According to the police, I have been something of a menace on the roads lately. That was me, they say, racing up the A10 in Enfield on April 21 – and not just nudging over the 40mph limit either – I had my foot down, going at 57mph without a care in the world, on a very busy road. I might have narrowly missed you as I barrelled past. You might have been about to step on to a pedestrian crossing while pushing a pram... who knows, I would not have cared.
Five days later I was at it again, this time clocking 47mph in a 30 zone. I had my windows down and my elbow propped jauntily on the sill. On the days in between, I treated myself to a few excursions through the Blackwall Tunnel in south London ‘on the house’ – nipping through three times on April 26, 27 and 28 without paying the £4 charges. I am not fussed about parking restrictions either. I just park where I like, when I like – private residential roads, bus lanes, whatever.
Not surprisingly, the letterbox in my house in north London has seen quite a bit of action. I have been receiving penalty notices from Transport for London, the Metropolitan Police, UK Car Park Management and Lewisham Council at the average rate of three a day and counting. As I write, the postman has not arrived yet but I am expecting the ominous clatter any minute as a fresh wad of threatening white envelopes is fed through the door. Julia Lawrence (pictured) has had her car number plate cloned and has had dozens of fines for driving offences she did not commit. Sarah explains how in countries such as France, plates are treated like passports and can only be bought from one or two rigorously controlled outlets. In this country, there are more than 43,000 DVLA registered companies.
I have started to dread that sound. So far, on paper, I have incurred over £1,200 in fines. The tunnel penalties alone are £180 each. But it was not me racking up all those traffic offences, nor my husband or daughter, who are also on the car’s insurance. It was someone else, using a stolen car with number plates cloned from my taxed, insured and nicely maintained VW Golf that has been sitting innocently outside my house, while its evil twin has been out there, probably being used in all sorts of crimes, and trashing our good name and driving records along the way.
The Scale of the Problem
We are the latest victims of car number plate cloning, a vast and wildly out of control crimewave sweeping the UK, and one that has prompted a Private Members’ Bill currently going through Parliament. According to the DVLA, there were 11,394 reports of cloned plates between January and December 2025 (although it stresses some of these could be admin errors). The car-choked streets of London, where I live, seem to be the epicentre. A BBC investigation last year revealed a 64 per cent surge in fines being cancelled due to car cloning over three years, from 22,450 in 2021 to 36,794 in 2023. Cloned number plate ‘factories’ have even been linked to gang-led crime.
How I Got Caught Up
So how did I get caught up in this? It is worryingly simple: having acquired a stolen VW Golf, the offender went looking for a virtually identical vehicle, found mine, copied the number plate, then ordered some replacement plates from a ‘no questions asked’ supplier online, swapped them over and, job done, they have an invaluable asset that can never be traced to them. The most likely hunting ground for vehicles to clone is used car sale websites, but I am not selling my car, which suggests it must have been spotted while I have been driving it or – creepily – by someone cruising the streets who spotted it at my house.
The notices began arriving on April 24 and they have not stopped. The headache cannot be underestimated. When we receive a notice, it is up to us to prove our innocence. We have spent every evening for a week downloading and scrutinising images taken by traffic cameras, trying to spot discrepancies between the two vehicles. We then have to photograph our own vehicle, upload the images and fill in reams of forms – some paper, some online – before sending it all to the authorities. In some images, the differences are obvious: our car has a sunroof, the rogue one does not, we also have different wheel trims. The images taken in the Blackwall Tunnel, however – just a blurred plate in the half light – are near impossible to prove.
Another way to prove your innocence is with evidence of an ‘impossible journey’, for example if the cloned vehicle is photographed in Edinburgh at 10am and I can prove my car was in London at 11am. But so far our perpetrator seems to confine his nefarious activities to within the M25 while our car barely moves Monday to Friday (and Ring doorbell footage of it sitting there does not count, apparently). One police camera photo showed the bottom half of the driver’s face – some bull-necked, bouncer type, with his elbow out the window – but not looking like Phil Mitchell out of EastEnders is not evidence either. So far, we have had one appeal upheld but the fines are coming in faster than they are going out. It is stressful. Luckily, we are quite computer literate, but what if we were not?
Chilling Implications
And while it may appear, at first glance, not a particularly serious crime – a victimless inconvenience for a privileged few – the implications are chilling. These cars are used in drug deals, robberies – and at least one murder. In October 2022, a 21-year-old man called Kyron Lee was deliberately knocked down by a gang in a stolen car, as he rode on a bicycle in Slough. He was then attacked by four men with machetes and knives in a ‘planned execution’ after getting caught up in a ‘tit-for-tat’ issue with a local gang. The car used to mow him down was using cloned plates. When the car was found, abandoned, police discovered a stash of other cloned plates in the boot. Five people were later convicted of Kyron’s murder and given life sentences. It was through the phone contacts of one of the killers that police found the supplier of the plates. Mohammed Waqas Akhtar, 30, the owner of business Perfect Plates Online Ltd, later admitted four offences under the Vehicles Crime Act, and was fined a total of £5,500.
Pretty lenient, when you consider what Detective Constable James Heath of Thames Valley Police’s Major Crime Unit said at the time: ‘It is obvious that Akhtar’s activities were intended by those who killed Kyron to conceal their identities. The ramifications of his business activity are plain to see.’
Legislative Response
Number plate cloning has become such a blight on the nation it is now the focus of Sarah Coombes, Labour MP for West Bromwich, whose Vehicle Registration Offences (Review) Bill is going through Parliament. ‘Your number plate might seem like a humble piece of plastic, but it is absolutely intrinsic to the road safety system,’ she tells me. ‘Dodgy number plate sellers are a public scandal waiting to happen. [Many of] those businesses are really fronts for money laundering and criminality.’ She is calling for fines of up to £1,000 and six-point penalties for drivers caught with cloned plates: at the moment the fine is £100, similar to a parking ticket. Sarah was alerted to the problem by constituents complaining about vehicles being driven around housing estates like they are at a motor rally. She was horrified to learn the cars were almost impossible to track, however, because the vast majority were using cloned plates. What is more, the plates are so easily obtained they can be dumped and replaced on a constant, untraceable loop due to how they are regulated in the UK.
Sarah explains how in countries such as France, plates are treated like passports and can only be bought from one or two rigorously controlled outlets. In this country, there are more than 43,000 DVLA registered companies. ‘That is four times the number of petrol stations,’ says Sarah. For while reputable companies, such as Halfords, require customers to present paperwork, such as your log book and driving licence, plenty of them do not. The onus is on the DVLA to regulate the outlets, but of course they cannot keep up with them. Last year, Amazon banned the sale of car number plates on its platform after seven companies were found to be selling them for £40 with no ID checks.
A DVLA spokesperson said: ‘We understand how distressing vehicle crime can be. Any motorist who believes their number plate has been cloned should report it to the police and contact the issuing authority for any fines or penalties, providing evidence that the vehicle involved was not theirs. We are working with the police, Trading Standards, the National Police Chiefs’ Council... to improve identification of cloned plates.’
What Can Victims Do?
But what should I do? The obvious solution is to change my number plate. Although this can be done online (for an £80 charge, naturally), it requires sending off your log book and can take up to six weeks. That logbook is instrumental in appealing a lot of the penalties so, without it, I am going to be unable to defend myself for over a month or more. I could wind up having to defend myself in a magistrates’ court. If I cannot, I could lose my licence and have thousands of pounds of unpaid fines against my name. Or I could sit it out and hope the driver will be stopped by the police soon. The crime has been reported, so hopefully the car might be picked up by cameras. The Blackwall Tunnel would be a good place to start.
Now the police have the registration flagged, a new set of challenges could be about to start, however, as they did for Jo Leach, a 52-year-old secondary school teacher trainer from Torquay. She tells me how last year she was pulled over by police numerous times after the second-hand car she had just bought turned out to have a cloned cousin. ‘The first time I realised something was wrong was at a petrol station, when I was not allowed to pay for fuel at the kiosk – I had to put my credit card in the machine at the pump, before filling up. I was actually Tannoyed over the forecourt. That usually only happens when someone has driven off without paying. I am a vicar’s wife. It was really embarrassing!’ says Jo. After that mortifying experience, Jo reported a potential cloning and got a crime reference number. ‘Then the police kept pulling me over. I started to keep the crime number in the glove box. I would be constantly looking in my mirror, expecting a blue light. It was absolutely awful – you actually start to feel guilty.’ After a few months, the incidents stopped, suggesting the car had been impounded and the number plate confiscated – or the thief had moved on to new ones. That is what we are hoping for.
Prevention Advice
And in the future? What can we do to stop ourselves being targeted again? I read with a heavy heart that a VW Golf – an inconspicuous, not too flashy family car – is a very popular choice for thieves. Practical advice seems to be limited to not posting pictures of your car, and its number plate, online, but I have not done that. Sarah has some grim words of warning: ‘A senior police officer once told me that, generally, he can give crime prevention advice on most things, from burglar alarms, to keeping your mobile out of sight when walking alone. But there is nothing you can do to protect yourself from having your number plate cloned. Nothing.’
