Hank Investigates: Incorrectly Charged for EZPass Tolls:
Cynthia's red four-door sits in her Concord driveway. Exactly where it's been for weeks.
[...] "We were following the governor's order and we were not leaving," Cynthia said.
So when Cynthia got her April EZ Pass bill she was baffled. It said her car went through tolls in New York, a COVID hot spot.
[...] She was billed for 60 different tolls with charges totaling more than 600 dollars.
"It said we were on the Bronx, Whitestone Bridge, the Throgs Neck Bridge, and the RFK Bridge in New York City.
I'd never been on those bridges," Cynthia said.
Not a chance her car was in New York. She says she spent hours on the phone with EZ Pass trying to get the errors fixed.
[...] What happened? We found Cynthia's toll trouble is because of the way Massachusetts issues license plates—and a glitch in the EZ Pass system.
The problem is Massachusetts, one of the 17 states connected in the system, uses the same numbers on different types of plates. For example, there could be Mass passenger 1234, but also commercial 1234, Cape and Island 1234, Red Sox, Purple Heart, and more.
When a special plate like that gets an electronic toll, cameras snap a photo of it, and then it’s looked up in the EZ Pass shared system so the car can be charged.
But we found those files do not provide “plate type” information! So if commercial 1234, for instance, goes through, passenger 1234 could get the bill.
How in the world did anyone thing that giving the same license plate number to multiple vehicles was a good idea?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @08:12AM (1 child)
I could see the argument for allowing different plate styles to have the same number, especially back when they were enforced by actual people who would already be well aware. But for a long time in my state, people from different counties could have the same number. In addition, they used to be consecutively assigned by a lot of counties. If you had a relatively low combination, there literally could be dozens of cars out their with the same plate. Thankfully, they changed it back in the 80s when a statewide number system was adopted, so it isn't too much of a problem now. But old vanity plates can still be renewed as grandfathered under the old system, so I'm sure someone somewhere has run into that problem with automated systems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @11:32AM
We have EZpass here in western NY but I don't use the local toll bridge very often. So I get bills for $2 every other month or so, when I use that bridge a couple of times. Touch wood, so far no problems (I do wish they left a cash toll lane).
But maybe this is a good reason to sign up for EZPass and their in-car transponder--would having the transponder help disambiguate me if there was a similar plate number out there?
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday May 18 2020, @09:10AM (1 child)
The whole place was designed to confuse automatic plate readers:
commercial [bing.net]
bus
Lots more here [google.com]
tl;dr: the automated plate readers need to be able to distinguish the words under, and beside the plate numbers and letters to work out the plate type, and even then, the state allows special characters within the plate numbers and letters... (do they allow emojis?)
Want to bet a State Trooper with a number that matches someone else's never gets a ticket or a bill? ("when in doubt, send to first private user with a matching/similar plate")
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Interesting) by inertnet on Monday May 18 2020, @10:15AM
Back in 2002 everybody in the Netherlands was forced to buy new licence plates. There was a make believe story that this would combat theft. But the font [dafont.com] was highly optimized for automatic plate recognition, with open 'O's, 'P's etc. Theft stayed the same, but issuing of fines was automated. We had only a few toll roads back then, currently we only have 4 toll tunnels.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by datapharmer on Monday May 18 2020, @11:47AM (5 children)
Forget duplicate tags, I've gotten several charges sent to me repeatedly for $0.50 to $2.00 or so that simply can't be sorted out with the private company running this system. I get a nasty letter every few months and then dispute them every few months to no avail. The picture clearly shows a different plate number than the one the automatic reader detected. The tag it supposedly detected is for a temporary plate that I never took on a toll road and only used one day and has been expired for years and was issued to a truck (the picture shows a car). So despite point this out in their electronic dispute system, via phone, and by written letter I continue to receive the bills. I figure if it goes on long enough and they take it to court or something I'll counter sue for damages and lawyer fees, but so far for the lest few years it is just the same couple piddly bills over and over that clearly don't have anything to do with me to anyone that looked at them for even a half second.
My Dad did have to get the police and a lawyer involved for an automated plate reader where he received a traffic ticket in the mail from New York City. He's never driven to New York city, the vehicle was a different color than his and he had records that the car happened to be at the dealer's shop overnight getting service with surveillance footage of it being parked there. The answer when disputed initially (to my dad who was over 70): "Well sir just because you were in Florida at some point of the day means nothing... we don't know how fast you drive". Finally by getting a lawyer involved they admitted that maybe you couldn't actually drive a car on the interstate over 300 miles an hour across several consecutive states without stopping for gas and still have it parked in the spot long enough to have actually qualified for the parking infraction...
Why is the burden of proof for these fines so squarely on the accused?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @11:55AM (2 children)
> Why is the burden of proof for these fines so squarely on the accused?
My guess, people in general (and/or people in power) believe that "the computer" is always right. Anyone want to chime in on how we got to this place?
If grade schools had programming classes for everyone (even something very simple) that might eventually change this belief(??)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @02:15PM (1 child)
I think the classic sci-fi "short story" Computers Don't Argue [atariarchives.org] explains it pretty well. It's absurd, but you know that is going to happen someday. Someone will be executed because of computer error.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @02:29PM
I'd forgotten "Computers Don't Argue", thanks for that link.
We've gotten much better at these things in the last 50 odd years...now we have Swatting, much quicker, no need for all that correspondence (yes, this is sarcasm).
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday May 19 2020, @12:17AM
Because you're attacking a basic income stream.
I can't find it now, but there was an ad a while back about online credit card fraud/theft, where robbers burst into a bank and demand e.g., $52.18 and $34.77 , which is why a lot of this stuff goes unnoticed, ignored, or unreported.
On the other hand, I think this is the kind of thing local news investigates and reports on, especially on slow days.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2020, @05:50AM
I had a phone company chase me for months to pay for charges on a mobile phone plan I had cancelled. Repeated conversations along the lines of "What dates are these charges from in your system? April. May. June. Okay. According to your system what date was this account closed? March. Very good. Now explain why I am being charged for a service I cancelled."
Eventually I figured it out. When I switched phones it didn't update the SMS provider, so the phone company thought that it was still active. Turns out all you needed was their SMS configuration, plug it into your phone, and anyone could send SMS messages. Their system could detect activity. My number was last associated. They billed me.
In the end I sent them two cease and desist letters politely pointing out that they cancelled the service a month before the billed charges, and that the account had been finalised when closed. Eventually, months later, they gave up.
I do wonder how much they spent chasing me for a few dollars.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @11:53AM (7 children)
Good luck fighting anything EZ-PASS in NY or NJ, my wife had a malfunctioning EZ-PASS reader and we traveled to Massachusetts. The second we saw an 'error' on the first toll we called EZ-PASS. They said they had disabled our EZ-PASS and sent us another one (which had been lost in the mail, but since they never notified us, we didn't know). But not to worry, any toll we go though where it errors out, the license plate would be cross referenced against the database and they'd get the charges on the proper EZ-PASS.
Well, about a month later we received tolls for NY and NJ, with fines of over $100. They were assuming we had the error because of lapse in payment and we couldn't shake the tolls. Calls, e-mails and even letters later providing proof that we've never had a lapse in payment (we were automatic withdrawal) went unheard. Worse, every time we talked to a representative, they told us that we're on hold until they can rule on our dispute but once we received a collections letter with threats of legal action, we felt strong armed into just paying it. The dispute notification we were waiting on NEVER came. I assume they just were telling us that to get us off the phone.
These people are crooks and scumbags. If this lady gets away from this without any payments in addition to her troubles, it'll be a God damned miracle.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @11:57AM
I think this is when you call your local congress critter's office. A call from Representative (X) can be surprisingly effective (at least in some cases).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @02:05PM (5 children)
It is possible to win (in my experience), but it takes a lot of patience and finally getting through to the right person.
A couple years back, I took a few trips across a bridge in NY during the holidays. My experience when Massachusetts adopted cashless tolling was that it sometimes took a while to get bills. (I think it took almost 90 days before I received my first one there.) So, I didn't think anything when I didn't receive anything for a couple months.
Then I suddenly get an envelope in the mail one day with red stripes on the side and VIOLATION in big letters. I open it to discover that I had been charged the $5 toll for the three times I crossed the bridge, plus a $100 fine for each occurrence, for a total of $315. They claimed that I was delinquent and if I didn't respond within 30 days, they would send it to collections and perhaps get my car registration revoked.
I had never received a previous bill. So, I started searching in their online system and managed to pull up the previous statements, which had been sent to an old address I hadn't lived at in 18 months. I had renewed my registration over a month before I had driven across the bridge, and my address was updated on my new registration, but for some reason they sent it to my previous address. (It had been so long that mail forwarding was no longer working.) I never could get an answer on how they finally magically happened to send it to the right address on the third time, when they suddenly wanted to charge me a $300 fine.
Anyhow, I called them up immediately and was told that I couldn't be helped on the phone. I needed to dispute the charges in writing by mail. So, I sent in documentation of my registration with my new address printed on it, along with an explanation that the previous statements had been mailed to the wrong address and with the $30 payment to guy on the telephone suggested. (He said that they could waive the fines, but I'd be assessed a "service charge" for the late payment. I gave in and figured if it helped to resolve it, I'd just do it. I also recognized that I probably should have checked on this sooner when I didn't get a statement.)
I called two weeks later, and they could give me no further information. Another week later, I finally received another letter, which was simply another statement. No acknowledgement that they had even received my explanation or responded to it. Instead, they credited the $30 I had sent in to only one of the fines, not even crediting it to the actual $15 I owed in tolls. That seemed to assure that they could charge me more fines, as the tolls were still officially "unpaid."
I called again, and again was told there was no one I could talk to on the phone who could fix my problem. I requested a supervisor, to no avail. The guy on the phone this time seemed very confused by why they had credited the account that way and actually seemed legitimately apologetic. But he said there was nothing he could do -- I needed to send another dispute by mail.
So, I tried again. This time, I sent it certified mail and included even more documentation, with the old addresses circled in red ink on old statements I printed out from the online system and my current address and car registration. Two weeks later, I still had heard nothing. Another call got me nowhere -- they told me it can sometimes take up to 30 days to get info into the system.
I received another bill. No change. No acknowledgement that anything had happened or that they had received anything. So I called one more time, livid. But I was still polite and made clear I was NOT going to get off the phone until I spoke to someone with the authority to solve my problem. The rep was again confused and actually could see some documentation I sent in -- apparently, they weren't going to pretend they hadn't received a certified letter.
Magically, a supervisor appeared and they put me on hold. Ten minutes later, she came on the line and told me that she had zeroed out the fines and got rid of everything. After I hung up, I discovered just what she had meant by "got rid of everything" -- I searched for the original toll statements on the online system, and they weren't even there anymore. They had clearly destroyed evidence of their screw up by deleting the whole incident from the system. I wasn't surprised, as I know there have been various scandals around incorrect tolls in the cashless systems in the past few years.
The thing is -- these are private companies who have the authority to ruin your credit and even invalidate your car registration, and they operate mostly unchecked by government as long as they turn a profit. And apparently they are destroying evidence when they fail to get someone to comply with their absurd fines due to their own mistakes. It's horrific.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday May 18 2020, @04:07PM (4 children)
For several reasons I won't write up my similar story, but the gist of it was that there were mistakes by EZ-PASS that didn't even make sense. It was a friend's EZ-PASS. He hired me to drive some people and him on a trip. I don't have, and won't have, an EZ-PASS account. It took several calls and patience and a rep. finally followed what I was saying, removed the fine and tolls, but then 6 months later it was back. Aforementioned friend is a really good guy, but a bit naive, and foolishly trusts "officials". He understood the situation and that it was EZ-PASS's fault, but he kept thinking he had to pay the fine.
The problem was 2-part- the transponder and rental license plate didn't match up in their database, and at least 1 time the system didn't properly communicate with the transponder. One of my gripes with their system is that you (the driver) have NO indication that the transponder is recognized. At some toll booths yes, but they have many readers where there is NO indicator at all.
It's a system built to make $ for EZ-PASS, full of potential failures, and always in favor of EZ-PASS taking your $. I don't know how to fix this badly broken system. Govt. and courts generally don't give a crap about a few people who get ripped off. To them, the system is working well enough. Lump it in with the traffic light cameras. USA was founded by people who were united. Everyone now is so scattered and divided, I doubt anything will be done to fix EZ-PASS. Maybe if a major news journalist got the story out to enough people.
But as I write I'm thinking a problem is one of the tenets of democracy is majority rule, so if the majority of people are happy with EZ-PASS, then the few who have problems are in the minority, and of course they're unhappy, and the heck with them.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @04:46PM (1 child)
Sorry to hear about your issue, too.
Let's just be clear here. This isn't just "about a few people." There are literally millions of people who have been ripped off by E-ZPass. See, for example, here [abc7ny.com], here [abc7ny.com], or here [phillyvoice.com], just for a few stories in just the first page of search hits.
The thing is, E-ZPass has figured out how to shake people down. Mostly, they overcharge by charging "cash rates" instead of what they are supposed to be charging, or adding on little $5 or $10 charges that frequent commuters are unlikely to notice. When they hit people with the whopper bills for hundreds of dollars, they'll negotiate down until they find a number people are willing to pay, rather than going through months of threats and non-responsive customer "service."
The thing is, it's illegal to blackmail people. It's illegal to send people threats by mail. And yet, E-ZPass gets away with threatening to revoke car registrations all the time when any court who actually looked at most of the errors (and likely deliberate profiteering schemes disguised as "errors"), any revocation of a registration because of an erroneous charge wouldn't stand up.
So, this isn't just a matter of regulation. If the justice system were operating realistically, the authorities behind E-ZPass should be charged with criminal conspiracy to blackmail, threaten, and likely commit fraud. Unless they can prove they've taken steps to drastically reduce error rates and create an actual customer service system that makes it easy to resolve complaints immediately, they should start putting leaders into prison.
I've never met anyone who was happy with E-ZPass. Have you? I mean, people will admit to convenience, and cashless tolling has helped to resolve some traffic problems. But every time I've told some part of my story, inevitable half of the other people I'm with have some other complaint about that time their transponder didn't work, or that time when they were charged for being in a state they've never been to, etc.
And I can't quite figure out how my $100 fine for each missed $5 toll could possibly be legal under the Excessive Fines Clause of the 8th Amendment. Oh wait, maybe it isn't [nj1015.com].
In that class action lawsuit, E-ZPass is claiming that it takes so much money to cover the cost of processing fines. Well, in my case, I wasted probably ~5 hours of their reps time between phone conversations and likely dealing with the documentation I sent them. If they had a simple system where I could upload documentation that a rep could review immediately with me, it probably would have taken 10 minutes to resolve the issue. So, the labor costs they complain about are complete BS -- they created an inefficient system so people would give up before getting their fines resolved.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday May 18 2020, @08:00PM
The more I engage in these discussions, the more frustrated I become that I'm not a wordsmith. You've raised excellent points and questions, but it can all turn into a bunch of philosophical questions and more discussions, partly hinging on diction, definitions, colloquialism, etc.
Define "happy".
How about this: content. Maybe people aren't happy, but so much of life is compromise and to most people EZ-Pass is "good enough". And what's their recourse? Like you said, most people don't have the time to wait on hold for hours to talk to someone who might not actually help. The call can get cut off. Etc. Overall, there's no clear path to rectifying these problems, and people decide their time is better spent elsewhere.
I blame it on lazy compromising government. Congress should be up in arms, holding all-night sessions until they fix problems like this. If it was up to me, a single improper fine should trigger a full-scale investigation and radical change in the way the system works. EZ-Pass should never have been allowed to distribute passive transponders that have NO indication of being read by the stationary system. The stationary systems should NEVER have been allowed to be installed with NO indication of a read. This is great for EZ-Pass- cheaper, and much more difficult for a driver to document.
If I ever use EZ-Pass again, I'll very carefully document every time and place I'm aware of a stationary reader system, antennas, etc.
Yes, I know many people who are "content" with EZ-Pass. They've gotten a fine or two here or there, but they always say it's still worth it for the convenience.
How about this: get rid of tolls altogether.
More of my cynicism: EZ-Pass is yet another tracking system, and I think the govt. likes keeping tabs on everyone.
I wasn't aware that EZ-Pass could revoke a registration. That really has gone too far.
What REALLY burns me is that they have huge power over us, but we'd have difficulty winning a lawsuit over them, let alone press criminal charges. Lazy lazy lazy government.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @07:37PM (1 child)
Dude the first thing Washington did after the founding of the country (before the constitutional congress) was conscript a bunch of people to go put down the Whiskey Rebellion in Kentucky, because those upstarts should pay their 0.5 percent tax on their bartered hooch while the east coast corporate assholes get to pay a flat fee because it would be too much paperwork or cost for them to actually pay their 0.5 percent on every barrel of whiskey they produced.
America has always been the haves and the have nots. The difference was America for a long time had enemies without who unified those within, even those disparate groups fought a simmering cold war of class and ideological battles from the 1770s-80s through to the Civil War, Women's Suffrage, Civil Rights movement, Gay Rights/Feminist movements, and then to today, where external threats are only as important as mass media tells us and as often as not the targets are previously simmering groups within the country with which to be outraged rather than those without who previously would have been targetted to focus our collective ire.
Also don't forget because the Constitutional Congress the Confederation was constantly stabbing each other in the back with locally printed script, lousy exchange rates and in some cases runaway inflation. Not altogether different from what the Union is doing today, although the hucksters involved are far more consolidated and the debt is now everyone's to bear, rather than bickering over which state should carry which debts. (There is a lot to be learned from early American history that translates well to the events of the past decades.)
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday May 19 2020, @06:16PM
I absolutely agree, and I'm super impressed with your knowledge. As a young-un I all but hated history. Now I'm fascinated with it. Of course, no K-12 system that I know of explains things the way you did. I remember the name "Whisky Rebellion" and that's about it. Well, the founders were a pretty scrappy bunch. So so much of life is perspective, right? You could very easily look at the "freedom fighters" as extreme treasonous criminals. I could babble on about what little I know, but the truth is, even for someone who knows much detail of early American history, it still matters whose side you're on. No question something had to change, but doesn't it always? When or where has there been a system of government where everyone is happy? Or at least content? If I had time this could be interesting, but just no time right now.
Are you a historian officially? Or do you teach history? Or poly-sci? Or??
Thanks for your post, btw.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday May 18 2020, @12:53PM
Giving multiple cars the same license plate numbers is a wonderful idea for a government authority that wants to charge multiple people for the same trip through EZ Pass gates. It's the same government authority that pulled Bridgegate [wikipedia.org]. The same authority called the inner lane on the freeway connecting the Verrazano Bridge with the Goethals Bride on Staten Island an "HOV Lane" ("High Occupancy Vehicle") in 48 point letters on a giant sign, while a paragraph in 6 point letters underneath specified restrictions saying that it was actually a Bus Lane 88% of the time and you would get a $200 ticket for being in it outside that narrow HOV window, then parked a line of cop cars to swoop on everybody who read the "HOV" bit but didn't have time to read the small type below.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by CCTalbert on Monday May 18 2020, @03:02PM (2 children)
One might be under the impression that the intent of a license plate is to provide an easily used unique ID for each motor vehicle.
That would be incorrect.
The purpose of a license plate is to act as a visible receipt showing you've paid your personal property taxes, and to provide an easy way to identify those that haven't so they can be acted against. It's just a tax receipt. From the tax assessors perspective it's really not critical that it's unique, or easily read, etc. They're only concern is that it's visibly apparent if someone hasn't paid.
A vehicles license being used for ID, for law enforcement purposes, toll charges, etc., is like your social security number being used to identify you. BUT, in the case of SS, at least you're assured that numbers are unique. (and even then it's for the SS administration purposes, not because they realized that the number would be used for ID and other purposes)
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday May 18 2020, @03:32PM
For that matter, it used to be illegal to use the SSN for identification purposes. People started doing it anyway, and I think they changed the law.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday May 18 2020, @08:26PM
A license plate is something Mexicans steal to commit crimes in situations where they're unable to steal your whole car. I don't know about New England Jews (apparantly no property theft has to happen to get Jewed by their system) but we on Mexican border cities suffer that fate on a regular basis. Kinda makes me want to hone my plates to a razor's edge before installing them on my car.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2020, @10:29PM
"How in the world did anyone thing that giving the same license plate number to multiple vehicles was a good idea?"
Because it predates them needing the plates to be machine-readable.
A MA cop tracking a "1234" commercial plate and a "1234" passenger plates can distinguish between them easily enough. One says "commercial" in little red letters down the bottom. The other doesn't. But this doesn't fit into how the machines just read the large numbers in the main body of the plate.
I also think the story is wrong about the Red Sox plates overlapping. These plates have, as part of the main body, "RS". It's written vertically, but I believe that's considered part of the plate's overall number for ALPR purposes. Similarly there are conservation plates with "RW" and probably others I don't know.
New Hampshire's system has different plate types but it's mostly distinguished by the initial letters in the plate's number. Nearly all of our plates are blank white with green lettering. Government plates start with "G". Farm trucks with "FA". School buses with "SB". Handicap plates are three digits followed by an "X" (and sometimes "Y", after they seem to have run out of "X" plates.) And so on. Regular passenger plates are a pure string of numbers, and have the Old Man in the Mountain in the background. Our conservation plates have a moose on them and the letters C, H, I, or P, appear in a string of otherwise numbers (L-CHIP being the state conservation agency that gets the money). Vanity plates are required to contain multiple letters so they can't collide with any of these.
Incidentally, the passenger plates are issued sequentially so you can roughly tell when a plate was issued. We're around 45x xxxx right now. Five years ago 37x xxxx (my own car). A six-digit plate means the driver is probably 80. A good example of how sequential IDs leak information and are generally a bad idea.