It took months for Texas automobile sales regulators to craft rules aimed at stopping fraudulent temporary tags from hitting the nation’s streets, but it has taken mere days for those new rules to have an impact.
The number of suspected phony paper tags has dropped from about 25,000 weekly to “low hundreds,” based on estimates from law enforcement officials. An official with the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles on Thursday said the figures are in line with their own findings.
The steep drop comes two weeks after the DMV imposed new rules limiting how many temporary registrations a vehicle dealer can issue through the state’s online system and giving DMV officials authority to immediately suspend dealers believed to be illegally printing tags.
Six dealers have been suspended since the rules took effect on Jan. 27, said Brian Gee, managing attorney for Texas DMV.
“Those dealers are not printing tags anymore,” Gee told DMV board members Thursday.
Gee said officials “have all the evidence needed to move forward” with further scrutiny of those dealers and others.
Some police, however, said the early decline could be a step in the right direction, but hardly solved the issue.
“The criminals will just produce 900 (tags) and activate their next fraudulent license,” said Sgt. Joe Escribano, with the Travis County Precinct 3 Constable’s Office, who oversees the…
