From faking your own death to blaming phantom car thieves, we count seven unbelievable ways people tried to escape traffic tickets!

7 – Man Buys His Old Car Back to Prove He Didn’t Speed

• Englishman Dale Lyle was the proud owner of a fourteen-year-old Honda Civic – a total rust bucket that was on its last legs.
• One day, he received a speeding ticket that claimed he’d been driving ninety-eight miles per hour in a seventy zone. Dale contested the offense, as his license would be suspended if he was found guilty. A magistrate said he needed proof.
• Unfortunately, Dale had sold his Honda Civic before the ticket arrived, leaving him unable to get the proof. To proof he was in the right, he ended up buying his old car back for six hundred euros. He then hired a professional driver for another six hundred, who took the old bomb out onto a two-mile circuit track to speed-test it.
• Dale got the results he was looking for: he couldn’t have been going ninety-eight miles per hour because his shitbox Civic’s top speed was only eighty-five! He brought the evidence to the court and the ticket was withdrawn.

6 – Driver Blames Tickets on Imaginary Car Thieves,

• Mario Hili from the Australian suburb of Geelong was caught speeding and running red lights twenty times over thirteen years. Incredibly he never paid any fines and lost no points on his license because police kept falling for his ridiculous excuses like they were banana peels in Mario Kart.
• All of his offenses were caught by traffic cameras, but as soon as Mario received a ticket in the mail he’d report his car as stolen. However, his car would magically turn up again just before the police had a chance to investigate. With this method, he was able to blame all of his traffic offenses on fictional car thieves. Somehow no one in the Victorian police force noticed this pattern or became suspicious.
• Of course, the run couldn’t last forever. On Mario’s twenty-first attempt he was finally caught. After dusting his car for prints, police determined that Mario’s story was bullshit as only his sneaky prints showed up. Foiled at last!

5 – Woman Fakes Own Death to Avoid Paying Tickets,

• After accumulating a nice collection of traffic infringement notices, Kimberly Du from Des Moines attempted to get out of paying them by using that timeless problem-solving solution: faking your own death.
• She wrote a letter to a county judge claiming that she wouldn’t be paying her fines today because she was, in fact, dead. The pièce de résistance was signing the letter with her mother’s name. She added one forged newspaper obituary notice and – voilà! – her fine was avoided. Well, at least for a month.
• On the one-month anniversary of her fake death, Kimberly has pulled over again. Refusing to believe she was a ghost, the cop saw through Kimberly’s antics and she was arrested.

4 – Man Receives Fine Thirty Seconds After Parking,

• In 2013, an unidentified Melbourne man proved that appealing unfair parking tickets actually works – if you’re super sarcastic.
• The Australian man received a ticket in the very short space of time between parking and walking to the rear of his vehicle to retrieve his wallet. That’s right: the parking inspector saw the man park and go to walk around his vehicle, yet still left a big fat ticket on his windshield while the man was busy counting his coins.
• Arguing with the inspector changed nothing, so the man wrote an extremely passive-aggressive letter to the Melbourne Parking and Traffic: “I’ve gotta hand it to him – this guy’s a genius. He knew I intended to comply with the regulations and pay for my parking, so he did what any good parking officer would do: he wrote me a ticket before I could walk the eight steps to the machine. Officer 335 must get a raise.”
• He then jokingly apologized for taking thirty seconds to pay and resolved to wind down his window next time and throw coins at the ticket machine in the hopes that some would make it into the coin slot. The appeal worked and the ticket was revoked.

3 – Boy Genius Builds Fine Appeal Website,

• Eighteen-year-old economics student Joshua Browder is a budding entrepreneur who founded DoNotPay.co.uk – a website that helps people appeal traffic fines. The site asks motorists to enter their details, then sends a custom-generated appeal created by the website’s algorithm to the relevant council.
• Through this website, Joshua has helped over ninety thousand drivers and saved people more than £2 million in parking fines. He built the site after receiving several of his own unfair parking fines and discovered that sending appeal letters to councils actually works.
• The site is a free, not-for-profit public service designed to help the most vulnerable members of society: the elderly and disabled, who are often slammed hardest with trivial parking offenses. Joshua stresses he isn’t trying to encourage illegal parking; he just wants to combat incorrectly issued parking tickets, which he says exist solely to bring in revenue.

2 – Professor Uses Physics to Escape Ticket,

• ph.D.-wielding physics professor Krioukov wrote a four-page dissertation filled with equations, charts, and graphs to escape a speeding ticket.
• In the paper, Krioukov argued that the cop who booked him had been tricked into seeing him pass a stop sign because of several abstract physics-based conditions. He detailed these at length using a lot of convincing scientific language.
• The presiding judge didn’t understand any of it, so, at the risk of looking stupid, smiled, nodded and dismissed the ticket. It just goes to show that maths and essay-writing aren’t wastes of time; they could one day get you out of tickets!

1 – Hypnotist Gets Out of Ticket,

• Skeptics may doubt the validity of this one, but it’s pretty amazing if true. While driving around filming a YouTube illusion, a magician managed to attract the attention of a police officer by causing a minor road offense. Incredibly, the driver manages to get out of receiving a ticket by hypnotizing the officer.
• Using what he calls ‘NLP patterns’, the driver gets the officer to answer a series of unrelated questions and performs a set of strange finger snaps. The whole thing basically becomes the real-life equivalent of ‘These aren’t the droids you’re looking for’, and is amazing to behold.
• Before you know it, the magician is driving away with no ticket. If real, this is the ultimate psychic lifehack.