Record Number of UK Drivers Discover They Have an Evil Twin Who Loves Bus Lanes
More than 11,400 motorists told the DVLA last year they had been fined for driving they didn't do. Their cars, it turns out, have been busy without them.
Satire This article is fiction. Any resemblance to sane reality is coincidental.
SOMEWHERE ON THE M25 — Britain’s motorists have long suspected their cars live a secret life. New figures confirm it: thousands of them are out speeding, dodging congestion charges and driving through bus lanes, apparently while their owners are at home watching telly.
A record 11,402 drivers contacted the DVLA in 2025 to say they had been sent fines for driving they did not recognise. Most, experts believe, are victims of number plate cloning, the increasingly popular practice of copying a stranger’s registration onto a similar-looking car so the stranger gets the bill.
“I received a parking fine for Leeds,” said one entirely fictional driver from Kent. “I have never been to Leeds. Apparently, my car has. Apparently my car also has a favourite bus lane, and it’s not one I’d have picked.”
The doppelganger economy
The clones are not careless. According to the RAC, fraudsters choose cars of the same make, model and colour, so the camera sees nothing unusual and the original owner becomes the only person in the country who can’t drive like a maniac and get away with it.
Industry observers say the arrangement is extremely efficient. One person enjoys the speeding. Another person enjoys the paperwork.
Meanwhile, a separate group of drivers has opted out of the system entirely with “ghost” plates, designed so the UK’s 18,000 automatic number plate recognition cameras simply cannot read them. Those cameras capture around 90 million vehicle reads a day, which makes the ghost plate the motoring equivalent of a cloak of invisibility, available from the wrong sort of website.
Government sources are reportedly trialling specialised goggles to spot unreadable plates, confirming that Britain’s response to a 21st-century camera problem is, at least partly, glasses.
This section is satire. The quotes are invented. The numbers below are real.
What actually happened
An RAC Freedom of Information request found the DVLA was contacted by 11,402 drivers in 2025 who had been sent fines or penalties relating to the use of their vehicle that they did not recognise or accept responsibility for. That is up 9% on 2024 (10,460) and 93% on 2018 (5,912). The Guardian reports most cases are believed to be down to cloning. The RAC notes these are reports, so the true scale of cloning and of unreadable “ghost” plates is harder to measure.
Drivers are supposed to show number plate suppliers their V5C logbook plus proof of identity and address, but an investigation last year found more than 130 official suppliers willing to sell cloned plates, the Guardian reports. A report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Transport Safety, backed by the RAC, estimated as many as one in 15 vehicles may carry modified or non-compliant plates. RAC head of policy Simon Williams called cloning “the menace of modern-day motoring” and said it is often only “when a fine arrives at a vehicle keeper’s home address” that owners discover the problem.
The government announced a nationwide crackdown last month, funding a new roads policing team and a National Roads Policing Coordination Centre that will trial technology including goggles to detect unreadable plates. Displaying an incorrect plate can bring a fine of up to £1,000. If you get a fine you don’t recognise, contact the issuing authority and the DVLA quickly and keep evidence of where your car actually was.