On Wednesday, Bouchaib Moussaid’s £8,000 Kia Sportage car was all set to be sold at auction by bailiffs. The care worker, who lives in St Albans in Hertfordshire, and his extended family have spent the last few weeks trying to stop the sale.
Moussaid is one of a growing number of people who have had their car cloned.
Unknown to him, someone had been using copies of his car’s registration plates and had driven in London’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) 12 times, resulting in him being sent a series of penalty fines.
Despite Moussaid repeatedly telling Transport for London (TfL) that it was not him at the wheel, agents working for TfL seized his car in January.
Car cloning could be one of the UK’s fastest-growing crimes but it is barely acknowledged or recorded. If it happens to you, it can be a nightmare to resolve – one that will consume your life, as a host of unpaid speeding, parking and other fines start landing on your doorstep.
Motoring experts say that the big jump in the cost of car ownership over the last year or two is in part to blame.
Unscrupulous drivers facing £2,000-a-year car insurance costs and £12.50 a day to drive in London’s Ulez – or those using stolen cars – are choosing to clone another owner’s number plates. Usually they pick a vehicle that is the same model and colour.
Once the plates are attached to their vehicle, they are able to drive around as an apparently legitimate driver.
Moussaid has never driven his car in London, so was bemused when Ulez penalty charges started dropping through his letterbox last year. Only when he looked at the grainy black and white images of “his” car being driven in the zone did he realise that it wasn’t his vehicle.
The car caught by the cameras didn’t have the Eco badge that his had, the number plates looked different, and there were other small differences to the bodywork that made him certain it wasn’t his vehicle. At the time of the alleged offences, his car was actually off the road, and registered as such with DVLA.
“We have provided a witness statement from his neighbour that it couldn’t be him and shown TfL that his attended care worker shifts in St Albans coincided with the time and date of the offences,” says Lauren Hine, Moussaid’s sister-in-law and one of those trying to help him save the car.
“We have provided evidence that the car was declared off the road when the offences were committed, and shown the physical differences between the vehicles.”
She adds: “Herts and Met police forces are aware his car was cloned and are searching for the culprit using the camera system, but TfL just won’t listen and are selling his car. How can this ludicrous situation even happen?”
Only because of the Guardian’s intervention this week were Moussaid and his car finally reunited on Tuesday, leaving the care worker in tears. All of the fines have now been dropped. It just happened to be his birthday.
A TfL spokesperson said: “We are sorry that Mr Moussaid has been a victim of vehicle cloning and apologise for any distress the handling of his case has caused him and his family. Although the evidence which confirmed the vehicle wasn’t registered to him was submitted after the statutory deadline, we should have cancelled all TfL PCNs related to the cloned number plate and stopped the enforcement process – which has now happened. We have also returned Mr Moussaid’s vehicle to him.”
Late last year, the Guardian was contacted by another driver who had fallen victim to car cloning. The 88-year-old’s insurance doubled at renewal to £1,259 and she was told this was because her Ford Fiesta had been involved in an accident on the M25.
Despite her pointing out that she had not driven on the M25 for more than a decade, and that she had been either at church or at home at the time of the accident – and the fact that she had reported that her car had been cloned to Hertfordshire police – her insurer, Zurich, refused to take the claim off her file. Only after the Guardian intervened did the firm restore her no-claims bonus and reduce her premium accordingly.
For Simon Oliver, who lives in north London, this all sounds horribly familiar. He has twice been targeted by car-cloning criminals.
The most recent incident happened in July 2021, when he received two penalty charge notices from different London councils – one for driving in a bus lane and the other for an illegal left turn. Both notices included photos purporting to show his five-door Audi A3 car.
Despite him providing extensive evidence that at the time of one of the offences his vehicle was in a car park, and demonstrating that the one in the photo appeared to be a three-door Audi A1, the council concerned rejected his appeal.
Only when he sent in photos of his vehicle type and the one in the CCTV image where he had “circled all the differences” was the matter dropped.
A few years earlier, when he owned a Ford Ka, Oliver received a flurry of penalty notices from different bodies, including speeding fines, parking tickets and congestion charge fines relating to various parts of London – including some areas he had never been to.
Oliver worked for a government department at the time and had a “massive stroke of luck” when Suffolk constabulary agreed to write a letter backing up his assertion that, at the time that one of the offences was committed, he was visiting the police HQ in Ipswich for work and his car was parked there all day.
Nevertheless, he still had to go to a tribunal to make his case to an adjudicator. “I probably had a couple of inches of paperwork … [The adjudicator] acknowledged very quickly that I had the necessary evidence, and he agreed that all these fines would be overturned.”
Paul Barker, the managing editor at the sales website Carwow, says the number of cloned cars on the UK’s roads is “unfortunately increasing”.
“It is becoming a real worry for those caught up in it and can have severe consequences for both buyers and legitimate vehicle owners,” he says. “For buyers, there is the risk of the financial loss and legal complications that come with inadvertently purchasing a cloned car (which may be stolen) and potentially subject to repossession.”
Barker says the latest data from TfL shows that more than 12,762 Ulez charges were cancelled because of cars being cloned in 2022. This was up from 2,779 in 2021 and 1,298 in 2020, but the zone was expanded in October 2021, so the numbers are not comparable.
None of the agencies we approached for figures were able to provide us with data.
Barker says if you find out your car has fallen victim to a cloning fraudster, it’s vital to act quickly and alert the authorities – ie the police – before further crimes are committed. “Not only will it save you having to appeal against any future tickets, but it will hopefully help the police snare the criminals, as a cloned vehicle will be flagged on nationwide [ANPR] cameras as one to look out for,” he says.
“We would also encourage clone victims to collect as much evidence as possible, digital or testimony, about your whereabouts, to support appeals against unfortunate motoring fines or traffic violations that your car’s doppelganger has accrued.”
Edmund King, the AA’s president, says the growth of camera enforcement – from speeding and parking to bus lanes and yellow box junctions and from the congestion charge to low-emission zones – means that for those wanting to stay outside the law, cloning a car is their “easiest option”.
He says: “One solution we advocate is to have more traffic police or ‘cops in cars and on cycles’ on the streets, as often they are able to spot the ringers. Evidence from the Home Office suggests the most serious motoring offenders are much more likely to be involved in other crimes.”
‘I was told I’d done 88mph in a 40mph zone’
It was a bright spring day when trouble landed on my front doormat: a letter from National Parking Control “inviting” me to pay a parking fine complete with a picture of my car parked in a part of Greenwich that I’d never heard of let alone driven to.
My first instinct was to run out into the street to check that my car was still there. It was, but all was not as it seemed.
Someone had clocked my number plate, had a duplicate printed and was now running around south-east London masquerading as me.
The first parking ticket was quickly followed by several more at £100 a time as the cloned car made its way around Greenwich. My first job was to challenge the penalties. Thankfully, the clone, while the same make, model and colour as mine, was missing a few bits of trim, allowing me to prove that the car was not mine with photos. After a few back and forths, NPC cancelled the tickets.
Next I logged the crime with the Met police, who put a marker on my number plate that would trigger a stop should any passing officers or cameras spot the car in the next four months. I was issued with a CAD (computer-aided dispatch) reference and warned to carry it, the car’s V5 logbook and ID while driving as I was just as likely to be stopped as the criminals, though I was informed by an officer that it was likely the criminals would ditch the cloned plates before they could be caught.
The cloning also needed reporting to the DVLA, which required a signed cover letter to be sent, via post no less, to put a separate mark on the registration number’s central record.
I thought that would be the end of it but a few days later a scary-looking notice of intended prosecution arrived from the Met informing me that my vehicle had blown through a speed camera doing 88mph in a 40mph zone. They might have been trying to go Back to the Future but I was facing an instant ban.
Despite reporting the cloning, the burden lay on me to contest each penalty as it came in. It wasn’t obvious from the intimidating form what to do for a cloned vehicle, but for a speeding ticket of this magnitude you have 28 days to reply via post with the form, printed photos showing discrepancies and a signed statement.
I followed up with a phone call 15 days later to be told to expect another letter requesting more information, which arrived on the mat six days later. Another photoshoot required, this time of the front, back, sides, closeups of both number plates, plus the VIN in the windscreen and V5 logbook. This time at least the photos could be emailed to the investigations team.
Fifteen days later a letter arrived from the investigating officer to inform me that the offending vehicle had been caught by police and impounded, likely putting an end to my three-month saga. I was so relieved.
So what I have I learned? While there is little you can do to stop your vehicle being cloned, there are some precautions you can take to help you if it does happen. Having a distinctive plate design with an emblem such as a country flag at one end, a border or a plate surround will help you prove the vehicle isn’t yours from closeup images of the plate. Equally a distinctive sticker low down on the front and rear windshields will help add unique elements to help contest tickets in photographic evidence. Dash or security camera footage or GPS logs can also be used to prove your location at the time of the offence. Samuel Gibbs
