A man who registered 'NULL' on his car's license plate faces a huge fine for parking violations
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License plates for cars generally use a combination of letters and numbers, but in the United States, people can pay an extra fee to use any string of characters they like on their license plates that are unique to them. A man who used this system to register a license plate with the string ' NULL ,' which means nothing in programming languages, ended up paying a large number of parking fines.
He tried to prank the DMV. Then his vanity license plate backfired big time.
https://mashable.com/article/dmv-vanity-license-plate-def-con-backfire/
In the United States, many people use any text string on their car license plates, and you can see license plates that would be unthinkable in Japan. For example, a car with a license plate that reads ' DEAD' ...
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' ANIME ' comes from Japanese
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Taking advantage of this mechanism, a security researcher who goes by the handle name Droogie came up with the idea of making his own license plate number 'NULL'. NULL is often used in databases to indicate that no numbers have been entered, and he imagined that this might confuse the Department of Motor Vehicles in the United States.
When he first set his license plate to 'NULL,' Droogie didn't have any problems. However, after registering his license plate on paper, when he tried to enter his license plate number on the Department of Motor Vehicles' website, the website was unable to recognize the 'NULL' character string as a license plate, Droogie testified.
Although Droogie had always been conscious of complying with the law, he received a parking ticket shortly after changing his license plate. Based on this, Droogie was charged a parking fine, but for some reason, this situation triggered Droogie to receive a huge amount of 'fine for parking violations that he did not remember'. Each fine was at most about $37 (3,900 yen), but the total amount ballooned to about $12,000 (about 1.3 million yen).
By Pixabay
The cause of the mischarge was that the database of a company contracted by the Department of Motor Vehicle Management to handle parking violations already contained the character string 'NULL.' This 'NULL' was used to mean 'the license plate could not be confirmed and the data was incomplete.' However, when Droogie committed a parking violation, 'NULL,' which had previously meant 'unconfirmed license plate,' came to be interpreted as 'Droogie's car,' and all parking violations that had previously been processed as 'NULL' were deemed to be Droogie's violations.
In the end, Droogie explained to the Department of Motor Vehicles that his license plate was 'NULL' and that he had been charged a wrong parking fine, and the $12,000 fine was written off. The Department of Motor Vehicles asked Droogie to change his license plate, but Droogie refused, saying, 'I haven't done anything wrong.'
However, although the private subcontractor carried out the cancellation of the fine itself, they did not fundamentally fix the system. As a result, the 'NULL' in the database is still associated with Droogie's license plate, and Droogie has been fined more than $6,000 (about 630,000 yen). Droogie, who explained the series of events at the security-related event ' DEF CON ' held in Las Vegas, USA in August 2019, said that he has no intention of paying the new fine.
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