How about this.
Guy's plate gets cloned and over 6 weeks the cloner (is that a word) racks up £2,000 in speeding tickets/parking fines/bus lane fines.
The guy contacts the Council, not interested just pay up, contacts the Police who call him a liar.
He tracks the cloned plate and provides phtographs of the car to the Police/Council plus the cloners address.
Fines get cancelled but has the cloner been arrested/charged? Of course not, the Police are pursuing 'lines of inquiry'. Pathetic. No wonder people do this, even if you get 'caught' you won't get caught.
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How did he track the car ? And then find the "cloner's" address ?
If you'll forgive my cynicism, it sounds a bit unlikely.
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Apparently true www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,4484-663162,00.ht...l
I'd like to know more as well, Mark.
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Good question Mark. London is a big place. Maybe all the parking tickets were from one local and he hung around there.
Anyway must have taken some bottle, you don't know who you are dealing with and (in my best Ray Winstone voice) whether they are 'tooled' up.
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Actually you may recognise him. The owner in question is the London correspondent of 'Brazil's biggest TV station'
To find the article, you'll have to go to www.timesonline.co.uk and do a search for Losekann if this link search.thetimes.co.uk/cgi-bin/ezk2srch?-aSTART# doesn't work.
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Plus it would appear that with motoring offences you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent. This must be against the EU charter on human rights.
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Certainly reported, although I'm not sure that makes it true.
If someone repeatedly was getting me parking tickets, I'd have to hope they were regular and in the same place or at least a pretty limited area. Then I'd have to walk around checking licence plates until I found the car - I'd probably have to do that for days unless the guy was getting a ticket *every* day. After that I would then have to hang around the car with my own transport waiting to follow someone home to discover what was hopefully his address - and I'd probably lose him once or twice, or he might not go home, so then I'd have to do it again.
Sounds pretty impossible/impractical unless I actually already knew who'd done it.
It could be true.
If the Police were at all cynical or doubtful, then I'd guess they'd hold off on making any arrest and continue with some enquiries to work out exactly what was going on and what was the truth of the matter, including any potential relationship between the involved parties.
Oh, hold on a minute, that's what they said they were doing.
So maybe their behaviour is not so "pathetic" after all. Or maybe it is.
But, perhaps, a fairly damning thing to say when we don't actually know.
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Although it does sound like its true, having read further reports about it.
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Car with cloned plates parked at X location. Clearly illegal. What does the relationship between the offender and the real owner of the plate have to do with the offence which clearly has been committed? If the offender is the Mother/Father/Business Partner/Significant Other of the real owner what difference does this make to the offence being committed? It may lead to other charges being laid but surely that can be worked out after he is arrested and interviewed?
Owner of cloned car at location X. Has committed offence (see sentance above) and can be arrested.
Car and owner likely to disappear in puff of smoke at any moment, these criminal types are not known for being reliable. Likely he already has done. As I say pathetic.
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This case was on TV news - SKY I think. The car in question was an 03 Reg Chrysler PT cruiser(I forget the colour) - not the commonest car and pehaps a bit easier to spot.
The reporter let down the four tyres on the cloned car to at least keep it there until he could get the police.
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"But he added that the onus would remain on the owner of a numberplate to prove that he was not driving in the place where a fine was triggered."
Guilty until you get off your butt and prove yourself innocent?
H (Darcy rebranded).
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With great respect to the police who are doing the best that they can with limited budgets and management in place of leadership, the fact in this case was, that they didn't have the manpower to stake out the car and arrest the 'cloner' but when they did move it to a pound they had to fingerprint it etc which I am sure was lot more costly. The cloner had also defaced the car's VIN number, on the plate in the dashboard and seen thru the windscreen. The reporter located the car by plotting the place of issue of the many parking tickets, ie did a bit of police type detective work! I think that he would still be fighting his corner unless he had involved the Times newspaper. (This is paraphrased from the Times article). What a dire impression this foreign journalist/guest must have got of the state of law enforcement in our country.
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Hawkeye,
"But he added that the onus would remain on the owner of a numberplate to prove that he was not driving in the place where a fine was triggered."
That needn't be so.
My car was cloned and I got a NIP for my car going through a speed camera when I and the car were hundreds of miles away. I wrote to police said they were mistaken and asked for evidence etc. Did not reveal my alibi as next time may not have been able to prove innocence. Got back a standard "Dear Sir/Madam" letter saying after review they had decided to take no action.
The cloned car was eventually illegally parked and moved to a compound. Turned out it had been stolen.
The tickets are issued by clerks not police. If you are innocent you will not be convicted and the police will probably not even proceed with the proscecution.
C
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It is a true story. The full details appeared in the printed edition of the Times of Mon 28 Apr 03. The police only took an interest after Losekann told them he was going to the Times with the story. Some snippets from the paper (full credit acknowledged to The Times):
>>> " He noticed that several parking tickets had been issued in Liverpool Road, Islington, on consecutive mornings. He staked out the road but saw no sign of the rogue driver.
The crucial clue came when he received a ticket issued in Wolsey Road near Newington Green. Unlike the others, this ticket stated that the driver had parked ?more than 50cm from the kerb and not within a designated parking place?. Mr Losekann suspected that the culprit might live locally because this was not a brazen violation but careless parking.
He drove around the area last Thursday and within minutes had found the car parked in Mildmay Grove South and called the police. He noticed what appeared to be a half-smoked cannabis joint lying on the back seat.
Mr Losekann said that the officers found that the numberplates were simply stuck on and came away easily. He said that they also noticed that the vehicle identification number, a security code printed on the dashboard, had been scratched off. Removing a VIN number is an offence in itself.
The officers ran a check and discovered that the car, which showed signs of damage, had been involved in a hit-and-run incident a week earlier. Mr Losekann gave police his dealer?s number and they called it to confirm that his car had been in storage for a month.
Mr Losekann said that the officers told him that they could do nothing because the vehicle?s owner might be an innocent victim who thought he was buying a legitimate car. When Mr Losekann pointed out that the driver had committed many offences, he said the officers said that they did not have the time to make local inquiries or to stake out the car.
At this point, Mr Losekann realised that he would have to take action himself to stop the criminal using the car and possibly killing or injuring someone. He punctured all four tyres. The following day he contacted The Times to tell his story. He rang the police to tell them he had gone to the media and, when he returned to the scene an hour later, he found that the car had gone. " <<
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This is a perfect example of the 'Broken Window' theory.
That is ignoring small crimes leads to big crimes or solving what appears at first to be a small crime can lead to solving big crimes.
The Police obviously don't want to get invloved with cloned plates, its small beer and time consuming plus it means they can't whizz around covered in body armour and weapons looking important.
But if they had copped this bloke they would have got a cloned car, £2,000 in fines and a hit and run driver and who knows what else? Someone who buys a NEW car and clones it? Likely this is just the tip of the iceberg...
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Bought new car and cloned it? dont think so, this bloke has removed the visible VIN. This is a nicked mota.
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"He punctured all four tyres.."
I expect they'll arrest him for that!
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What offence is committed in letting down tyres, if no damage is done and the caps/valves are not lost?
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.. assuming the owner notices before driving away, of course?
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My apologies for being dumn, of course its a nicked mota.
Add that to the number of crimes not being investigated by our beloved Plod. Oh no they are 'pursuing lines of inquiry'.
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Well they said he punctured the tyres, so it's a clear case of the actus reus of criminal damage (i.e., the physical facts are present).
Whether letting down the tyres so that they could be pumped up would count - I would guess so as they would still need effort before they could be used again.
Of course, they also have to prove that it is 'wilful' (easy), 'property belonging to another' (fairly easy, although if it had his number plate on it he might legitimately believe it to be his own) and that it was 'without lawful excuse' - an attempt to aid in the detection of crime or recovery of property, especially if it did not go beyond what was necessary to do so, would count.
Of course, if it was my nicked mota, I'd immediately nick either a. a set of wheels and tyres or b. a whole new car.
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Vehicle Interference!
Fullchat
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