happened to in her area, with Kent Police saying reports of number plate cloning have been going up in recent years.
Birkett told the BBC she was ‘minding her own business at home’ at the time of the incident in Liverpool: ‘I said it wasn’t me but they asked me to prove my whereabouts and to send photos of the condition of my car, and they continued to investigate.
‘Then I remembered I could use my Google locations and luckily on that day I was in Herne Bay and I posted some videos on my business page on social media, proving I was at work that day.’
Not only had her number plate been cloned, but Birkett reported the scammers had even gone so far as to put it ‘on the same make car’.
She told BBC South East she also received letters from the insurance company’s lawyers asking for settlement money when the case had closed.
Figures obtained by the BBC show reports of number plate thefts in Kent up 37 per cent over four years. There were 1,120 cases reported in 2024 compared with 815 in 2020, according to a Freedom of Information request.
Ch Supt Rob Marsh from Kent Police told the BBC: ‘If someone wakes up in the morning, and their number plate is missing, they know they’ve been a victim of crime.
‘If the number plate has, unbeknown to the victim been cloned, we’ve got to wait for it to trigger an ANPR camera linked to another incident and then it would come to our attention and we would then start our investigation.’
Fraudsters are using cloned plates to escape fines, having no tax or insurance, driving stolen vehicles or engaging in criminal activity
What is plate cloning?
Cloning is when someone uses the number plate that’s registered to your car to avoid fines, road tax, insurance or engage in unlawful activity.
Fraudsters copy legitimate registration plates and create fake identities for similar cars – usually the same colour – that may have been stolen or are being used for criminal activity.
The criminals can then use the fake plates to avoid paying costs including car park fees, congestion charges and speeding penalties.
In the case of Ms Birkett criminals can even get away with causing accidents.
One This is Money reader paid £708 to a debt collection company after his plate was cloned and a fraudster racked up a massive amount of London ULEZ penalty charges, despite the car being sold and the driver never even going to London in that car.
After This is Money stepped in, a TfL investigation was satisfied that the vehicle was cloned and have cancelled the PCNs and issued a full refund to the reader.
Similarity: Criminals look for similar car models in order to get away with parking charges, speeding tickets and ULEZ penalties
The rise of plate cloning in recent years and why?
As well as the 26 per cent increase in number plate cloning in 2023 , Carwow’s FOI also revealed a 689 per cent increase since 2013.
In 2013 a total of 1,248 people contacted the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) about correspondence, fines or penalties for their vehicles they did not accept responsibility for and was due to cloning. By 2022, that number had jumped to 7,837 cases.
One year later it had increased by over a quarter again to 9,850 cases – a near 700 per cent increase in 10 years, although the DVLA did point out that a proportion of potential cases of number plate cloning could be due to human error.
Ch Supt Rob Marsh from Kent Police told the BBC: ‘In relation to number plate thefts, people are clearly using them to commit other crimes such as whether it’s to avoid congestion charging, other road toll fees, whether it’s to do with making off without paying for fuel.
‘With the increases in the cost of living that can sometimes be a reason for people to engage in criminality of this type.’
Motorists warned to be cautious about sharing photos of their number plate on social media and online advertisements