Car cloning trade exposed

Geoff Bird was scratching his head as he glanced from one red Rover 400 to the other. "That one's mine," he said, pointing as we walked towards them. But he was wrong. It was mine. I had met Geoff just five minutes earlier and told him I had some good news and some bad news. The bad news, the news Londoners are coming to dread, was that his car had been cloned. The good news was that I, and not a crook, had cloned it.

In just 24 hours, I had acquired not one, but two sets of illegal number plates and made myself a fake tax disc using commonplace computer software. Now I could drive as fast as I liked, speed along bus lanes and completely ignore Ken Livingstone's congestion charge. And all the fines would be sent to Geoff.

For years, hardcore car thieves have been stealing vehicles and giving them the serial numbers, log books and registration plates of other, often scrapped, motors. But cloning was the domain of the few, of the serious criminal. Now, partly because of the proliferation of speed cameras, partly because of the C-charge, more and more unscrupulous motorists are trying it.

Evening Standard recently published concerns that as many as 500 suspected clones were regularly whizzing through the congestion charge zone, but motoring organisations believe the figure could be much higher. So concerned is the Government it introduced strict regulations last January requiring makers of licence plates to be registered, to prevent crooks buying copies of other drivers' plates.

But an investigation by the Standard has found the system is seriously flawed.

As he looked back and forth from his car to mine, Geoff Bird, the 64-year-old proprietor of Flightlink International, a high-class chauffeur service, looked shocked. "It's absolutely outrageous that you were able to do this," he said. "It happened to me for real a few years ago and it was awful. I kept receiving the other guy's fines and parking tickets. But I thought they were stamping this out. How did you do it?"

Sadly, it was frighteningly simple. First of all, it was necessary to find a car with the same colour and model as mine. I spotted Geoff driving in Docklands and simply wrote down his registration number. Minutes later, I was on the lookout for a motor spares shop that could make me some number plates bearing his car's registration number.

This should have been impossible. Under the new rules, administered by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency as part of the Vehicles (Crime) Act 2001, I should have had to provide the car's log book, my driver's licence and a utility bill, all going to prove that I am the car's owner and I am who I say I am.

But at the first shop I found, Poplar Auto Spares Centre on Poplar High Street (it operates under the shopfront Motorist Discount Spares Centre) none of that seemed to matter. I simply told the man behind the counter that my girlfriend had had a minor accident and needed some replacement plates. Quite correctly, he told me about the documentation I was supposed to produce but he acquiesced when I lied that my girlfriend lived in Richmond and the documents were there. Couldn't he just let me off ?

"DVLA are getting very tough on this - we'd be f****d if they found out," he said. And then proceeded to make me a set in just five minutes for just £15.

The plates were handed over, even though I gave a false name and an address for my girlfriend in a street that didn't exist. But he didn't ask for any ID or even check the road name I had given in an A to Z. It wasn't like this everywhere. Comfortingly, five other number plate outlets refused to serve me without the correct documentation, but a sixth, Englefield Garage in Islington, was much more obliging. "We don't make plates," said a mechanic there, "but we can get you some delivered in an hour."

Again, without checking my ID or requesting any documentation, the garage was kind enough to call its supplier, E. One Motor Factors in Whitechapel - one of the five outlets that had refused to serve me just two hours earlier - and I had the plates in my hand one hour and 20 minutes later at a cost of just £17.65. The staff at both outlets were charming, helpful and kind.

They didn't ask for a bribe - they felt they were just helping out a fellow motorist. But their actions were anything but helpful to Geoff Bird. They allowed me to begin cloning his car.

The next step in fooling the cameras and any passing traffic warden was to put my new registration number - Geoff 's - on to my tax disc. Again, this was too easy. All I had to do was use a scanner to feed the disc's image into a household computer and then alter it using imaging software that comes with most new computers. A good office printer did the rest. I even made a fake parking permit so I could park "legitimately".

And that's where I stopped. For the "cheap" cloner, it isn't necessary to grind off a vehicle's chassis number or take the 17-digit number from a car's windscreen to apply to DVLA for documents in the owner's name. No, for the sake of the cameras, this should be enough.

When Geoff was told how easy it was to clone his car, he was rightly angry. He has spent 10 years building up a fine fleet of 50 pristine Mercedes that drive around some of the most powerful bankers in London, so he's a fierce opponent of car crime.

"The guys who made the plates might have thought they were doing you a favour, but it doesn't look that way to me," he said. "There is nothing worse than knowing someone is out there using your identification to commit crime.

"It simply isn't good enough to complain about it. Anyone who clones a car should go to prison, and so should anyone who helps them to do it. The trouble is, there are more and more people out there on the edge of criminality these days. And this is so easy, they just might be tempted to try it."

Paul Watters, head of roads and transport policy at the AA Motoring Trust, a charitable arm of the Automobile Association, agrees. He feels that the present system for supplying number plates is simply too slack. "In

Germany, there is just one supplier of number plates - the government," he said. "In the UK, there are thousands of licensed outlets, so how can they possibly be policed correctly?

"Car cloning is a growing problem but too little is being done to protect the person whose vehicle is cloned. There was one man in Leeds who was sent a congestion charge bill even though he hadn't been to London.

"He asked for a copy of the picture of his vehicle taken by the automatic number plate recorder and was told he would have to pay £10 - but he was also told he wouldn't be given his £10 back even if he won his case."

Mr Watters said the minutes of a recent DVLA meeting on car cloning show no action will be taken the first time a cloner is caught. "Action would only be taken after two or more offences. Where is the protection in that for your average motorist?"

Transport for London, which implements Ken Livingstone's transport policies, refuses to accept there is a problem. A spokeswoman insisted the number of clones recorded by TfL technology was "in the tens", adding: "We get 110,000 payments a day. We hardly consider the low number of clones to be a problem."

TfL does liaise with the police over car crime, but such a response is not likely to reassure the growing numberof drivers whose vehicles have been cloned in someone else's attempts to beat the congestion charge. At least the DVLA, which said it was concerned about the problems in London, asked me for the names of the rogue plate-makers.

The new legislation brought in last year should have reduced the problem, but it hasn't. The penalty for failing to display the correct registration mark is a fine of up to £1,000, and for failing to display the correct tax disc, a fine of up to £200.

The penalty for outlets that supply number plates without conducting checks is a fine of up to £1,000 and/or suspension from the register of number-plate suppliers for up to five years. The AA would like to see tougher legislation to prevent cloning. Some hi-tech plates with microchips, holograms and bar codes could be in the pipeline, but in the meantime motorists can only hope that plate-makers follow the strict guidelines, unlike Poplar Auto Spares and Englefield Garage.

When we contacted the Poplar shop, owner Mike Doughty said he recalled serving me at a time when he was under pressure. "It is our normal procedure to demand to see all relevant documentation," he said. "We are normally very thorough. This will definitely not happen again."

At Englefield Garage, manager Raymond Barnes said he wasn't aware that he had to check anything. "I have a licence to order plates, but I never realised I was supposed to take details of the log book, driver's licence and so on," he said. "No one from DVLA ever told us that. Thank you for telling me. From now on, we'll carry out all the checks."

It seems almost sad that the helpful staff at these places had to suffer so we could make our point. But for the sake of Geoff Bird and all the other honest motorists out there, it was a point that needed to be made.