FROM a very early age, Joshua Browder was different from other children. Almost as soon as he could read, he swiftly graduated from Thomas the Tank Engine books to Time Magazine and Business Week.

    By the age of 8, computer whizz Joshua had moved on from Lego, toy cars and train sets to fixing his primary school teachers’ laptops and mobiles.

    At 12, he created an unofficial iPhone app for sandwich chain Pret A Manger that so impressed the firm’s management they officially adopted it.

    At the independent North London secondary school Joshua attended — where he achieved 12 A* GCSEs and four A-levels, all grade A — he set up a business selling his revision notes.

    So when the budding entrepreneur passed his driving test last January aged 18, he was never going to conform to the teen tearaway stereotype of stuffing parking tickets in the glove compartment to be ignored.

    “Once he’d passed his test, he was out and about, never to be seen again except to come home and say: ‘I’ve got a parking ticket,’” said his mom, 56-year-old Melanie.

    “One day, after I’d paid around three or four them, I said, ‘I’m not going to pay your tickets any more. You can pay them yourself.”

    “Joshua told me ‘I’m not paying, I’m going to write a letter to the council,’ to which I said, ‘Good luck with that!’ But when I asked ‘How did you get on?’ he told me he’d been successful.

    “I couldn’t believe it. Then, the same thing happened again and again so I suggested he could use what he’d learned to help his friends, and he built a website.”

    The result was the free, non-profit public service website DoNotPay.co.uk, which Joshua launched quietly in August thinking only a handful of his family and friends might access it.

    He couldn’t have been more wrong. To date more than 86,000 people have used the site to launch appeals against incorrectly issued parking tickets, and in the past week the number of users has shot up to 120,000.

    DoNotPay.co.uk — a name his mother suggested — allows motorists to pick one of 12 reasons of defense, then enter the relevant details and send a custom-generated appeal created by the website’s algorithm to the council in question.

    With a success rate of 40 percent, based on an average parking penalty of £60 (US$89), Joshua has helped thousands of drivers save a total of more than £2 million in parking fines.

    No wonder he is being hailed as one of the brightest “Super-Teens on the planet,” though being an exceptionally modest chap, Joshua insists this is an “exaggeration.”(SD-Agencies)