Ontario drivers fight mystery 407 bills, parking tickets — likely from duplicated licence plates
CBC
Imagine seeing an online ad for what looks like a carbon copy of your licence plate.
Omar Ahmad didn't have to imagine it.
Last month, Ahmad's brother sent him a link to a Facebook Marketplace listing for "any Canadian province plates for all your needs" for $26, alongside an image of what looked like an Ontario licence plate "3MAR."
That's the personalized Ontario plate Ahmad has had for 11 years. His wife gave it to him as a gift back in high school for a car he'd built as a showpiece for his family's auto body shop in Hamilton, Ont.
"It literally looked like if you took a picture of my plate and put it up there," said Ahmad.
"To take a plate that's legitimately made — it's somebody's registered plate — and to make it into a fake plate multiple people have is just — it's wild."
Ahmad says the ad did, however, solve the mystery of why he has received four Highway 407 ETR bills connected to the vanity plate of a car he rarely drives since August.
He's just one of a growing number of drivers receiving 407 charges for trips they say they never took.
On average, Highway 407 ETR investigated more than 500 accounts a month last year for toll charges related to lost, stolen or duplicated licence plates. That's double the nearly 250 accounts the toll highway operator investigated a month in 2019 for the same issue.
It appears that at least part of the increase comes down to how easy it is to duplicate a real licence plate like Ahmad's.
CBC Toronto found several vendors selling custom licence plates online for novelty use. To determine whether the plates could pass for the real thing, a reporter ordered a replica of a CBC vehicle's licence plate earlier this month. The novelty plate was shipped within a few hours and delivered within the week.
Although the fake plate is made of plastic, it could pass for the real thing on the road. Depending on how much someone is willing to spend, other vendors also sell metal and high-end adhesive sticker replica plates.
"We have seen some very well-disguised fake licence plates out there that wouldn't catch the eye of an officer," said Sgt. Kerry Schmidt, with Ontario Provincial Police's highway safety division. "You wouldn't know until the driver of the vehicle was stopped for some sort of violation."
In a statement, a spokesperson for Highway 407 ETR said they're aware of cases where "an individual's licence plate number has been stolen or illegally duplicated," and in those cases the company will work with customers to identify illegitimate trips and reverse the charges.
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