Hatunen wrote:



I believe getting current tags usually involves paying
registration fees for the years tags weren't obtained, which in
some states and for some cars can amount to a fair piece of
money.

Sometimes it also involves safety certification or emissions testing. In
most states and provinces it would also require payment of outstanding
fines.

Anyone thinking about driving around with switched plates or expired plates
should be aware of the technology available to police officers and their on
board computers. The enforcement agency I worked for was not exactly at
the cutting edge of technology, but I could punch in a licence plate from
any Canadian province and US state and in 2-3 seconds it would display a
vehicle description and identify the owner. If it was a plate from this
province it would automatically display the owner's driver licence number
and was flagged if he was under suspension or currently unlicensed. For
commercial vehicles, the company's safety violation rate was immediately
displayed. There were all sorts of hyper linked fields to access driver
conviction records etc.

A few years ago people could get away with playing dumb sometimes, but
these days it is not worth it.