No Stupid Questions

It hasn't happened to me, but the tag was stolen off my friend's Nissan Rogue multiple times. The police said it's a commonly stolen car. Thieves put the stolen tag on the stolen car so the tag doesn't come back to a vehicle that was reported stolen.

I've never heard of any method of preventing them from being stolen. They're held on by screws; anyone with a screwdriver can take it in less than 20 seconds, only 5 if it's electric. I'm not sure how scoring the tag is supposed to prevent anything.

If a scored tag "looks suspicious" and leads to getting pulled over, that means everyone who does this is constantly getting pulled over for no reason.

That one doesn't pass the smell test.

Uhm... what are "vehicle tabs" ?

EDIT: Oh, tags. I guess it's the anual sticker proving that your registration is up to date. Don't have those here anymore. My previous car had the 2012 stickers still when I sold it last year.

In New Mexico registration stickers have your plate number on them. I guess if they are removed it would fool someone giving a cursory glance at them. I am fairly certain the stickers are perforated so that peeling them off renders them unusable.

It is not uncommon to see drivers in Albuquerque without any plate at all.

I once saw a cardboard plate that said "plate stolen, cops didn't do shit"

What are vehicle tabs?

I've never had them stolen myself.

In PA, when they used to still use them, they had little wedge shapes cut into them when you got them, so once you put them on, they couldn't be removed intact.

Because they couldn't be removed, you'd see tons of cars with the corner of the license plate cut off.

Pennsylvania finally stopped using the registration stickers a few years ago.

No point to the registration stickers anymore anyway. The license plate scanners already know everything about you.

One time, I had my expired plates stolen off a car I owned. The plates expired many years ago, the car died and sat quite a few years before I was able to get rid of it. What is someone doing with expired plates? The car next to it had valid plates. How dumb are people???

Apparently tabs are tags.

Alberta got rid of them eight years ago or so, but before that they were extremely one-use items. Super-fragile with an incredibly strong glue. You could NOT have remove them with a razor blade and the precision of a master jeweller.

Besides, annual registration is what - 80 bucks? Not worth it.

Real talk: the cops only look at the stickers if they want an excuse to pull you over.

For every thing else they run your plates- and usually before they even do that much. If your registration is current, then, they may just be letting you know they got ripped off, or checking if your drunk or just incredibly bored.

That said… if someone goes to the trouble of peeling off a sticker, it’s not going to do all that much good, and probably catch them more charges than just being unregistered.

(More likely they’d steal the entire plates. Particularly one from a similar car to yours- color, make, model, year, etc.)

I had my plates stolen several years ago, if that counts!

I used to live in a bad place, people would steal anything and everything. I had to lock up everything, hide everything of value. Yes I cut up the registration sticker into 50 pieces to prevent theft. I have seen them stolen before.

I think it’s largely dependant on location. I live in the northeast US and never heard of this before my cousin moved to California and has his registration sticker stolen the day after he got Cali plates.

Nope, never. That said, I don't live in a place that uses tiny brightly coloured stickers on the outside of the vehicle to prove it's taxed, so that might be a factor.

I assume even where these are used, the police could just check a database to see if the vehicle is taxed.

Well first I'm hearing of this advice to score them. I have had someone attempt to steal them corner peeled up cleanly but didn't manage to get it all the way off...

I have.

Family member had it happen. It's easy to take them off if there are 5 years of stickers on top of each other. But, just exacto knife the tag a lil and it's too much trouble to lift off.

My dad did once. Stolen off his pickup while on a work parking lot

I've only ever heard the advice to perforate the vehicle registration sticker from one person, but supposing that it has become normalized advice, I have to imagine that it's due to the low-effort, not necessarily the extraordinary security that it provides.

In a related situation, I'm often confused at folks who don't lock their cars when going to the shops, since it's adding an extra barrier for an opportunistic thief to cross. There's no question that a motivated thief could just take a brick to the window, but it is indeed low effort to lock the car and if that's enough to dissuade one theft of the car's coin tray, then that's good enough.

It is, after all, quite hard to prove a negative so we can't really know how much theft it deters. But it is very clear that a perforated registration sticker destroys any value to anyone who would even contemplate stealing it. But as you say, if there were zero such people to begin with, then it can't really be reduced further.

I have never heard this in my life. It never even occured to me someone might steal them!

If you means “tags” as in “license plates”, then yes. Not only have I had my own license plate plates stolen on more than one occasion, but I have known both brothers and friends who have had license plates stolen in five different states over the last 30 years.

Why do you ask?