A New York driver's surname doubled as her license plate, and the coincidence buried her in more than $40,000 of fines for violations she never committed. Melanie Blank Brown's vanity plate read "BLANK" — a string that also appeared in local records where the plate number had been entered as "Blank."
The trouble surfaced only after she moved. Until then, Blank Brown had no idea what was building behind the scenes. When her registration was updated with her new address, the new entry for her plate was ingested by local registration and ticketing systems, many of which held records in which the plate field read "Blank." She was told almost immediately that she had two outstanding tickets.
The tally did not stop there. The violations multiplied to more than 400, with fines totaling more than $40,000. Because the tickets had been issued across the city, they could not be cleared in a single appearance; Blank Brown had to go before multiple judges, repeatedly, to have each one voided.
To keep the pile from growing, she gave up the plate. The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has since removed "BLANK" from the pool of potential vanity plates, so that no other driver can take a run at the same experience. Her replacement plate, according to the New York Times, reads "KNALB."
Vanity-plate folklore is full of supposedly clever strings said to defeat automated enforcement — the much-repeated "Null" story among them — and the record on those schemes has tended to run opposite to the claimed shortcut. Blank Brown's case is a different kind of collision: a plate chosen for a family name that happened to match entries in which the plate number had been recorded as "Blank."