5 Of The Most Regrettable Vanity Plates We've Ever Seen

The "humble" vanity plate is one of the easiest ways to customize a vehicle. Tons of people have used them to put things like their names and jobs, or other short seven-character messages, on the back of their cars for those following them to read. Vanity plates have been around almost as long as license plates themselves. New York was the first state to require license plates in 1901, and Massachusetts was the first to have state-issued license plates in 1903. Custom vanity plates emerged in 1931 and have been around ever since. 

Unlike other car customizations, such as bumper stickers, car wraps, and custom rims, vanity license plates are also used for official identification. Thus, there are some rules as to what you can put there. It varies state by state, but some categories are illegal everywhere — For example, references to illegal activity. In one instance, an Ohio driver wanted KIA GRLZ, a reference to the Kia Boys trend where many Kia and Hyundai vehicles were stolen, and was rejected. Things like racial slurs, cuss words, bodily functions, intimate body parts, sexual innuendo, and most references to drugs and alcohol are also banned in every state that we checked. 

However, some folks managed to get some creative vanity plates, and in some cases, it got them in quite a lot of trouble. From never-ending fines to cultural misunderstandings, here are five license plates that people ultimately regretted getting for one reason or another. 

A fun fact about computers is that they have some fun lingo. One such example is the word "null." Null is often used in computer science to denote a nonexistent or invalid object. Usually, if it's entered into a form on a computer, it means that the form section has no valid input. White hat computer hacker Joseph Tartaro thought he'd have some fun with the DMV by creating the NULL license plate, with the joke being that once entered, the police's computer systems wouldn't recognize that the plate was his, and he'd get out of tickets. This backfired phenomenally. 

Per the story reported by Wired, after a year without any difficulty, Tartaro went to renew in 2017 and had to use his reference number, as the DMV interface wouldn't accept NULL as an entry. This is when things took a turn for the worse. Associating his personal information with a null value meant the database started attributing every ticket associated with invalid license numbers to him. It started with an innocuous $35 ticket, which he paid without complaint. After that, dozens of citations started coming, eventually accumulating over $12,000 in fines.

Through months of work with the California DMV, Tartaro eventually got the fines knocked down to $149, which he had to pay to renew his registration. As part of the joke, Tartaro had planned to make his wife's car's plate VOID, which would've showed NULL and VOID in their driveway. Alas, that was one expensive joke. 

Some vanity plates get in trouble for reasons you wouldn't expect. The LUVSICK vanity plate is one such story. As the story goes, a southern Californian woman had been using the vanity plate for a couple of decades on her various vehicles, with the most recent being a hemi-powered Dodge Magnum, a now-discontinued station wagon that came with a larger-than-life engine. For most of that time, the woman had no troubles with her plate, and everything went well. Then, one day, she started getting citations in the mail for traffic crimes she was not committing. 

As it turns out, a nationwide retailer had begun selling novelty license plates, and one of the options was LUVSICK. People then began putting this novelty plate on their vehicles and committing crimes. Since the Californian woman was the only one with LUVSICK as an official license plate, all those tickets eventually got attributed to her. When all was said and done, she was blamed for 15 tickets for things like toll road violations, running red lights, and speeding everywhere from San Francisco to New Jersey, Illinois, and Texas. 

The woman was eventually able to knock those tickets off of her record with a little effort, but campaigned that the novelty plate be removed from the Broken Promises Co website where it was being sold. As of this writing, the novelty plate seems to no longer exist, so seemingly she got what she wanted. 

Sometimes, vanity plates don't necessarily get people in trouble, but poor timing and coincidence can cause some difficulty. This is the case with IAMISIS, or with spaces, I AM ISIS. If you've paid attention to world news over the last couple of decades, you've no doubt heard of ISIS. Also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Ash-Sham, it is a militant Salafi-jihadist group most famous for its terror attacks and brutal video-taped executions. For a woman in California, it was simply her name. 

Isis Wharton wanted her license plate to say her name, so she got one that said I AM ISIS. From 2022 until 2025, she had no issues with it. Then, in late summer 2025, Wharton received a letter from the California DMV stating that her plate contained "a configuration of letters/ and or numbers that are non-compliant with the requirements of Title 13." Per the letter, the DMV acknowledged that her use of it was innocent, but could be construed as being supportive of the group, and so it had to go. 

Since this happened in September 2025, the story does not yet have a conclusion. The last update was that Wharton had until September 25 to request a hearing, which she was in the process of drafting when the story dropped. It'll be interesting to see the outcome, especially since federal courts have ruled that potentially offensive license plates do constitute as free speech under the First Amendment. 

Most of the plates on this list are from recent times, as DMVs continually narrow what is acceptable on a license plate. However, the modern age does not have a monopoly on regrettable license plates. One famous example is the NO PLATE license plate. Every state has this plate banned now, but back in 1979, a man named Robert Barbour had one, and he got in a lot of trouble for it. 

Barbour went to the California DMV with the intent of getting a vanity plate. The DMV told him at the time to pick three options. Since the man was a sailing enthusiast, he wrote down SAILING and BOATING but didn't have a third option. So, for the third slot, he wrote NO PLATE, which was intended to signal that if the first two options weren't available, Barbour didn't want a vanity plate made. The California DMV took his request literally and gave him the NO PLATE tag. 

Like with the NULL example from earlier, Barbour started getting citations every time a California police officer ticketed a car that literally had no plates. The first citation came four weeks later, followed by a nonstop river of them — 2,500 in just a few months. Barbour fought these tickets and eventually won, leading California to instruct police to write "none" instead of "no plates" on tickets. In an ironic twist, some officers wrote MISSING instead, which was another vanity plate owned by a man named Andrew Burg, causing him to get citations as well. 

Perhaps the most egregious example of a regrettable license plate comes from a "Star Trek" reference. For the uninitiated, the Star Trek series follows the exploits of the USS Enterprise. That ship's registry number is NCC 1701, which is printed on the side of the ship and visible in most outside shots in both the TV show and movies. Beda Koorey, a fan of the show, decided to get the iconic registration number as a vanity plate in New York, and it backfired spectacularly. 

Koorey's plate originally belonged to her former husband, who had first purchased it in 1998. A couple decades later, Koorey returned it, and eventually even stopped driving in June 2020 due to her eyesight. In August, she received a $50 citation for speeding, despite no longer driving or owning the plate, and having a receipt that the plates had been destroyed by the New York DMV. 

Over the next four years, Koorey would rack up $16,585.22 worth of citations, listing just about every traffic violation possible. The cause was a New York-style novelty plate sold on Amazon that people were using that was being traced back to Koorey. Amazon no longer lists the plate for sale, but you can get generic NCC 1701 license plates there still for under $20. Despite the New York DMV stating that her plate was destroyed, NCC 1701 was still linked to her in the database. The issue has since been rectified, but Koorey is still working to get those citations dismissed at time of writing.