A Northern Virginia man spent years disputing traffic citations issued to vehicles he had never owned, driven, or even seen, all because someone apparently found it worthwhile to duplicate his personalized license plate and slap it on other cars. What sounds like a clerical oddity turned into a years-long paper war with two separate jurisdictions, and Jay Rosenberg of Vienna, Virginia, is now raising questions that go well beyond his own front porch.
Rosenberg, who recently relocated from Montgomery County, Maryland, held a Maryland vanity plate that read “PRIVATE.” Simple enough, distinguishable enough, and apparently attractive enough for someone to reproduce it.
According to Rosenberg, cloned versions of that plate were linked to at least 20 traffic violations, the bulk of them issued by camera systems in Washington, D.C., and Prince George’s County. He showed FOX 5 DC a stack of citations at his Vienna home, and in at least one case, the vehicle photographed receiving the violation did not even have registration stickers that matched his legitimate plate. The cameras recorded the letters; nobody apparently looked much further than that…