NYC woman racks up $40K in bogus tickets over bizarre license plate mix-up

It was a real pain in the asphalt.Carole Blank Brown, a 70-year-old self-employed lawyer and real estate title agent, unknowingly piled up $40,000 in fines after some ticket trouble.The culprit — her vanity license plate.Inspired by her maiden name — “BLANK” — was what the plate read on her shiny, red BMW convertible.

This Spring, Brown found herself in a midst of parking pickle as The NYT reported her updated car registration was the reason for the headache.The self-employed lawyer had officially updated her address to the Upper East Side home she had moved to several years ago.Shortly after the address switch, Brown collected two notices of unpaid parking tickets.One was for $65 and had been issued back in March for a missing license plate.

Meanwhile, another was at the tune of $95 in February for blocking a driveway. The kicker — both tickets were listed with the license plate number as “BLANK.”Brown told The NYT neither she nor the BMW had been at the addresses where the violations occurred.“This is not my car,” she wrote while challenging one of the tickets.The real car-tastrophe was after she called the city’s 311 line — a non-emergency number to report issues — where she was told over 400 outstanding tickets were in her name.

The amount owed — more than $40,000.The 70-year-old Gothamite had to speak with an administrative judge at the Finance Department’s Adjudication Division to resolve the hundreds of tickets.Brown was then led on a wild car chase printing out a list — which the paper alone cost her $400 — so she could have all of the violations in one place.Some of the citations — missing plates, double parking, parking in no-standing zones and blocking fire hydrants — according to The NYT.

On each fine, the space for a license plate number was left empty — or blank.To get the tickets thrown out, Brown wrote challenges to those first wave of tickets, telling the city that the blank space on the plate was mistake...