Catch-22 : Licence to steal

Stealing number plates of a car and charging money to return them is the latest way extortionists are making profits.

KARACHI:

‘Listen, I have the original number plates for your car and if you want to get them back, you need to pay me Rs50,000 by Monday evening.’

If your number plates have been stolen, either in a parking lot somewhere or outside your residence, you are likely to receive such calls. This is because the street criminals have discovered this latest technique to extort money from people.

They take advantage of the complicated process of getting replacement number plates and victims of such a crime find themselves in a true catch-22 situation. The process of getting replacement number plates from the excise and taxation department is so lengthy and time-consuming that most often, they end up caving and paying the extortionists.

According to Haroon Jadoon, a showroom owner at Khalid Bin Waleed Road, the original number plates of a car are just as valuable as its original registration documents. “You have to pay them [the extortionists] whether you can afford to or not because then the car’s value in the market plummets rapidly,” he said.

According to Jadoon, the theft of number plates has become a profitable business and he comes across such cases every week. Another reason to have contributed to the helplessness of the victims is that the excise and taxation department have in the recent years begun the practice of printing the word ‘duplicate’ on replacement number plates. The label automatically lowers the value of the car. Customers are reluctant to buy a car that does not have its original number plates and therefore, car dealers avoid buying cars without it. The value of the car, depending on its original price, can depreciate anywhere from Rs100,000 to Rs2.5 million. “A Land Cruiser worth Rs15 million will lose around Rs2.5million in resale if its original number plates are missing,” said president of  Pakistan Motor Dealers Association HM Shahzad.

Shahzad says that car dealers are also often involved in this type of theft to buy cars for at cheaper rates. “They [the car dealers] get your address when you go there to sell your car and offer you a low price that you will naturally refuse. They somehow remove one of your plates once you have left and you assume it fell off on the road somewhere,” he said. “When you try to sell it to another dealer, he will offer you an even lower price now that the number plate is no longer present. You go back to the first dealer, who will give you Rs50,000 more that the market rate and you naturally end up selling your car to him.”

WHAT THE EXCISE DEPARTMENT SAYS

Before the use of the word ‘duplicate’ on number plates, the department used to issue replacement number plates through a special series introduced for this purpose alone. This series began with AC, AA, QP and AB but the car dealers complained that this led to a depreciation of the car value. After that, the department began producing the same number plates as the original and putting the word ‘duplicate’ on them.

The department’s director-general Muhammad Shoaib Ahmad Siddiqui says that the word should not have any impact on the value of the cars as even if the department was to remove it, the buyer could easily get the information by looking up the car’s records. “We use the word to indicate that the original number plates have either been damaged or stolen, so that the plates can’t be used by someone else.”

THE PROCEDURE

If you have lost your number plates and want to replace them, you have to first place an ad in the newspaper. You must then visit the excise department, located in the Civic Centre, to apply for the replacement plates. You must bring along your car and registration documents,  a newspaper clipping of the ad and a copy of the FIR registered for the plates. An excise and taxation officer examines your original documents, the car, its engine number and chassis number. The replacement plates cost Rs500 and take up to a month to be made. 

Published in The Express Tribune, June 23^rd, 2014.