A New York resident’s attempt to use her surname as a license plate turned into a costly administrative tangle after the word “BLANK” matched records in local ticketing systems.
Melanie Blank Brown had used the vanity plate until a recent move. When her registration was updated with her new address, her plate sequence entered local registration and ticketing systems. The mismatch surfaced only after the address change brought her registration into contact with those records. Many of those records contained a license plate field that read “Blank,” and her registration began matching violations that had been issued to other people.
She was first told she had two outstanding tickets. The count eventually exceeded 400 violations, with fines totaling more than $40,000. Because the tickets had been issued across the city, Brown could not resolve them in a single proceeding. Each violation carried its own paperwork and venue, stretching the process over repeated court visits. She had to appear before multiple judges repeatedly to have them voided.
To stop the list from growing, Brown surrendered the vanity plate. The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has since removed “BLANK” from the pool of available vanity plates, reducing the chance that another driver will repeat the problem. The New York Times reported that her replacement plate reads “KNALB.”