"He had it to come": California man's joke registration plate turns against her



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What began as a serious joke for a father – or a failed attempt to be incognito – resulted in a $ 12,049 fine for the information security researcher, Joseph Tartaro.

A presenter of this year's DEF CON conference – a Las Vegas-based conference bringing together thousands of hackers and techs every year – Tartaro presented his seemingly clever idea of ​​courtesy license plate. Reviewing some career-related word games, he finally chose one that said "NULL".

In many programming languages, the term indicates a non-existent data value.

To finish the farce, he would also get another personalized plaque for his wife's car marked "CANCELED" so that their driveway could be "NULL and CANCELED". If he dodged one or two parking tickets, or at the very least, was confusing the DMV system – well, that was not his problem


"I was like:" I'm the s – ", he joked, according to Mashable. "I'm going to be invisible."

But the joke was on him.

Tartaro bought the plates in 2016 and a year has passed without a problem. But when he tried to renew his license, it happened something odd.

"It broke the website," he told Wired. The license plate would have been invalid, but he managed to find a different reference number to renew his vehicle. Later, in 2018, he received a ticket for "not having the appropriate registration tag" on his license plate. Tartaro assumed that someone had used it for his own car. That was only $ 35, so he paid, thinking nothing.

Then a wave of quotes came. Dozens of them, from Fresno to Rancho Cucamonga. Thousands of dollars in fines of $ 37, $ 60, $ 74 and $ 80 monopolized his mailbox.

"I've never been to Fresno," said Tartaro.

He added that some of the tickets he had received were from 2014, two years before his appointment and his conviction of the condemned registration plate. On one odd occasion, he even received two tickets written at Cyprus College two hours apart. They were for two separate vehicles.



But since he had paid that $ 35 bill to save himself a headache, he was done with a bigger one. Tartaro assumed that a database somewhere now associates NULL with his personal information, that is to say that whenever a policeman neglects to indicate the plate number registration on a quote, the fine would be automatically paid.


Taking matters into his own hands, Tartaro contacted the Citation Processing Center, a private company that had issued his tickets. But they told him that he had to prove that they were not his and advised him to mail them hundreds of paper tickets for further inspection. He refused, worried about losing the paper trail.

The next day he noticed something odd: a specific quote that he had mentioned over the phone to the company had been replaced by an Infiniti bearing the Taranto license plate number.

The company told Wired that she was aware of the situation, but unable to comment on the modified ticket.

He then turned to the DMV. Fortunately, they helped him cancel most of his tickets. Yet, more and more people continue to appear on his record over time. It was more of a disadvantage than a real disaster because he simply had to continue reaching out to the DMV to cancel them.

Just days before the conference, Tartaro received a notice informing him that the DMV would not allow him to renew his registration if he did not pay the unpaid fines.

"Now that the DMV applies these falsified tickets, that changes everything," he told Wired. "At the moment, I can not re-register my vehicle without paying for the tickets, but I can not pay the tickets because it admits guilt, and as soon as I admit that it opens up all the others. I'm basically in a very bad situation. "

Only $ 140 left. California DMV spokesman Marty Geenstein told Wired that the situation was out of reach – the problem stems from policies set by local parking authorities over which the DMV has no control .

Tartaro is determined to keep his plates – not for reasons of pride, but to avoid even more complicated damage.

Christopher Null, a former Wired journalist, can explain the problems his last name has. But he does not understand why Tartaro chose him in the first place.

"He had planned it," Null said. "All you get is mistakes, accidents and headaches."

Amanda Bartlett is an editorial assistant at SFGate. Email: [email protected]

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