A California man recently devised a cunning plot to never be held responsible for any parking or traffic tickets ever again—a plot that spectacularly backfired. Recounting his experience at this year's DEF CON hacking conference, an information security researcher who goes by the handle "Droogie" cheekily attempted to fool the DMV's computer system by registering a vanity plate that read "NULL," the computer programming shorthand for a non-existent value. If all went to plan, any and all tickets issued to the plate "NULL" would, at the end of the day, be issued to no plate at all. As anyone with a modicum of programming experience will attest, these things rarely go as planned. "I was like, 'I'm the greatest,'" Droogie told the audience. "'I’m gonna be invisible.' Instead, I got all the tickets."
Apparently, a privately operated citation processing center kept a database of outstanding tickets attributed to a NULL plate—these are tickets with missing or incomplete plate data, not plates that literally read "NULL," like the one Droogie owns. Unfortunately for the California I.T. professional, the system in question wasn't sophisticated enough to differentiate the two inputs, automatically sending all NULL tickets his way. When he contacted both the DMV and Los Angeles Police Department to explain what was happening, both government agencies simply told him to change his plate. Droogie, however, stubbornly refused. "I said, 'No, I didn’t do anything wrong.'" While the original bill of $12,000 has been wiped by the DMV, he has accumulated another $6,000 in fines by other drivers since then.
Credits:
https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-hacker-ticket-hell/
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