Number plate theft

With the steadily growing number of cars on Ukraine's roads, cases of number plates going missing from cars, being damaged in accidents, or being stolen outright have become more frequent.

Damage to number plates is easy enough to understand, since accidents happen all the time, and the plates themselves lose their original look after a few years on the road anyway. But with plate theft, a troubling trend has emerged.

Drivers are running into number plate theft more and more often. The reasons vary. Plates can be stolen for ransom, or to fit onto a clone car or a stolen vehicle. But lately other reasons have surfaced for why plates get pulled off cars. Now plates can be removed right in the courtyard by residents of the building out of plain personal dislike for the car's owner, or over conflicts where someone's car is in the neighbours' way — a conflict that flares up especially often between car owners and pensioners. Plate theft is particularly common on cars registered in another country, especially Russia, Latvia, Belarus, Moldova, and the USA. Such plates are stolen with a ransom demand to follow, so you need to be extremely careful: check closely how firmly the plates are bolted to the car, and whether there's any damage or defect to the plate mount and frame.

It's a pretty unpleasant situation: without plates you can't drive the car anywhere, and finding the culprits quickly and fixing the problem doesn't always work out either.

To solve this problem quickly and without hassle, it's worth turning to a company that makes duplicate number plates. Ukrainian law doesn't forbid making number plates, and any vehicle owner can order duplicate plates made without having to go through the police first.

Duplicate plates can be made in under a day, given copies of the car's documents and a police certificate confirming the theft. And it works out far cheaper and far less hassle than getting new plates issued all over again through re-registration, or hunting down whoever took your plates off the car.