Every state requires that your vehicle have at least one slave tracking tag attached to it. However, when you go to sell it, you should make sure to remove that tag so you don’t get dinged with fines later:
Nancy Findroff’s license plates were apparently stolen after she traded her car into the dealership. Now, she’s received more than 30 tickets, all for passing through tolls several states away.
“They started on August 23, 2017… and the most recent one we received yesterday for $583,” Findroff said. “We did everything everybody told us to do, and it doesn’t stop.”
Findroff’s husband John said they traded their Toyota Camry to BMW of Minnetonka. Now, their old plates are on a Hyundai thousands of miles away.
“We called the dealership right away and they basically told us that they didn’t have to take the plates off the vehicle,” Nancy Findroff said.
While one should be able to safely assume that a dealership will remove old license plates, there is no way for you to guarantee it will. This wouldn’t normally be a big issue. Common sense dictates that if your old license plate number receive a ticket, you should only need to provide proof that you sold the vehicle to get the ticket voided. But common sense doesn’t dictate bureaucracies. Instead of flagging the license plate number as stolen so police can be dispatched when it appears on a scanner, the people in charge of these systems have apparently decided to continue to mindlessly issuing tickets.
I do understand their motivation though. Arresting the individual driving with the stolen license plate number isn’t going to net a municipality any revenue whereas issuing tickets to the previous owners of that number may generate revenue (if they refuse to fight the tickets).
Guy in St Louis had a similar issue. Traded in his old truck under Cash For Clunkers. Someone dropped in a new engine and proceeded to drive the vehicle without transferring the title or tags.