I got a NYC parking ticket today - with NO TICKET!
I don’t understand it, I come back to my car - actually, I peeked from half a block away - and saw that bright orange thing in my windshield wiper. Knowing that I parked during a street cleaning (Okay, I saw the street cleaner go by, and even a NYPD parking ticket guy go by, so I thought I was in the clear! I didn’t know he’d come BACK to get me!), I was sort of expecting it, so I just took it (it was an orange envelope, I assumed the ticket was inside), got in my car, and started driving. Not until later on the road did I decide to see how much that one hour I couldn’t wait would cost me. I looked inside the envelope…there was NOTHING! Nada. Empty.
Did I get a ticket and somebody took it out to mess with me? Did I get an ‘envelope’ as a warning? Did some bizarre person put an NYPD orange envelope on my car in a sort of sick-minded joke? I don’t know, and I’m going to have to go to the NYC.gov website and type in my license plate number to find out the truth. (I found out I DID have a ticket)
But this reminds me of a news flash I overheard on TV a couple days ago. I never saw the actual story, but I remember the idea - random people messing with your parking tickets in a new type of scam.
So I searched online, and found this:
- Made Up in Manhattan, a 2005 story about ticketing officers fabricating ‘phantom’ tickets
- Victims of NYC Parking Tickets, about how to respond when this happens to you, among other info & links
- Prank Parking Tickets, a prankster’s paradise - store with hilarious joke items
- Holiday Parking Ticket Trap, where people got tickets on holidays last year
- NYC Ticket & Tow Scam, in brooklyn somebody put up a ‘no parking’ sign overnight
- and the one, from last week, supposedly the “Elaborate Parking Ticket Scam foiled in Harlem” video, which I could not find in any links, is probably the one from CBS2 New York that I was thinking about. Oh well…
