There is not much that surprises Darren Hughen these days. A Trading Standards officer for 20 years, he’s dealt with his fair share of rogue traders and cowboy builders.

So when he was called out to help an elderly lady who’d been fleeced of £15,000 for a dodgy garage conversion, he knew the routine. Identify the workman responsible, track him down, make the botched construction safe and take action to recover the money. It seemed like a simple job – but it proved to be anything but.

“There was an ANPR [automatic number plate recognition] camera on the road, so we wanted to see if we could track his vehicle,” says Hughen, 54, who’s based in Rochdale, Greater Manchester.

The builder hadn’t given his phone number or address to the pensioner, so tracing him via his van – using Britain’s sprawling network of 18,000 ANPR cameras – was the obvious next step. The cameras, fixed to gantries on main roads and motorways, can identify vehicle registration details in real time. They are widely used by police and other agencies to locate criminals, manage traffic, and enforce parking and road toll regulations.

The problem was that when the Trading Standards team examined the image of the van captured by an ANPR camera, they couldn’t see the numbers or letters on the plate.

“We were sort of thinking, ‘How is this possible?’” says Hughen’s long-time colleague, Dennis Chalmers, 57. He had never seen anything like it in his 22 years at Trading Standards. So the pair got in touch with the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), which maintains records of nearly 53 million drivers and more than 47 million vehicles, to ask them what could have happened to the registration details.

“They said it could be a ‘ghost’ plate,” says Chalmers. “And we were like, ‘What’s a ghost plate?’”

One in 15 cars equipped with ‘ghost’ plates

A ghost number plate, also known as a stealth plate, looks normal to the naked eye, but is altered so that it can’t be read by the infra-red technology used by ANPR and other roadside cameras. There are several different types. Some use reflective sprays, which cause a bright glare when viewed through an ANPR lens, or transparent coatings, which distort the letters and numbers. Others have modified characters, such as turning a “B” into an “8,” which confuses recognition software.

Their use is now as widespread as that of cloned number plates, where criminals copy a legitimate vehicle’s registration on to a car they are using (which has usually been stolen) to hide its identity.

Recent estimates, cited by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Transport Safety (APPGTS), suggest that one in 15 cars is using ghost number plates, leading the body to conclude that the situation has “far exceeded the ability of the relevant bodies to manage or bring it under control”. Others have warned of a “number plate Wild West”.

Last year, a police operation in Birmingham flagged almost 3,000 vehicles with unreadable plates in just two weeks. In London, a 2023 inspection of 1,000 private-hire vehicles found that 41 per cent were using ghost plates.

In fact, there is evidence that ghost plates are not just being used by taxi drivers and motorists keen to avoid detection for speeding penalties, parking fines and low-level criminality, but also by grooming gangs, drug traffickers and organised crime groups.

Some experts believe that vehicles with ghost plates even pose a security threat, with would-be terrorists able to bypass surveillance systems around airports, train stations and iconic buildings. Last month, the Government belatedly responded to these concerns by announcing that it was “considering plans” to curb their sale by introducing stricter enforcement and harsher penalties, including imposing points on offenders and seizing vehicles when deemed appropriate. However, no timescale or further details have been provided.

Manufactured in back bedrooms and garden sheds

Rochdale’s Trading Standards team were among the first to uncover the extent of the scandal. In 2024, fresh from their experience with the rip-off builder (who was eventually identified, cautioned for a fraud offence and ordered to pay back the £15,000 he had plundered from the homeowner), Hughen and Chalmers launched a country-wide investigation with funding from the British Number Plate Manufacturing Association.

“We told them our story, and what had happened – and Operation Ghost was born,” says Hughen.

The first task was to find who was supplying invisible plates in and around Rochdale – home to some 235,000 people. Chalmers says, “We were speaking to the DVLA and said, ‘How many number plate suppliers do we have in our area who could possibly be making these?’ We were thinking we’d have 40, 50 at the most. When we got the results, we nearly fell off our chairs – it was 600.”

He adds, “We were finding people making them in the back bedroom, in the shed, in the garden. We’re thinking, ‘This is wrong – this is the security of that vehicle. What’s going on?’”

In December last year, a report from the APPGTS found that there were a staggering 34,455 suppliers in the UK providing registration plates – four times the number of petrol stations. They operate with “no background checks and very little oversight”, despite being responsible for handling customers’ sensitive personal data and identification documents.

All suppliers have to do is pay a one-off £40 fee and answer a few basic questions to set up shop. There are no criminal record checks, and they can make a tidy profit – a ghost plate typically costs £10 to produce and sells for £40.

The lax controls around number plates appear to be compounded by their outdated design, which hasn’t kept pace with technology. “Unlike a passport or a banknote, which are protected by complex security features such as holographic foils, embedded chips and specialist inks, the number plate has none,” concluded the APPGTS, which is made up of 57 MPs and peers.

“The simplicity of this system, the ease of registering and the huge profits up for grabs have created a boom time for registered suppliers,” said the group, adding that although tens of thousands of suppliers follow the rules and produce legal number plates, some have been found with “serious and violent criminal records, and multiple fraud offences”.

‘It’s like a magician’s trick’

At one supplier, a car valeting and restoration business on an industrial site in Rochdale, the two Trading Standards officers found a printing machine that had made 20 ghost number plates, eight of which belonged to vehicles linked to organised crime. More than 3,000 number plate digits were seized from the premises – each had been altered with plastic film or gels to make them unreadable to ANPR cameras.

“If Dennis held the digit up, I’d put infra-red light on, and it’s like a magician’s trick, it disappears in your hand – it just goes straight through it,” says Hughen.

The APPGTS is urging the Government to strengthen controls on suppliers through annual fees, criminal record checks and regular audits, with immediate bans, prosecutions and tougher penalties for those who don’t abide by the rules. As part of their road-safety strategy, ministers have said they will explore the potential use of AI to identify illegal plates, and “empower” the DVLA to carry out more “robust” checks on number plate suppliers.

But, to the frustration of Rochdale’s Trading Standards team, the prolific ghost plate manufacturer they discovered still hasn’t been removed from the suppliers’ register. What has been even more concerning for Operation Ghost is the discovery that unreadable plates are helping offenders move freely around the country, including criminals involved in drug trafficking and people smuggling.

“It became evident that ghost plates facilitated the free movement of vehicles involved in various forms of criminality, impacting multiple areas of Trading Standards legislation,” Hughen and Chalmers told the APPGTS inquiry into the issue. “These included organised crime groups, rogue traders, counterfeit goods, unsafe food and beverages, illicit tobacco and vapes, non-compliant electrical products, and even the illegal movement of animals and people.”

Such is the ease with which ghost plates can be obtained that the illegal practice is increasingly drawing in motorists who wouldn’t normally circumvent the rules. On race day at Cheltenham in November last year, PC Patrick Quinton caught one red-handed. Quinton, a taxi compliance officer for Avon and Somerset Police, had been checking the number plate of a Wolverhampton-based cab driver using an infra-red camera that he carries while on duty.

“Only the first two digits of the number plate registration would show up under IR [infra-red light],” he says. “What that told me is that the characters that had been applied on the plate were resistant to being read by IR cameras.”

The taxi driver, a man in his 40s, told the constable that he was “unaware” of the problem with the plate, which he claimed had been “supplied by a friend”. Nevertheless, he was fined £100 and had his taxi licence revoked after it emerged that his insurance certificate was fake. Quinton suspects that many other motorists, particularly lorry drivers, are prepared to take a chance with ghost plates to avoid paying for charges imposed when they travel on toll roads, along bus lanes or through clean-air zones.

“If you’ve got a 7.5-tonner and you want to drive through Bristol city centre, you’re going to have to pay £100 to do that or take the risk of being caught with your ghost plate on, which leads to a £100 fine. So you’d take the risk, wouldn’t you?” says Quinton.

‘Millions lost in revenue’

At present, fines are non-endorsable, meaning that they do not carry points and are not recorded on a driver’s licence. The Operation Ghost team believe that this is one of the reasons why invisible plates are “everywhere”.

They have estimated that Transport for London is losing out on £49.8m in revenue and £898.8m in lost fines per year. Losses at the Dartford Crossing are said to amount to £13.4m in revenue and £402.4m in fines, although the figures are disputed by National Highways, the agency that manages England’s motorways and major A‑roads.

“We’re looking at millions that’s being lost in revenue, because these cars are defeating ANPR cameras,” says Hughen.

The scale of the crisis means that Operation Ghost has been keeping the Trading Standards officer busy – so busy in fact that he’s been working in his own time, at evenings and weekends, as has his pal, Chalmers. “When we turned the stone over, and we saw no one doing anything about this, it sort of became our passion,” he says.