American gets $12,000 unjustified fines for license plate that reads ‘null’

At the end of 2016, an American security researcher requested a license plate for his car with only the text ‘null’. That seemed like a nice idea that might prevent fines, but the opposite turned out to be the case. He received fines totaling about $12,000.

Joseph Tartaro took the opportunity to submit his own suggestion for the license plate, and after ideas like ‘segfault’ and ‘null pointer’ eventually came to ‘null’, Wired writes based on his explanation on Defcon. He thought it would be fun, because his car was parked next to his wife’s and that car got a license plate with only the text ‘void’.

Because of his background, Tartaro knew that in many programming languages ​​’null’ actually stands for an empty value and thus in fact corresponds to a void, or ‘void’ in English. The security investigator indicated that he initially hoped that his license plate would prevent fines from ending up on his doorstep, because the violation would probably not be recognized in the government database and processed by the ‘null’ designation. Later, however, he admitted that joking was not his main intention; in his own words, he was surprised that the state of California allowed him to register ‘null’.

After the registration at the end of 2016, little happened in 2017, although it appeared during the re-registration in 2017 that the text ‘null’ was no longer accepted and that the website went down. His license plate and vehicle identification number would be invalid, but he was still able to renew his null number via a reference number. Gradually, however, the fines poured in, partly on the basis of violations in places Tartaro had never been before. In fact, fines rolled in from 2014, well before he carried his license plate that read ‘null’.

He paid his first fine without thinking about it; that concerned a fine for not having the correct registration sticker on the license plate. That payment likely led the fine database to associate the text “null” with his personal information. This had an undesirable effect: every time an officer forgot to enter the license plate with a fine, that fine was automatically sent to Tartaro.

After attempts to correct the errors, the fine was reduced to $6000 and now all fines are said to have disappeared, leaving only the obligation to re-register his car for an amount of 140 dollars. Despite the fines, Tartaro says he will stick to ‘null’ on his license plate, because, according to him, fines are still linked to his name. Changing the license plate would only make solving the problem more difficult, he said.