A New York driver who chose “BLANK” for her vanity plate learned that the word also functions as an empty field in local ticketing software, leaving her on the hook for citations issued to other people.
Melanie Blank Brown, a New York resident, selected the plate because it matched her surname. Until a recent move, she had no idea what was piling up behind the scenes. When her registration was updated with her new address, the new entry for her plate sequence was ingested by local registration and ticketing systems, many of which held records where the plate number had been entered as—in effect—blank.
The bill arrived in stages
Brown was first told she had two outstanding tickets. The count eventually climbed past 400 violations, with fines totaling more than $40,000.
Because the citations had been issued across the city, they could not be resolved in one sitting. Brown had to appear before multiple judges, repeatedly, to get the tickets voided.
To keep the pile from growing further, she gave up the plate. The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has since removed “BLANK” from the pool of available vanity plates, so no other driver can repeat the experiment.
According to the New York Times, Brown's replacement plate reads “KNALB.”