An employee of a body shop in Cleveland, Ohio, confessed to pilfering the validation sticker from the license plate of a totaled vehicle after getting stopped on the highway by police.
After police checked with the Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV), they discovered that the 22-year-old’s plates were expired, even though they had a 2012 validation sticker on them. It was then discovered that the sticker belonged to another man’s vehicle. The young man’s story was that the BMV had mailed him the wrong sticker.
Police contacted the man whose vehicle the sticker had been stolen from and verified that, after a crash, he had taken the car to the body shop where the 22-year-old worked, it had been declared a total loss and the sticker had gone missing from the plates.
The police intend to get a warrant for receiving stolen property for the 22-year-old, who blamed the theft on his financial problems.