A Long Island Trekkie tells WCBS she has been enduring years of harassing mail, coming from all over the country, for having expressed her love for Gene Roddenberry’s science fiction universe.
The problem specifically for 76 year-old Huntington, New York retiree Beda Koorey is that her old license plate, one she turned in to the state DMV in 2020 when she stopped driving, bore the fictional registration number of the Captain James T Kirk-helmed USS Enterprise from the original Star Trek series and other subsequent TV and film installments from the franchise: NCC-1701, with the harassment coming in form of speeding, parking, and other automated, camera-issued tickets and drive-though toll bills sent by jurisdictions from all over the country recording violations by vehicles with fake, illegal versions of her former New York State license plate mounted on them.
“These came yesterday from Chicago, speeding tickets. They are $100 each… I got a phone call from Ohio, a police chief looking for plates because they were involved in a robbery,” said Koorey, who showed a reporter the pics of the plate mounted on the rear of various vehicles running red lights, speeding, blowing through EZ Pass toll gates, and a bill for $16,585.22 from the City of New York for unpaid parking and traffic violations. At least one of the tickets she’s received was from a violation by a motorcyclist. Koorey says she has never owned or rode a motorcycle.
It’s not totally clear whether all of the violations are from the fake New York State “NCC-1701” plate that goes for $14.00 on eBay or if Koorey is also getting them sent by cameras detecting a state-less novelty version that says “USS Enterprise” at the top. Either way this is fucking stupid and these systems should be capable of flagging to human reviewers a mismatch between the plate number and whatever make/model of car Koorey used to drive. This marginally funny story speaks to a serious problem for interstate law enforcement (intrastate too, given the bill from NYC), that people can simply drive around with a fake plate – whether or not it bears the code from a fictional spaceship – and get away with it. Meanwhile a nice old lady on Long Island gets stuck with the bill.