Safe Speed Forums

What if you disguise your vehicle with a fake plate from a genuine vehicle which is legal in every way - i.e. taxed, insured and not tagged for any reason. You could stop worrying about ANPR couldn't you? Especially if the fake plate was from a vehicle of similar type and colour. Are there any plans to close this loophole? I would have thought the crims would have cottoned on to this by now.

They have. They steal number plates - so if yours go missing report it to the Police immediately then at least you might have some chance of avoiding being accused of a crime you didn't commit.

But you don't need to steal plates - you can just buy 'show plates' by mail order.

Hi Eurostar -

well done, you have the brain power of a criminal mastermind. Well, actually no, you quite possibly have pretty average brain power same as everyone else???

Which incidently is infinitely more brain power than the Baldrick who thought up this cunning plan to catch criminals using cameras.



Look a little deeper though, and you and I become the exact criminal they want to catch if we let our road tax elapse or get too lead footed on the right pedal. It's simply an issue of definition.

When they say they want to catch criminals, they're not lying. It's just that we (citizens) assume they must mean robbers, kidnappers etc. We're wrong to think that though - the criminals they want are road users. Just think of ANPR as the tool the KGB always dreamed of.

Welcome to the forum by the way

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Oh. When ANPR was recently justified as a means to catch crims I believed it!

So it seems the only people who have anything to fear from ANPR are NOT criminal enough to use fake plates but ARE criminal enough to drive without tax or insurance or MoT. It seems to me that those sort of people - who allegedly number in the millions - may as well buy fake plates and carry on driving around 'off the radar'. When I lived in Brixton it almost seemed to be the norm.

Maybe the powers that be should have kept quiet about the existence of ANPR and carried on using it for anti-terrorism and serious crime. I first saw it in use in vans in London about 10 years ago. I asked an officer what was going on and he said it was hooked up to the PNC. Perhaps it should have been left at that?

Any officers care to comment?

Yeah. But the veneer is pretty thin isn't it?

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Eventually, I guess that all numberplates will be chipped and tamperproofed to prevent cloning and transfer of plates between vehicles. But that STILL wouldn't stop someone just stealing a whole car.

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“For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” - H. L. Mencken

Amazing what you can do in a closed garage in 30 minutes.

I think 'chipped' number plates are just a joke. There will be dozens of ways to render the chip inoperative in no time flat. And in not very long there will be so many busted chips that the cops have no chance of keeping up. Many of the busted chips will be technical failure - so it cannot become an offence to drive without a working chip - how could you know if it had failed?

One of the funniest ideas was a battery powered active transponder. Oh look, the battery must be flat.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Mine f:censored:g won't!
*ahem*

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Andrew.

Quite. I am not a number...

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

ANPR will never stop the hard-core crooks because any shady underworld character will make sure that their car is fully legitmate with all the correct docs. The last thing they want is the old-bill sniffing around for a piddly motor offence.

One of ANPR's selling points is that it will help with surveillance of the hard core crim (or terrorist). Theoretically if you know the crim's reg ANPR can track all his movements whether his vehicle is legal or not. But it would need lots of high quality fixed cameras and a monstrous database which given the government's track record on IT projects will never work. If it did work, would crims have a problem? They'd have to switch cars the whole time...perhaps by hiring them with other people's credit cards, or nicking them and abandoning them after a short while, or threatening people to lend their cars and not report it to the police.

Or,indeed, take the train, like the last lot of terrorists did !!

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Good manners maketh a good motorist

I think Viz described the situation best, back when it was the congestion charge

"Under the new laws, any motorist who fails to fit false plates before entering the capital will be fined five pounds."

The company I work for regularly gets congestion charge fines for one of it's cars. We have no customers in London and no plans to get any. Sending them the records from our own satellite tracking system makes them go away.


With ANPR though, it'll be worse. Our fleet manager will probably be put away for two weeks for being a terrorist, as will anyone who goes to a sugar factory and a garden centre on the same day.

If they dont "accedentally" shoot him in the chest for wearing a dangerous pair of pyjamas.

I work for a local authority and we regularily work with the police who use ANPR equipment and we take our place in the line to nick those who need nicking. If the police make only two arrests in a morning its a poor show. A number of vehicles are taken off the road there and then for no road fund licence or insurance. As one of the police officers said when a gent moaned about his car going off to the pound. "If they had not got you I would have, you have no insurance either"! Others get done for not having waste carriers licences, the flat back transit with a load of rubbish on board some mug has paid them cash in to dump and they usually do on someone elses land or a layby out of the way.

You may not get armed robbers or the Mr Bigs of the criminal world but those who do not tax or insure their vehicles and lot of low level anti social types get their lives made unpleasent.

The current ANPR I have no problems with. I got confused with my last post and was talking about the new ANPR every 400 yards thing that they're rolling out at the moment.

We've had that here for a couple of years, Bradford is now a zero crime zone......




....isn't it? Bugger, guess that didn't work.

It may be that the car security module has to read the chip before you can start the car (much like the transponder in the key head in most modern cars)

The big issue is that transponder IDs can be scanned and copied so you can make a perfect clone. The worry is the more the Police rely on technology the more easy it will be to fool it without detection. You cannot use rolling code because you need a read-write routine that would be impossible in any other environment and if you did manage it once the code is cracked (as it will be) it would be rendered obsolete.

As was said before you can get plates made at any sunday market without any ID so tamper proof plates are a waste of time.

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Speed camera policy Kills

If so, marry the transponder to the receiver and wrap in foil.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety