Six months ago I bought a private plate for my daughter's scrambler. She fitted it. and kept the old plate but didn't 'retain' the number. Yesterday she had a letter from Essex police saying that her bike had been seen in Essex on the 3/3/25 and quoted her old plate. She hasn't been out on her bike and lives in Dorset. It is all very odd.
Very. In my experience (I have a few) you don’t have to do anything to “retain” the original reg. It is kept on record and will be reassigned to the vehicle by DVLA if the personal reg is ever taken off (which will need to be “retained”).
Well funnily enough I had a visit from the local police yesterday (thought it was about the neighbours again) and they asked if I owned a bike with registration FLxx xxx I said yes. Apparently someone had been ragging a bike up and down a road in the town a few days earlier and I was the only person who lived near by with a registration that fitted the report. The person who reported it only got half the registration but it does worry me that my plate has been cloned too. Police said don’t worry about it but then I don’t trust them at all. Cloning is on the rise apparently.
My bikes are SORN'd, and someone with a van cloned one of the reg numbers and two notices came through. The process as I discovered is, 1) notify the police, 2) notify DVLA, 3) appeal the penalty. Cloning is rife unfortunately.
I ticked the box to NOT retain the old number. They said the bike wasn't insured and that the letter was a "warning" and they would be watching to see if it remained so. The bike with its new plate is taxed insured and MoT'd
How are these people cloning the plates and what are they doing with them? Are they getting new plates made? Can't turn your head for a minute...
Without wanting to sound like it’s a conspiracy, your neighbours could possibly be being mischievous?
I expect they buy blank plates and stick on the letter though @bigjimmyb 's friend has their's nicked. Though its certainly no excuse; this is a backlash against endless speed cams & overzealous parking cams all run using ANPR. "For every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction". The Police/ government should have listened more closely to Newton, methinks. I was just driving up the M6. Cameras every few miles, -they aren't even painted yellow any more- and its ridiculous.
though plates officially need to be produced by a DVLA authorised business, a quick google, ebay, facebook marketplace search will turn up plenty of non authorised places to by plates. a cheap vinyl cutter machine can turn them out easily. old article from 2024 would suggest cloning increased by >50% in 2 years (cases rose from 22,450 in 2021 to 36,794 in 2023). that's pandemic years and the rate could have increased. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ar...number-plates-being-sold-without-legal-checks better checking of the database would reduce the false positives, in my chase if they had checked the DVLA meta data the vehicle class entry would have revealed a motorcycle registration was on a van. so it's partially a zealousness to send out penalty notices over error checking. at some point number plates will become so unreliable we will have to move to etags as other countries do (in combination with number plates).
In a similar vein, someone on an old Bandit was riding like a complete twat on a busy, city main road here at the weekend. Registration was WH05DAT, which amused me enough to look it up; no such vehicle of course! So he's driving with a false plate and thus no insurance and advertising the fact by riding like a complete bell-end. Twat.
The day after I moved to the UK, I bought a used car. As I was pulling out of the dealer's lot I got hit from a car going twice the speed limit. Fortunately, I was stopped at the time and there were lots of witnesses. Anyways, it was a bit of a dog and pony show to get a new reg plate made. After we bought our new motorcycles I thought I would be a good idea to get some plates made a little smaller than the barn doors we are riding around with. I ordered a set for each bike, including a carbon fibre look for the numbers. I have not put them on yet and as I was studying for my motorcycle theory I found out they were illegal plates to have and they didn't even ask If I owned the reg plates. I guess it's pretty easy and cheap to get them... Maybe I will get a set and glue it on the back of my good plates. I can flip them over for quick trips down the motorway...probably not!!!
Easy enough to obtain number plates as no one has clamped down on the purchase of plates through the post. I’ve purchased a few via eBay very easily. If I use my local car factors I need to take the logbook as proof of ownership, not so for the above.
Sadly not, speed cams are on, whenever someone decides they should be on, allegedly for a maximum of 90 minutes at a time. There is no way of knowing if they are on or not. There is a legend that most of the large yellow ones have not been in use for years as the tech is outdated -but I don't if that is true. Not all cameras on the motorway are used to automatically fine you for speeding. But they are recording your plate "to reduce crime" which is clearly a waste of taxpayers money as the crime rates are doing anything but going down. These cameras could have their recordings viewed, and other infractions could be subsequently looked into, but I have no info as to whether the Police are actively pursuing this. I guess it rather depends on how low their funds are! LOL!
The large Yellow ‘boxes’ haven’t been active for quite some times as the film needs to be processed and such places no longer exist. At least where I live you can kinda tell they aren’t as if the road surface is relaid the white distance markers aren’t always painted on. Unfortunately as you are no doubt aware in Stoke those boxes are now being switched to digital, I believe the first set/s are near to Powerslide motorcycles on the A road. Where I live there are a few that have been torched……….
Neighbour’s daughter had her plates physically nicked off the car a few weeks ago, it was parked in a side road just round the corner from the house.
If you happen to run into the "torching" tell me I've got a few spare boxes of Swan Vesta he can have -if it helps.
It’s the first thing I thought too so I asked the copper if he was sure that it was a genuine complaint and not the rats being malicious and he said it was a call from a resident on the street it happened on and he was well aware of what my neighbours had been doing to us. I’ve also not used that bike since last summer and I don’t think inbreeds could remember a number plate that far back.
3D printers can be used to clone plates,cloning plates around these parts is for stealing fuel and stealthy crime. what I do is make sure I have something on the car that will show up in photos thats unique to our car.
