The ALPCA Guide to Deceptive and Misleading Plates

The goal of the ALPCA Guide to Deceptive and Misleading Plates is to educate the public about license plates that are not genuine, or are not what they may appear to be.

Genuine license plates and related objects are issued or authorized by the government identified on or by the plate, and are intended for legitimate vehicle registration. Unfortunately, there are many faux license plates that resemble authentic plates -- either by design or coincidence -- but are not genuine.

Please use this pictorial guide to help identify reproduction, altered, novelty and souvenir license plates.

Additional non-US fake plates can be found on Hanspeter Holdener's site, which also has a mirror of the late Cedric Sabine's information.

Potentially misleading objects in scope for this guide are:

• Deliberately faked objects (license plates, stickers, tabs, discs, etc.). This includes forgeries of existing types, fakes of non-existent types, alteration of real objects to change their value or representation, etc.
• Novelty, souvenir, booster, and similar objects (never intended to represent vehicle licensing)

Objects currently out of scope for this guide include:

• Bicycle plates and boat plates
• Sample, prototype, and error plates
• License plates issued by organizations with jurisdiction over limited areas (college campuses, airports, etc.)
• Other physical instruments of non-vehicle licensure (gas-station inspection license plates, etc.)
• Prop plates -- made for use in movies, television shows, plays, etc.
• Wheaties and other cereal plates
• DAV and Goodrich tags
• Other vehicle-related ephemera

To learn more about what these terms mean, see the ALPCA Glossary of License Plate Terms.

If you have photos of pseudo plates not shown here or have any questions, please contact the ALPCA at fakes@alpca.org.