A New York resident who chose “BLANK” as her vanity plate learned that the joke could cut both ways when local ticketing systems began attaching other people’s violations to her registration.
Melanie Blank Brown, as identified in the report, did not know what was accumulating until she moved and updated the address on her registration. That update introduced her plate sequence into local registration and ticketing systems. Many of those systems, according to the account, had entries in which the license-plate field had simply been left as “Blank.”
Soon after, Brown was told she had two outstanding tickets. The total then grew to more than 400 violations and more than $40,000 in fines. Because the tickets had been issued across the city, they could not be resolved in a single proceeding. Brown had to make repeated visits to multiple judges to have them voided.
To stop the pile from growing, she gave up the vanity plate. The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has since removed “BLANK” from the pool of available vanity plates, according to the report, to prevent another driver from taking the same risk.
Her replacement plate reads “KNALB,” the report said, reversing the letters of the original plate.