THE city’s traffic police authority said Tuesday that they had seized 10 vehicles with fake license plates in one month’s time. Most of the seized cars were luxury cars valued over 1 million yuan (US$145,400), the Shenzhen Evening News reported.

    The police said that they would carry out investigations on these cars to find out the approaches their owners had taken to purchase fake car plates and get tougher on cracking down on such violations.

    “With our Big Data system, we have discovered a Land Rover SUV in Shekou with fake car plates that did not match its registered information,” said Ou Weiyuan, one of the traffic police officers responsible for investigating these suspected vehicles.

    Ou, who belongs to a squadron of the Shenzhen Municipal Traffic Police Bureau, went to a residential complex in Shekou on Monday in order to find the owner of the Land Rover suspected of using fake license plates. “I investigated for hours in that residential area and eventually found the owner,” said Ou.

    By the time Ou found out who the owner of the car was, the Land Rover was no longer in Shekou, so the traffic police officer waited at the scene for the car to show up.

    It wasn’t until late in the evening that the Land Rover returned, and Ou detained the driver in the car. “He did not resist arrest, but was curious about how we discovered that he was using fake car plates,” said Ou.

    “Using the Big Data system we found that most of the vehicles using fake plates were from Hong Kong and Macao, and the owners thought that it would be impossible for us to track down their plate information,” said the traffic police officer.

    Most of the fake plates had been mortgaged for loans by their original owners, and some plates had been transferred a few times. The police are still investigating the sources of these fake car plates.

    According to Chinese traffic laws, people who use fake plates will be detained for 15 days and fined 5,000 yuan. Meanwhile, they will have 12 penalty points.

    The purpose of using duplicated plates is to evade legal punishment for traffic violations or crimes, said Qi Yanbing, a lawyer from a local law firm. Qi said that the owners of genuine car plates would get in a lot of trouble if drivers using fake plates copied from the real ones violate traffic rules or cause accidents.

    Although the owners could eventually prove their innocence, the procedure would take a lot of time and energy, said the lawyer. (Zhang Qian)