One man lost a license plate two years ago and forgot about it until he received a bill charging him with a toll he didn’t make. The document said that he was driving a Ford F-150 when he drove through a toll booth, except there were two problems. He says he never owned a F-150 and the toll booth was in Massachusetts when he lives in Rhode Island. Despite this, he’s now on the hook to pay the toll unless he can prove his case with the company.
Man receives surprise E-ZPass bill two years after losing license plate
A TikTok user named Jay, self-described as a 22-year-old living in Boston, posted a video on August 28 explaining how a stolen license plate has resulted in him getting hit with a bill with tolls he didn’t make.
Jay explains that two years ago he found that the front license plate to his vehicle was missing. Thinking that it had just fallen off, he rolled with the punches and didn’t report it stolen to the police. This didn’t cause a problem for two years, long enough that he eventually forgot that the plate was gone in the first place. But then on August 27, he received a letter in the mail from E-ZPass Massachusetts saying that he went through a toll.
Surprised and confused, Jay did some investigation, thinking that it was possible that he had gone through a toll booth in Massachusetts on that day the bill said he did. But he then realized that he was working at that time, so something was wrong.
Jay then called E-ZPass to settle the matter, and after trying to get through the automated system, he finally connects with a woman on chat.
“She basically told me ‘Yeah, it was your license plate on an F-150 that went through the toll,'” he recounts. “I was, like, ‘I have never owned an F-150, nor do I ever plan on it, so I promise you it wasn’t me. What do I do now?'”
The customer service agent tells him that she is unable to dispute the charge and that he would have to go through the process himself to do that.
In the meantime, though, Jay had a sobering thought and realized he was in a precarious situation due to what effectively amounted to identity theft. He grasped that someone else has his license plate now and he had not reported the plate stolen, so if that person commits a crime using that F-150, police would mistakenly trace that crime back to him. (The odds would be higher due to the widespread use of license plate readers.)
That person could also continue racking up tolls in Massachusetts and force him to pay them until the situation is resolved. He could dispute every two-dollar charge of course, but that would quickly become a hassle. Jay ends the video saying that he has learned his lesson and that he should have reported the license plate missing when it happened two years ago.
One commenter was surprised that the creator didn’t file a report earlier: “Why wouldn’t you report this? Isn’t this common sense?” Jay said he was ignorant about the situation and “didn’t know I had to.”
In a separate response, he said that he tried appealing the E-ZPass bill but was denied because the company said that the plate was his.
Another told Jay that he could show E-ZPass the registration of his car that is connected to the license plate and show that it isn’t a F-150 (it’s connected to a BMW instead). However, he wrote a reply indicating that the company needs more than that as proof of his identity: “I called, they said the only way I can prove it’s not me is with a police report.”
One user urged him that he needed to contact the police as soon as possible, something that Jay agreed with. “Im on it now,” he wrote.
