Here's How Dealers Scam The System With Illegal Fake License Plates

New York, New Jersey and other big cities in the U.S. are currently dealing with a new crime phenomena: Ghost cars, which are not registered with the state’s DMV or have their license plates obscured, have proliferated throughout urban areas since the COVID-19 lockdowns. One way of keeping your car off the books is by buying temporary license plates from unscrupulous used car dealers. Vice has an in-depth look at the criminal enterprises that makes this shady underworld tick.

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It all starts with a young man named Kareem Ulloa-Alvarado being duped into performing some very illegal acts in exchange for a gig-economy worker’s dream: $50 per delivery.

The job was straightforward. Kareem received emails with temporary license plates attached as PDFs, then he printed and delivered them to customers throughout the city. Kareem’s employers instructed him to collect $150 per tag from buyers, transfer $100 to a Zelle account, and keep the balance for himself. Kareem has never owned a car, so the idea that a dealership would deliver license plates seemed reasonable enough. The customers were grateful.

“These were like normal people that owned houses and owned apartments,” Kareem said later. “I would give temporary plates to construction guys and mothers. It just seemed so legit.”

But it was definitely not legit, and it wasn’t until he was mugged by a customer that he found out how deep he’d dug himself. These temporary license plates aren’t just used for dodging tolls and parking tickets; they’re used in crimes such as hit and runs injuring several people, running red lights, speeding, and, according to the NYPD, running drugs and guns across the city.

Kareem discovered what he was doing was illegal when he reported the assault to NYPD officers. He received supportive messages from his employer, but that was it. Vice managed to track down his likely employer as well, and found a wealth of very shady dealings with a car dealership in name only run by one Nazareth Shahinian:

Gift Cars’ location is an odd place for a car dealership, on a dead-end industrial street wedged between New Jersey Transit tracks and Teterboro Airport. The building is strange, too: A two-story brick structure surrounded by cracked, weedy pavement that has signs outside listing dozens of other tenants, all apparently used car dealers. On a recent morning during business hours, the building seemed to be empty and Gift Cars’ office was locked. 

Gift Cars does not appear to be a high-volume dealership. The company does not have a website. Its Facebook page has listed just 16 cars for sale in the past seven years and includes unrelated content, like a post from 2017 that reads “Yoga Aerobics Music Dancing burning fat.” But, in 2020, something miraculous happened: The number of temp tags issued by Gift Cars increased tenfold, from under 200 in 2019 to more than 2,000 the next year, according to New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission data obtained through records requests.

That leap in car sales was not what it seemed. The commission caught the Shahinians fraudulently issuing temps, according to an October 2020 letter from the commission obtained through a records request. And Nazareth, in an interview with Motherboard in December, admitted Gift Cars had been selling tags illegally. (It’s illegal for a dealership to issue a temp tag to someone without selling or leasing them a car.)

Shahinian says he and his sons are not selling license plates anymore, but Vice found evidence he may not be entirely truthful in that statement. Vice dug very deep into this story, and the whole thing is worth a read.