Texas Woman Sold Over 1,000 Dealer Tags Without Selling A Single Car

The proliferation of temporary paper plates is a big problem in Texas. A 38-year old woman from the Greater Houston area was arrested for issuing more than 1,000 dealer tags from a so-called dealership without ever having sold a single car. Police claim that criminals are using these tags to mask the identity of vehicles and to make stolen cars harder to track, as ABC13 reports.

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A Harris country search warrant revealed that Tina Jimenez, 38, printed and sold 1,037 dealer tags through a fake dealership that was nonetheless registered with the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles. The dealership existed on paper, operating under the name “EZ Used Cars and Trucks,” but when reporters went to the registered address they found an empty building at a strip mall in Spring, Texas.

The dealership seemed to be as fake as the paper plates being sold by Jimenez, who accepted payments for dealer tags on Zelle. Records show that “Jimenez made at least $5,345” from the sale of the paper plates. Jimenez had exchanges with her employees about the sale of the tags on a Facebook group called “HustleGroup,” which police claim they’ve been able to reference to charge her with two felonies: “money laundering and unauthorized reproduction and sale of temporary tags.”

If the dollar amount that ABC13 mentions does, indeed, correspond to the dealer tags issued by Jimenez, then that would come out to a price per tag of just over $5 — a low price for what is essentially a tool used in the commission of a crime. In one case, records show Jimenez issued eight tags for the same car in less than a month.

These tags are temporary plates printed on paper, which are reportedly reserved for dealership workers to be used on test drives and loaner vehicles. They’re a common sight, so they’ve evaded scrutiny from police. The plates are not that difficult to reproduce, however, nor is it expensive to do so. There’s now an illegal marketplace for these tags in the Lone Star State.

The sale of similar paper plates has been ongoing for years. For example, KHOU11 reported on a fake dealership in Houston that issued 7,800 temporary tags in less than one week in August 2021, which would be impossible to do if these plates came from legitimate car sales. The difference is these were buyer’s tags, while sellers such as Jimenez are now printing dealer tags instead.

Jimenez is out on bond, pending trial for the felonies she was charged with. Harris County constables claim the problem is so widespread that Texas has had to launch dedicated task forces to deal with the paper tag problem.

Texas State Governor Greg Abbott recently signed a house bill into law, banning paper plates in the state and mandating metal tags effective in 2025. In the meantime, the Texas DMV has implemented features to make the tags harder to fake with a PDF and printer. And the state is now requiring background checks and fingerprinting for all those issuing dealer tags.