This BBC investigation into Ghost Plates is worth a watch.
Panorama - Ghost Plates: Drivers Cheating the Law:-
https://www.bbc.co.u...heating-the-law
"Thousands of illegal registration plates on cars and other vehicles have been detected by a new camera system currently being tested on motorways in south-east England, BBC Panorama can reveal.
These plates have been adapted to avoid their details being identified by automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems, which are used to enforce speed limits and low emission zones as well as to track criminals.
Filming undercover, Panarama discovered how easy and cheap it is to buy plates without any background checks.
These tactics include deliberately using false plates that clone the number of another vehicle - and so-called ghost plates, where special plastic is used to make all or part of the registration number unreadable by most motorway cameras.
One of the main providers of ANPR technology, MAV Systems, has been testing a new camera capable of identifying and reading ghost plates.
At one test site, just outside London near the Dartford Crossing, it has recorded an average of more than 1,000 of the ghost plates a day over several months. Two other sites have been running for almost two years. At one, near the M25, detections have risen from 1,000 a day to nearly 2,000 a day - while at the other, near the Eurotunnel at Folkestone, the system is flagging more than 400 a day.
Both cloned and ghost plates look like normal vehicle registration plates when viewed by the naked eye.
In the case of cloned ones, at least two vehicles are on the road with the same letters and numbers - with only one of them being legal.
Ghost plates, on the other hand, show correct details for the vehicle - but they are made up of reflective materials which are difficult or impossible for most ANPR cameras to read."
https://www.bbc.co.u...s/cq9860162dj2o
