A New York driver’s attempt to use the vanity plate “BLANK” turned into a costly administrative ordeal after local ticketing systems began associating the word with violations that were not hers.
Melanie Blank Brown, a New York resident, had the plate until a recent move. When her registration was updated with her new address, the new entry for her license plate sequence was ingested by local registration and ticketing systems. Many of those systems contained records in which the plate number had been entered as “Blank.”
She was immediately told she had two outstanding tickets. The number eventually rose to more than 400 violations, with fines totaling more than $40,000. The case shows how a plate that reads like a common word can create false matches when databases treat that word as a blank entry.
Because the tickets had been issued across the city, Brown could not resolve them in a single proceeding. She had to make repeated visits to multiple judges to void the tickets.
To stop the total from growing, Brown surrendered the vanity plate. The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has since removed “BLANK” from the pool of available vanity plates, preventing another driver from choosing the same combination.
Her replacement plate reads “KNALB,” the reverse spelling of the original plate.