Now it's the poor car's who are having their ID's stolen!!!!

Another item to hit the news recently has been that of car cloning, i.e. where someone puts a false number plate on a car, goes through a speed camera, gets nabbed and you (the rightful owner of that registration) gets the bill. Apparently this crime is on the increase too.

In the article on the news, someone stated that all you need to clone a car is a copy of the vehicles registration and its VIN number. I don’t reckon you even need that!

I assume the requirement for the VIN number is so that you can send off for a replacement logbook and pop into Halfords and get a new set of number plates made up.

Obviously my first question… Is it really that easy to get a copy of the vehicles registration document? Simply walk up to a car, note down the number plate and the vehicle VIN number considerately displayed in the windscreen and send off for the logbook? Surely not!!!

But hang on, this assumes you actually want to get a set of legal number plates made up. If you simply want to get away with speeding, why go to all that aggro? Simply by some sticky vinyl (white for the front and yellow for the back), some black electricians tape and create your own number plate. It may not fool a policeman in the street (and what are the odds of coming across one of them?) but it’ll almost certainly pass muster when captured on a speed or CCTV camera!

And that’s where the problem lies to my mind. It used to be that before a conviction was secured for a crime, the prosecution had to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you were guilty of said crime. With the advent of speed cameras etc. this onus of proof has now been reversed.

If your car is pictured speeding, the assumption is that you are the guilty party unless you can prove otherwise (usually by shopping the real driver). The only evidence available is a poor quality picture of the vehicle and some computer generated information. This evidence is held up as infallible (just like the speed camera that measured a solid brick wall travelling at 58 mph) and so it is up to you to prove otherwise. In other words, you now have to prove your innocence rather than the state having to prove your guilt.

Thus I put a false plate on my car (yellow vinyl, white vinyl and black tape at the ready), drive around like a lunatic and you get a number of speeding tickets. The system then assumes you are the guilty party unless you can prove otherwise. As this may well come down to your word against the systems, you will face an uphill battle at best as the system has already assumed you are a criminal scumbag and therefore you must be lying.

This is just another example of a quick fix answer causing a whole new set of problems, problems that were patently obvious if only someone had thought about it in the first place!