Andrew Rule: Cloned number plates see criminals get away with murder

Cloned number plates are helping ‘brazen chancers’ and criminals disguise a car’s identity to get away with everything from paying toll fees and speeding fines, to murder.

The Mercedes was a late model in good order and the driver looked as if he should be driving it. But something about the passenger wasn’t quite right.

He was scruffy, hard-looking and on edge, and so the police staffing a drug and alcohol breathalyser crew on the Mornington Peninsula last month took an interest in the pair.

The driver passed the alcohol test but when asked to do the drug test, he wasn’t happy. A policeman reached through the window to “grab the keys” – not the smartest decision, he admits – and was knocked over when the driver hit the accelerator and sped off, endangering other officers on the job.

When the police punched the Mercedes’ registration number into the data system and traced it, they found a car and driver – but not the ones they wanted.

Paul Virgona was found dead in a van on the Eastlink Freeway after a shooting. (AAP Image/Julian Smith) NO ARCHIVING

Clearly, the number plates on the unknown offender’s Benz were fakes. The police were not surprised. Cloning number plates is the latest criminal enterprise to take off, boosted by advances in printer technology.

Crooks have traditionally stolen either number plates or cars to use for a few hours (or even minutes) to pull a crime. But they always ran the risk of the theft being reported and the “hot” plates being on a police watch list – not ideal if you are on the way to robbing a bank.

Cloned plates are different: They can be made to match the genuine plates of a vehicle of identical make, model and colour, meaning a routine check won’t reveal anything out of place.

When two alleged hitmen shot fruiterer Paul Virgona in his van on the EastLink freeway in November 2019, they were in a Mercedes sedan which they torched in Mooroolbark 20 minutes later.

The suspects switched to a grey VW Amarok ute hidden nearby, one of the twin-cabs popular with tradies and families wanting a workhorse alternative to SUVs and station wagons.

The Amarok was an ideal getaway car in the early morning hours when tradies head to work, but alert police gave chase, forcing the suspects to dump it without torching it. This left forensic clues that would eventually help in the charging of two men.

The ute’s number plates (IMC 9PG) were excellent copies but when police checked they discovered what Herald Sun readers found later that week after reporters traced the number to a similar Amarok in a Moorabbin car yard.

The alleged killers could have noted the legitimate Amarok plates by driving past – but it’s more likely they searched online to match a ute they already had. Then they’d had the plates cloned to order and hit the road to kill a man with no apparent crime links.

Shooting victim Muhammed Yucel, 22. Supplied: Victoria Police

If Virgona was the wrong target, which is yet to be proven, it wouldn’t be the first time that hitmen got it wrong. But even shooters who are hopeless at identifying their intended victim don’t have much trouble disguising getaway cars because any fool can stick fake plates to a vehicle.

One example of plenty is when a stupid gunman shot innocent victim Muhammed Yucel dead at Keysborough in 2017, apparently mistaking him for a bikie who lived nearby – but who was twice the size. The triggerman was using a Jeep Cherokee with cloned plates.

Investigators believe the Jeep plates were produced on a printer at a gymnasium operated by Comanchero wild man Hasan Topal, the one-time model presently keeping his photogenic profile extremely low in his parents’ overseas homeland.

This is the business of cloning. For a few hundred dollars, deadly criminals and brazen chancers disguise a car’s identity to get away with anything from toll and speed camera evasion or service station “drive offs” all the way up to arson, robbery and murder.

Investigators are routinely encountering clones at every level.

When Operation Ironside recently launched the global sting on crime syndicates using the “Trojan horse” AN0M app, one inside story revealed was that Australian police tapping into it had overheard a murder plot and intervened, as if by chance, to halt the “hit”.

What they uncovered, apart from an armed hitman linked to the Comanchero outlaw motorcycle gang, were two cars fitted with cloned number plates ready to stage the getaway from the planned northern suburbs crime scene.

As the law stands, this loophole is being relentlessly exploited. Cloning plates is not a serious breach of current laws but has become a key part of the organised crime toolkit.

For an enterprising crook, cloning number plates is a lucrative sideline. Not as lucrative as having a pill press for turning illicit drugs into saleable units – but the potential punishment is nowhere near as drastic, either.

One dodgy printer known to police operates in the southern suburbs, producing flawless fakes in his home workshop. He started out doing small favours but word on the street has attracted criminal clients from far and wide.

When charged over clones, the printer claims to be making the copies for trailers, which often lose their original plates. He is not the only bent make-to-order specialist but he is one of the bigger ones.

Police are confident that “clients” look at online classified ads for a car which matches the model they own, have borrowed or stolen for a particular crime.

Fitting the cloned plates slashes the odds of being picked up on the road because they are not “hot” plates easily identified by patrolling police. Clones also avoid the risk of being detected by automatic number plate recognition technology.

SES wrap a car for towing after the Paul Virgona shooting.

But cloned plates are not just a headache for police fighting serious crime. More and more, they affect law-abiding citizens. These are the people shocked when police come knocking with accusations of stealing fuel from service stations – or when they get a court summons over a string of unpaid fines because someone in a disguised vehicle has been rocketing past speed cameras and tollway transponders.

Because crooks often match their car with almost identical vehicles, police can no longer assume that the car owners they identify are actual offenders. Both the investigators and the wrongly-accused victims have to waste time and effort finding or checking alibis to show that it really wasn’t them stealing fuel, speeding or evading tolls. In effect, the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” is reversed.

As with many crime trends, cloning was established overseas before flourishing in Australia. One senior car sales industry source estimates that in the UK, a staggering ratio of one in 12 cars has been affected by cloning.

Making number plates has, of course, long been linked with criminals in Victoria. The state’s number plates are currently produced at the Hopkins Correctional Centre at Ararat. When traffic speed cameras were introduced in the 1990s, it turned out that thousands of number plates were “defective” and had to be recalled because the supposedly reflective paint wouldn’t show up on the cameras.

Legend has it that this was because prisoners urinated in the paint, a tantalising theory that only industrial chemists could definitively answer.

The Ararat number plate workshop is the modern version of the old “number plate yard” at Pentridge Prison, where Victoria’s plates were made on the cheap most of last century.

In those days, criminals on the inside used clanking metal presses to make legitimate plates at inmates’ rates. Now, criminals on the outside produce counterfeit plates on sleek printers for a big earn, as they say on the street.

That’s progress.

Originally published as Andrew Rule: Cloned number plates see criminals get away with murder