‘Speed camera pranks’ may be a scam in themselves
Teens in Maryland stand accused of pulling a scam to frame innocent drivers. Yet the claims themselves have a whiff of prankery about them.
Some scams we report on at Blorge are so complex they need a careful explanation, delicately balanced to be technically accurate while clear enough to easily understand. This one is considerably simpler: Teenagers at a school in Maryland are reportedly printing fake ‘license plates’, sticking them on their own cars, and deliberately triggering speed cameras so that friends (or enemies) wind up with a $40 fine.
It seems cameras in Montgomery County are not all that sensitive. To fool them, all you need is some glossy photo paper and what the local newspaper quaintly calls “fonts from certain websites that ‘mimic’ those on Maryland license plates.”
(We would say it only takes a second to find these details online, but Google’s search results page puts it at just 0.29 seconds.)
Police didn’t seem to be aware of the trend until questioned by The Sentinel, but just to be on the safe side some of the pranksters are apparently going to the effort of borrowing a car that at least vaguely resembles that belonging to the victim.
Of course, with ‘teens pull pranks’ hardly earth-shattering news, you do have to question how the newspaper got hold of the story. It turns out the source is a ‘concerned parent’, whose motivation appears to be less about the victims of the pranks and more about the politics of speed cameras themselves:
I hope the public at large will complain loudly enough that local Montgomery County government officials will change their policy of using these cameras for monetary gain. The practice of sending speeding tickets to faceless recipients without any type of verification is unwarranted and an exploitation of our rights.
So it’s certainly possible that this ‘trend’ has been exaggerated or plain made-up by a motorist who wants to discredit the camera system? In which case, perhaps it’s the media which is being scammed.
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December 23rd, 2008
Surprised? No. The general lack of journalistic integrity on blogs is glaringly obvious. Not that mainstream media don’t also misinform (often intentionally), but its far worse on the blogs. I suspect a lot of it is the pay per article fee structure. How many blog sites (Blorge included) do you see that are full of “journalists” who simply regurgitate articles whose subjects are easily found elsewhere first?!?
July 18th, 2009
I just sent a complaint email about this entire system to every elected official and district I could think of. Included my district reps, district 39 reps, Gaithersburg and Rockville mayors, The chief of police for gaithersburg, rockville, and the county. The house and Senate leadership for Maryland, and will be mailing my complaint to The Governor’s office. Also the the program itself, the county Council, the Gaithersburg/Germantown Chamber of Commerce and the Montgomery Village Foundation.