Ben@Forest wrote:Mick F wrote:Talking of ANPR, we've parked at Bristol Airport on occasion, and as you enter, you press a button and the machine spits a card for you to keep. On leaving, you go to a booth, insert your card, pay, then it spits it back at you and you push the card in the exit barrier machine and leave.
I wonder if you fitted a bogus numberplate on the front as you enter, and take the card, then remove the bogus plate.
When you are about to leave after coming back from a two week holiday, you "lose" the card and go to the office. Tell them your real reg number - which they have no record of - and that you only arrived an hour ago. It is "obvious" that their system is broken, so they take your word for it and charge you £3 instead of £100.
Could that be done?
It's likely that there will be CCTV inside the park too. It could show your real registration on your car sitting there for the last two weeks. It will almost definitely show that your car did not arrive in the last hour.
Nearly. But if you loose your ticket, you have to pay a hefty charge, even if you could prove you had only entered 30 minutes earlier. As Ben@Forest pointed out, they would also have CCTV, which would fail to show you entering at the approximate time you claimed. If it was that easy, anyone whose parking fee exceeded the fine for a lost ticket would just claim that they had driven in earlier that same day, and had lost their ticket.
Years ago I heard the story of someone who had a summer job retrieving hire cars that had been left for days in the airport's short stay car park. It required two people and a second car. Drive in with the second car. Pay the parking charge and then use the ticket to drive the first over staying car out. The other person then claims to have lost their ticket. CCTV will verify that they had indeed entered at the claimed time. Pay the lost ticket fee and exit. But this is no longer possible, because tickets are now matched against you car's number plate (so, I am not aiding and abetting). It is now much more convenient with the barrier raising automatically as you approach. No more leaning out the window. Not close enough. Reverse and go forward closer to the ticket machine. But I suspect that this convenience is more to do with ensuring tickets match the vehicle.