【Dear Utol (2025): Fake Orgasm Episode 44】

Everyone hates parking tickets. Not everyone,Dear Utol (2025): Fake Orgasm Episode 44 however, is an information security researcher with a mischievous side and a freshly minted vanity license plate reading "NULL."

That would be Droogie (his handle, if that's not obvious), a presenter at this year's DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas and man with a very specific problem: He's on the receiving end of thousands of dollars worth of tickets that aren't his. But don't tell that to the DMV.

It wasn't, of course, supposed to end up this way. In fact, exactly the opposite. Droogie registered a vanity California license plate consisting solely of the word "NULL" — which in programming is a term for no specific value — for fun. And, he admitted to laughs, on the off chance it would confuse automatic license plate readers and the DMV's ticketing system.

"I was like, ‘I'm the shit,'" he joked to the crowd. "'I’m gonna be invisible.' Instead, I got all the tickets."

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Things didn't go south immediately. As Droogie explained, he's a cautious driver and didn't get any tickets for the first year he owned the vanity plate. Then he went to reregister his tags online, and, when prompted to input his license plate, broke the DMV webpage.

It seemed the DMV site didn't recognize the plate "NULL" as an actual input.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

That was the first sign that something was amiss.

Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up!

The next sign was, well, a little more serious: After receiving a legitimate parking ticket, thousands of dollars in random tickets starting arriving in the mail at his house, addressed to him.

It seemed that a privately operated citation processing center had a database of outstanding tickets, and, for some reason — possibly due to incomplete data on their end — many of those tickets were assigned to the license plate "NULL." In other words, the processing center was likely tryingto tell its systems it didn't know the plates of the offending cars. Instead, with Droogie's vanity plate now in play, it pegged all those outstanding tickets on him.

Specifically, over $12,000 worth of outstanding tickets.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

"Basically," observed Droogie, "this is bullshit”

After contacting the DMV and the LAPD, and painstakingly explaining his situation, they both told him the same thing: change your plates.

"I said, 'No, I didn’t do anything wrong.'"

SEE ALSO: How eBay scammers turned Nespresso lovers into money mules

But the tickets were still piling up. Thankfully, the DMV contacted the private citation processing company, which then erased the $12,000 in fines. However, and this part is key, they didn't actually fix the problem with their system.

Droogie explained that, as of present, tickets are still being associated with his license plate and the system thinks he owes over $6,000.

Essentially, Droogie's prank backfired. Hard. But no matter what, he insisted to the laughing crowd, he's not paying those damn tickets.

---

Featured Video For You

---

From ATMs to printers, hackers prove you can play 'Doom' on anything

---

Topics Cybersecurity

• Social Good
• Digital Culture
• Shopping
• Tech
• Games
• Entertainment
• Deals
• Life

• Useful or Little Known Android Features
• Uber driver explains why he argued with CEO Travis Kalanick
• Warren Buffett: 'If a lady says no, she means maybe'
• Get free flights to New Zealand, y'all. But only if you accept a job interview
• Here are the glorious proposed logos for Donald Trump's Space Force
• World Bank CEO Kristalina Georgieva has a 'Slumdog Millionaire' moment in India
• This isn't a Nintendo Switch review, but it'll help you decide whether to buy one
• A Snapchat drone?! Here's what we know
• Sunday's Fat Bear Week match pits two fat favorites against each other
• TASER smart holsters make body cams record when a gun is drawn

• Isabella Hammad, Elisa Gonzalez, and Peter Mishler Recommend by The Paris Review
• Camus’s New York Diary, 1946 by Albert Camus
• How to factory reset a MacBook
• Plan for a Journal by Italo Calvino
• Big Bird is suddenly tiny and everyone online is concerned
• Best laptop deal: Get the Asus ZenBook Pro Duo 15 for $1,999.99
• Chateaubriand on Writing Memoir between Two Societies by François
• Chateaubriand on Finding Life in a Society Dissolving
• Love Songs: “You Don’t Know What Love Is” by Blair McClendon
• Fake Biden robocall creator suspended from voice AI company ElevenLabs

• Against Fear
• One more gaffe for India's national airline and people can't stop rubbing it in
• The fascinating story behind the coolest name in basketball
• Gloria Steinem refuses to talk sh*t about Emma Watson, obviously
• Shop the iPad Air and iPad 11th generation for their lowest
• Usain Bolt and Pikachu are in an ad together and Bolt's the bad guy
• WTF do you even say about this cat who ate 46 hair ties?
• Bottle of champagne rolls out under subway seat, brings New Yorkers together
• Best Samsung deal: Save $60 on 64GB Samsung Galaxy Tab A9
• #EveryoneWelcome campaign challenges you to stand in solidarity with trans people

• Best portable power station deal: Save $179.01 on the EcoFlow River 2 Max
• Trump finally says why he will skip the White House Correspondents' Dinner
• Apple dropping lightning for a USB
• Warren Buffett: 'If a lady says no, she means maybe'
• Today's Hurdle hints and answers for April 29, 2025
• Wild elephants get a lot less sleep than you do
• Man sentenced to 30 days in prison for accidentally hitting woman with his drone
• Basically everyone reuses their passwords
• Stablecoin bill advances in U.S. Senate as Trump critics call to end his crypto dealings
• Scientists are firing lasers at dinosaur fossils, and the result is awesome