Melanie Blank Brown, a New York resident, chose “BLANK” as her vanity plate. After a move updated her registration, the new entry for her plate sequence was ingested by local registration and ticketing systems, many of which contained records showing the plate number as “Blank,” according to an account of the case. Until the move, she had no idea of the problem building behind the scenes, the account said.
Brown was immediately told she had two outstanding tickets. The number eventually rose to more than 400 violations with fines totaling more than $40,000. Because the tickets had been issued across the city, they could not be handled all at once.
She had to make repeated visits to multiple judges to void all of the tickets, the report said. To keep the pile from growing, Brown surrendered the vanity plate.
The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has since removed “BLANK” from the pool of potential vanity plates, preventing another driver from selecting it. According to the New York Times, Brown’s replacement plate reads “KNALB.”
The episode shows how a plate that reads like an empty data field can create confusion when the same word appears in registration and enforcement records. It also shows the practical administrative burden of resolving hundreds of municipal tickets one by one.