A friend of mine, I’ll call her Sally, e-mailed me with a suggestion, which I think she herself received second-hand.
When you get a traffic tricket and pay it, mail in a check in the amout of $x+$2.00 or $3.00. ($x, of course, is the amount of the fine.) They’ll post your payment and send you back a check for the overpayment amount. She says, DON"T CASH THIS CHECK! THROW IT AWAY! That way, although your money was accepted by the system, the transaction isn’t complete with the overpayment check uncashed, and the points cannot accrue. Is she shining me on?
I am sure this is debunked all over the internet a million times plus 1. Look on snopes.com for example for any urban myth questions, including this one.
Dude , you would have more luck slipping the girl at the DMV some coin, to disappear the ticket, so it does not get entered into the system.
Declan
If you just send a check, you’ve plead “no contest” for the ticket. Once you’ve done that, the cops/courthouse tells the DMV to put the points on your license.
It is not impossible that in some early days of computers this might have actually worked somewhere.:dubious: It no longer does.
Or you could bribe her with some Nieman Marcus cookies…
Got this one in the UK just last week. It’s nonsense of course.
I might have known Sally was off-base here.
That said, I have also heard of people trying a trick on their bank: They rest a magnet on the magnetic-ink numbers along the bottom edge of their checks–the numbers representing one’s account number. Supposedly, this will scew up the magnetism so badly that the bank’s computerized check-recording system will fail to deduct the amount (s) of the check(s) thus affected.
Yes, for about a day or two until they manually input it.
You mean the check will be entirely rejected by the computerized system, and for that reason will come to the attention of employees handling incoming checks?
There was (briefly) a scam which worked for a while in the early days of magnetic numbering – I think we are talking about the 1960s – but it required a degree of organisation and resources.
You printed cheques that looked as if they came from Bank A in (say) Washington state, but which bore magnetic numbering appropriate to Bank B in (say) Florida. You deposited these in (say) Maine into your bank account in your false name.
Right. The Maine bank would send the cheque to o the clearing house, where it would be fed into a big ol’ machine which would read the magnetic numbers and put it in a batch headed for Bank B.
The Bank B machine would fail to recognise the account number and would spit out the cheque for manual examination and handling. The clerk would glance at it and immediately see that the problem was that the cheque had been sent to the wrong bank, so off it would go, in the post, to Bank A in Washington.
Bank A would feed the cheque into their machine, which would identify it as a cheque drawn on Bank B, and batch it to go to the clearing house and thence back to Bank B.
And so on, until someone at Bank B noticed that they had handled the same cheque from Bank A suspiciously often, or until the cheque was so tattered that it could no longer be machine-read, and a clerk at Bank A attempted to process it manually, and discovered that it had the wrong bank code, and the account number was bogus.
At that stage the scam would come to light, but by then your Maine bank would have allowed you to draw on the cheque – since it hadn’t been dishonoured within the time limit – and you would have disappeared.
All you’ll have done is paid your ticket and then shorted yourself some additional dollars. The transaction for your debt to the government is over once you’ve sent them money, and they’ve cashed it.
The transaction is over for the money they owe by the same logic.
Either way, you’ve paid your ticket, which means you’ve pleaded guilty.
The best way to avoid any points on one’s license is to move to Washington State; we don’t access points here.
Your best bet for avoiding points is to call the authorities and ask them what you can do.
A few years ago I got a ticket in southern Utah. On the advice of a friend I called the county in which I received the citation and aske what I could do to avoid points. They said I could file a “plea in abeyance:” I would still have to pay the fine on the ticket, but if I sent them a current copy of my driving record, and another copy three months later showing no new violations, they would remove the violation from their files and forego sending notice to my home state.
Many other locales have similar options, so it’s in your interest to give them a call.
Yes, more or less.
You do realize that this approach might also be call computer fraud? And since it’s done in a bank, post 9/11, it could be construed as a terrorist act?
Just sayin’ …
It’s simpler than that.
In almost every part of the US, you’ll get no points if you exceed the speed limit by less than 10 mph. The margin is the same, whether you are on the interstate or the city streets.
Every insurance company sees the records, and your rates go up when you get a ticket. If you speed on a 6 hour trip, you might save 30 minutes. When (not if) you get a ticket, you’ll pay the fine, plus the higher insurance rates. Is the 30 minutes worth that much money? It’s your call.
^If only it were as easy as you represent. Where I live, there is a stretch of road where the speed limit abruptly drops. Signage is present, but easy to miss. Locals are aware, so it never hits home.
In addition to speed traps, there are areas that I drive through where there is a reduced speed going through a town. After the town is passed, there is a sign “end reduced speed zone”. Ummm…I wasn’t taking notes…what is the speed limit?
Checks don’t have to have magnetic ink at all. That is just for efficiency. You can create your own checks out of just about anything including printing them on your own computer or even hand writing them on something if you can find someone willing to take it. The banks have to find a way to process it if it has all of the relevant information on it.
I find the easiest way to avoid getting points is to avoid getting tickets. I do this by not speeding, using my blinker, etc.
Traffic school is an option. Once every 18 months in California.
It’s WAY too easy to claim it as an accident, no prosecutor would bother, especially since it wouldn’t prevent the bank from processing the check.
I think if you read carefully the small print connected with what you signed when you opened the account, you will find that you have agreed only to use the bank’s pre-printed cheque forms, and you have also agreed that the bank may decline to process a cheque not so written, or may charge you handsomely for processing it.
Don’t be ridiculous. My friend and I (taking turns driving) drove about 95 MPH most of the way to Salt Lake City and back. That’s about 24 hours from here. That was almost 10 years ago and I’ve since slowed down a bit, but it’s far from a certainty that you’ll get pegged for speeding on a 6 hour trip. If you’re smart about it, you probably won’t on a single occasion.
And everyone knows that if you don’t speed, you won’t get a speeding ticket. There’s no need to point out the obvious. If I asked how to fix something on my truck, am I going to be told that I could walk everywhere and then wouldn’t have to worry about it?