The Ticket-Handler Story

I sat and watched HR (my local public-run Hessen network) last night.  MEX was one....their version of Sixty-Minutes but more diversified.  They cover grocery store gimmicks, bad deals, health issues, fake vitamins, mass transit, etc.

So, last night, they got onto the topic of 'ticket-handlers'.  These are people who you'd call when you've gotten a traffic ticket for serious speeding and the cops want to take your license for one to two months.  This is a fairly regular thing with the blitz-camera technology.

You get this letter....noting you were in such-and-such city a month ago, and seen via the blitz-camera doing 75 kph in a 50-zone.

You have three options....accept the loss of your license, challenge the picture part of this (it might not be your car), or say the picture is blurry and it was so-and-so (someone else) driving the car.  Naturally, with the third option....the cops want to know who because they will lose their license for the next thirty days.

This ticket-handler is a guy who you call.  He will review the ticket and picture.  Then he will offer the deal.  A hundred-Euro for his services alone.  Then he gets a person to accept blame for the speeding.  Naturally, there is a cost factor to this.....in the two-hundred to two-hundred-fifty Euro range.  My impression is that they'd prefer cash, but maybe I'm wrong on this part.

Who would be stupid enough to admit false speeding and lose their license?  Well....the guy they interviewed was a college student who rarely if ever drove.  He enjoyed the cash flow.  The points off this?  They disappear in roughly a year, so he could afford to do two of these one-month loss of driving privileges every year.  

How many thousands of people do this?  Unknown.  You can probably find old retired guys sitting in retiree homes....who still hold a license and never drive.....who'd volunteer for two or three of these a year.

Do the cops care?  They'd like to get the right guy, but frankly.....they just want to enforce the law.

Why pay someone off?  My guess is that a number of folks are fairly desperate on their job situation and can't afford lose their car driving ability for a month.  If you were a bus-driver, delivery-guy, or worked at some site twenty kilometers away.....well....it'd demand a resourceful solution.  I'm surprised how successful this operation is with getting around the situation.