Another Loophole Shuts

The advent of high quality colour copiers made low-level forgery a lot easier, and there is a thriving black market in such things as certificates of motor insurance. Now that ANPR number-plate readers are widely deployed, those forgeries are not just pointless but risky too. The Insurance Database will flag up the car as uninsured, which is bad enough, but if the driver is unwise enough to produce the certificate to the police, they will know that it is probably forged from the outset. We saw a driver at the end of last year who was stopped twice in five days, and produced a dodgy certificate both times. As a result he faced two no-insurance charges, which makes a ban of at least six months inevitable, and two much more serious forgery and deception charges for which prison was a distinct possibility.
While we are on the subject of motoring, if you left the pub after a session and found a PC in the car park who advised you not to drive and to call a cab because you seemed to be drunk, would you, ten minutes later, not just drive off, but drive off in the same direction that the police car had taken? I saw someone who did just that last month. He gets his licence back in December 2009.