Ghosted! City Council Report Blasts Rampant License Plate Fraud

A searing report published by the New York City Council in late August titled “Plate and Switch” is the most detailed look yet of one of Gotham’s most maddening problems of recent years: the widespread use of fraudulent “ghost” license plates on cars and trucks.

Summary: It’s big, it’s brazen, and it’s been getting worse, putting all rectitudinous road users—properly registered drivers, polite pedal bicyclists, and perambulating pedestrians alike—at dramatically greater risk while ripping off the city and state of much-needed moolah.

Said fiery Gale Brewer, chair of the City Council’s Oversight and Investigations Division (OID) committee, which did the report’s legwork and analysis, “Ghost vehicles are not just a nuisance—they’re a public safety hazard, and an affront to every New Yorker who plays by the rules.”

This isn’t just rhetoric, righteous and self-evident as it is to anyone who’s seen Gotham’s roadways go from frustratingly congested to downright menacing over the last decade.

While ghost plates aren’t the only cause for this change—an infinite number of competing ride-share vehicles, crosswalk-blocking delivery trucks, reckless e-bikes, and illegal scooters and mopeds (many of which don’t have any license plates, let alone legitimate ones) all play parts in this symphony of sorrows—they are one of the defining signs of the city’s descent into de facto anarchy.

If such language seems a bit heated, then please, read the report, which the City Council has posted in full online, and follows the Mayor Eric Adams’s September 2024 announcement of a joint DSNY-NYPD Ghost Car Task Force to remove illegal cars from city streets.

While this alliance was a promising one and included some impressively tough talk from then-Deputy Mayor Meera Joshi (“The era of the free ride is over. Whether you’re using a ghost plate to evade a toll or create a menace on our streets, you will be caught and you will be prosecuted”), the problem was immense.

Add in Adams administration turmoil, including then-Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch replacing NYPD Interim Police Commissioner Thomas Donlon two months later, and it’s no surprise there was lots of room for City Council to follow up on the matter.

A “ghost plate,” for those unfamiliar with the term, refers to a car with a license plate or plates, temporary (made of paper) or permanent (made of metal) that don’t belong to the vehicle or which alters a legitimate plate by whiting part of a letter or number or covering it with something to obscure the real plate. That could be a strategically placed leaf or a plastic shield that prevents the plate from being read.

In most cases, the ghost plates don’t, in fact, belong to anything: The temporary paper plates are entirely fraudulent, and the metal ones might be, i.e. they’re so called “replica” plates, though it’s also known that some people acquire genuine license plates from another state that are no longer attached to the vehicle they were issued for. “Live Free or Die,” the slogan on New Hampshire plates, was a longtime favorite of one well-known scammer.

One especially nefarious trick, by the way, for those who use New York or New Jersey plates, is to use two different ghost plates, one number on the front and a different one on the back. Many other states—including the many Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida cars one sees in the city—require only a rear plate.

In any event, the robust marketplace for myriad “ghost plates” was assayed by OID without attempting to quantify them—which would be impossible—but as with nearly everything illegal, one can get them online or in the not-so-hidden corners of the city’s vast underground economy.

What OID did do is hit the streets: five boroughs, 50 blocks, surveying more than 3,500 parked vehicles in all in March and April 2025.

Some findings:

* Nearly one in five of the 768 non-New York-plated vehicles displayed license plates that were not registered to the vehicles.

* Of those 768 “ghost vehicles,” more than a quarter of them raised concerns: 126 (or 17 percent) had problematic plates that either returned no registration or a registration that did not match the vehicle; 48 (or 6 percent ) carried out-of-state temporary or dealer plates; and 64 (8 percent), had no plates at all!

* Vehicles with those mismatched out-of-state plates owed much more—nearly two and a half times more—in parking fines than vehicles with properly matched out-of-state plates.

* On average, vehicles sampled accrued 49 percent more camera violations for “Speeding in School Zones” and received 74 percent more “Blocking a Fire Hydrant” violations than vehicles with matched plates.

Also, that more than 30 percent (!) of the cars OID surveyed in the Bronx, for example, had ghost plates. Likewise there was a high number of ghost plates in Brooklyn.

Not that NYPD and other police agencies, including those of the MTA, the Port Authority and Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority are idle, but despite thousands of vehicle seizures, the problems remain.

As for what can be done about the ghost plate problem—and its repulsive cousin, the purposely defaced or obscured license plate— the answer is the same as for any other pervasive crime of convenience, where the reward outweighs the perceived risks: enforcement, enforcement, enforcement.

Gale Brewer, in a letter to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, seems to agree.

“These findings,” wrote the UWS council member, “make clear that the City faces a systemic enforcement issue. Fraudulent plates are not an isolated problem but rather a growing shadow fleet that undermines public confidence, costs the City revenue, and erodes fairness for New Yorkers who comply with the law.”