Cloning Vehicles
Cloning Vehicles
Protecting your vehicle from being cloned?
Have you received documentation saying you have outstanding parking fines or speeding tickets that need paying, and wondered why as you weren’t in that location or on that motorway? The reason is someone has cloned your vehicle.
What is cloning?
Cloning has been around for years, and it involves a criminal finding an exact match of your vehicle, usually your registration plates and then basically drives around masking your vehicle as his/hers. If that criminal decides to park on yellow lines, they won’t be too bothered as they parking fine is not going to them it comes to you?
If you are out of the blue receiving these fines/charges and you know they are not down to you, then you should follow the information so that it can help you solve this inconvenient problem and protect you and your vehicle from criminals in the future.
- Return and fines/charges or paperwork back to the issuing authorities giving any documentary proof that you have received.
- Immediately write to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) at Swansea, SA99 1ZA or send them a fax, this will be recorded on the vehicle registration for any future reference.
You must immediately contact the police, and they will endeavor to find the criminal and hopefully prosecute them to the full and stop this illegal theft of your vehicles identity.
What will happen next?
The DVLA will receive the relevant paperwork and carefully take into consideration in issuing to you a new vehicle registration, if they are satisfied that your vehicle has had its identity stolen and that this has been a recurring problem.
What is currently being done to stop the illegal activity of cloning?
The DVLA is diligently working on a wide-range of measures to address this problem.
Since 1 January 2003:
- all number plate suppliers in England and Wales must register with DVLA
- registered suppliers must keep a record of every sale and must obtain documentary evidence of the customer’s name and address and entitlement to the registration mark requested
This problem of cloning as mentioned earlier is a serious criminal offence and due to the distribution from DVLA in the control of number-plates has cut the amount of theft of vehicle identity; however, there are still preventable measures that need to be taken in making number plates more difficult for criminals from cloning your vehicle in future.
There are security measures that are currently being put into place such as electronic tagging of number plates, also there are levels of development in theft-resistant plates that will not be useable once removed from the vehicle and also under development are number plates that contain electronic information about the vehicle.
In the UK there are reported estimates of around 10,000 vehicles that are cloned each year driving up and down on your vast network of roads.
The police are using a security system called automated number plate recognition (ANPR)
There are many vehicles that conceal cameras in the back to read and film each car registration plate as that vehicle passes, and this in turn is run through the police computer to find the details of that particular vehicle, and this can be used to identify the driver’s address, whether that vehicle is registered or has been reported stolen or is a cloned vehicle.
To stop this from happening to you regularly check that you are not receiving unwelcome mail from the police, parking fines or other unwarranted documentation that you can’t account for.