Has anyone had this happen - we are bamboozled

[MadameOvary81]

I will try to keep this as short as I can but it does require a little bit of explaining.

My partner and I were living in the South East and in March this year we decided to move to the North West. All good. Until the day before we moved and our car decided to give up the will to live. The clutch and battery went and there was just no was we could drive it 300 plus miles. So, my partner asked her works office manager if she could leave it in the secure car park until we could get down to fix it and drive it north.

That was all fine. Fast forward to a few weeks ago. We went down to get it sorted. Mechanic fixed the clutch and put in a new battery. We started to drive home and just outside London we broke down...the breaks had gone. AA towed it up. The car's brake pipes had corroded due to sitting so long, apparently.

Now...today. The landlord from our old property in the south east sent up our mail, and amongst it all is about 20 letters, all vehicle offences! All of them in the timeframe of when the car was parked at my partners work! They are in Oxford, Luton and Hertfordshire...all places we have never been. And we can't have been there...we were in the NW. The car was not driveable. If it had been stolen the person would have had to jump start it and I doubt they could have got it from Sussex to Luton with the clutch the way it was? Or with the brake pipe issue.

One of the offences is a parking violation. There is a picture of the car. It is in indeed the same make and colour of our car, but there is no tow bar on the car in the picture...we have a tow bar.

Has our plates been cloned? What the hell is going on? It's thousands of pounds worth of fines. It's parking offences, driving in the bus lane, speeding....the list goes on. We are lost as to what's gone on.

My partner is in meetings until 4, then she plans to call the police. But can anyone offer any insight until then? I am terrified we will be made to pay.

Definitely cloned plates. It's sadly common. You may be made to jump through hoops to prove it's not your vehicle.

Op can you prove it was in the car park for that time?

Does the secure car park have cctv which shows your car was parked there for a length of time?

Cloned plates. Has your partners old work got cctv that can prove the car was there all that time?

It sounds like the plates have been cloned. I guess you have receipts for work that show it has just had the clutch repaired etc & his work could confirm it was in the car park? That along with proof you were in a different part of the country should help, also the lack of tow bar on the car.
Ask for bus Lane or speeding pictures showing the driver (not always available but worth asking)

My brother had a similar thing with clones plates & was arrested for leaving a petrol station without paying (pulled over by police & taken to police station) the photo footage cleared him as the person in the tape was a different skin colour & about 8 inches taller!

Cloned plates are pretty common, ring the number on the letters and explain that it's not your car

Yes, cloned plates, very common, please don't worry about it, you won't have to pay.

Colleague was once accused of not paying the London congestion charge. He had never driven in central London. He told them that and heard no more.

Just tell them that the car has been off the road between X dates and they can check with your partner's employer if they like.

it's really common

we spotted a car parked on our road and a number plate was falling off the back (and revealed a different number plate underneath!). Think the heat had melted the tape they had used to keep it attached to the number plate beneath it.

we reported it to 101 thinking the police wouldn't do much but they were round in about 20 mins to check it out themselves and thanked us as that car had been driving around creating parking offences/involved in crimes with someone else's number plate on it !!

it it definitely not your car? can you see some identifying features that would make it not your car (not just that someone removed the tow bar and used it) - I assume as it was undriveable it wasn't but might be helpful to spot something that shows it isn't yours if it's the same colour/make!

The work car park doesn't have CCTV, but the office manager parks next to the space we had occupied and can testify she saw it there every day. The mechanic can testify when he fixed it and what was wrong ie it wasn't able to drive, as can the AA.

We have a picture of the car on the AA tow truck and you can see several small differences between the cars. The tow bar, the other car has a sticker we don't have, and we have a thing hanging from our mirror. The picture of the parking violation in Oxford, you can see what looks like a man with his feet up in the passenger seat...we are both women.

It's such a bloody headache that we don't need.

My partner has now called Hertfordshire council offences before her next meeting and they have said it will be fine if we can just build a case, showing pictures etc, and a police incident number will help.

Ugh, why are people so shitty.

Just another thought, did you sorn it whilst it was off the road?

It’s a nuisance but it sounds like you have a lot of evidence, if you can, see if you’ve got any receipts/something on your bank statement to show you weren’t in the same place as the car on those days too. I would imagine the office manager & the mechanic will be enough though

Thanks everyone for replying and being so reassuring. I've no doubt it will be okay in the end, but as someone said, the hoops we will have to jump through to get it sorted, well, we just don't need the stress. We have so much else going on, too. Never rains but it bloody pours, eh.

A colleague of mine had this. Someone no doubt saw your car parked up for a while and assumed its identity.

My colleague reported it as not him to the people that issued the fines, reported it to the police and had to go to see a solicitor and sign an affidavit to say it wasn't him.

He was warned by the police that he might be pulled over by the police if they saw him, just to check it was him and not the cloned car driver but never has been so far.

I would perhaps keep a little quiet that you hadn't changed your Registered Address with the DVLA though - I think that comes with a £1,000 fine!

@HopeHappy Oh, God. Fingers crossed we can avoid that. We've had so much going on that that we've neglected a lot of admin that's needing doing. Lesson learnt today!

[quote MadameOvary81]@HopeHappy Oh, God. Fingers crossed we can avoid that. We've had so much going on that that we've neglected a lot of admin that's needing doing. Lesson learnt today![/quote]
DVLA have such a reported backlog of everything at the moment (see the main BBC news page today!), I think if I were you I'd perhaps call them (or email them as calls are almost completely unanswered nowadays as they're so short staffed) and say that you'd sent back the V5 in the post to change the address, but you've just been made aware of the fines, etc, being issued to your old address, so have they not made the change yet?

Say you were aware they had a backlog and that you'd assumed they'd get round to it, but it's now come to light because of the plates being cloned.

Clutching at straws here I'm afraid though!

Thank you, hope, that's a fabulous idea. We can but try and cross everything that, for once, the universe is on our side.

Bit of an update. We called Luton council and apparently it's already been flagged with them from Luton police to say it's cloned plates. They sent my partner a picture and there's a few more subtle differences between the cars; one being we have leather seats and this car clearly has cloth interior. Hopefully now we just go to the other councils with this information and it's case closed. Luton had already closed theirs.

I'm going to sit in the garden and have a tiny cry of relief.

Phew that's good news!