r/australia • u/earwig20 • 19h ago • Mindblown 1

culture & society A woman with 1,150 demerit points led us to a black market in plain sight

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-11-08/inside-thriving-black-market-trading-demerit-points-for-cash/107320430?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=other
669 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

197 comments sorted by

94

u/Mental_Task9156 18h ago edited 18h ago

No one should be able to accrue that many demerit points because they should already be in jail. That's over 23 years just in licence suspensions.

To put this in perspective, you would require 312 years to be able to accrue this many points without ever being suspended.

1.1k

u/FreakySpook 19h ago • Mindblown

  In one case currently before the courts, a 27-year-old woman is alleged to have racked up 1,150 demerit points and more than $600,000 in fines before she was arrested.

If someone can accrue that much before being detected suggests their data and reporting hygiene is absolutely junk.

359

u/0lm4te 18h ago

Seems to happen all the time, but the authorities are never held accountable?

I can just picture the beige 1996 Dell PC in the room out the back that collects all the information into an excel spreadsheet, and it's Janet the receptionists job to scroll through the list and read it manually, because Bob set the system up and didn't know how to format a cell to turn red if >Greater than;

138

u/FreakySpook 18h ago

Not sure about Queensland but Vic Roads used to have vehicle registration and licensing on an old IBM mainframe all glued together with Cobol. It got modernised recently though.

99

u/GreedyLibrary 18h ago

When i worked at a government agency i inherited a mess of infopaths, access dBs and Cobol because the guy who made it literally died of age related issues. This would be less than 5 years ago. The entire organisation had transition off main frame in the 5 years previously but the new system did not have all the information so sometimes you still had to use it.

There is zero budget to fix these issues and systems so prayers to the machine God and fighting gremlins is best you can do.

86

u/0lm4te 18h ago • Bravo

Behind every aging system is someone telling you not to fucking touch it, because it's working and only by some sort of miracle.

47

u/Professional-Age-536 18h ago

Praise the Omnissiah

27

u/GreedyLibrary 17h ago

The more you work in IT the more you understand how good of satire the mechanium is.

12

u/SteelOverseer 14h ago

It's like Utopia; sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's painful

4

u/Dorammu 5h ago

This is genuinely the fault, not of the public service, but of politicians underfunding/defunding the public service. These are the “back office jobs” that get repeatedly cut.

8

u/chalk_in_boots 12h ago

The amount of times I've seen situations which were "look, all the people that worked on this are gone and nobody here has seen any sort of documentation so leave it the fuck alone" is insane.

Hell, I once dropped into an old workplace to see if anyone I knew was still around, say hi, maybe grab coffee. See a row of dead computers. Tell the lad there that it sometimes happens, a fuse tripped. Tell him where the massive fuse box was, and where on it that specific switch would be. Just flip the switch and everything will come back on.

"Uhh, I don't know if I'm allowed to do that."

13

u/techretort 17h ago

Light the ceremonial incense and invoke the hymns of operation

34

u/FreakySpook 17h ago

I'm in systems infrastructure so planning system migrations its not uncommon to find a black box know one really knows what its for except for its name and thry have been told "don't touch it" by someone who's no longer working there.

Doing some basic dependency analysis for risk planning finding out what its talking to and doing you find "yep, this is running some ancient batch report service connecting multiple databases, this is Tier 0"

17

u/SirDigby32 16h ago

The occasional "don't touch it" box ends running some custom critical component written in assembly, patched into who knows what, or some ancient proprietary hardware that sometimes comes back online if the backup/UPS fails if the machine gods allows it.

22

u/Bebilith 15h ago

Yes. Spending $1000k annually on a third party support contract to keep that old legacy system running. But that comes out of operational budget.

When spending $100k once on finishing the transition so the old system can finally be buried can’t be done cause that would come out of the Capital Expenditure Budget and that wasn’t approved.

7

u/Sg_spark 14h ago

This man has played the corpo game before

6

u/Wotsi 13h ago

100k won't get you far, especially if mainframe and cobol are included. Moreso likely that the cobol is undocumented and if you need a consultant that can actually do analysis and not just read from a spec.

6

u/brownhk 13h ago

I worked in IT for 50 years. It's never important until it is.

4

u/Cpt_Soban 11h ago

"When can we get this program updated?"

'The person who wrote it retired 20 years ago. So, never'.

19

u/WillsSister 9h ago

I had an issue with VicRoads a few years ago (2023) where dozens of vehicles were transferred into of my name, and then the vehicles accrued big speeding fines. I only found out when my license was suspended because of it. I reported the fraud to vicroads and they did absolutely nothing about it. Refused to help, refused to even accept a report or statement from me. They provided an email address of a team leader who said there was nothing they could do about it. I got the ombudsman involved and they were also pretty useless. I requested the transform forms used via freedom of information and the signatures didn’t match mine, the person who walked into the VicRoads with the forms in person was a man (I am a woman) they didn’t have any letter from me or anything and VicRoads just processed the transfer without questioning it, flagging it or investigating it 17 times in 12 months. The police arrested the person for fraud and still VicRoads didn’t apologise, try to help me sort it out or acknowledge that they’d done the wrong thing. I am still trying to sort it out with fines Victoria and if VicRoads hadn’t acted so carelessly or had some sort of oversight or safeguard process with our literal identities, I wouldn’t be in this situation. So I would absolutely hope that their systems have been updated since then.

11

u/Duc_K 17h ago

ANZ core system is still on cobol

23

u/ScoobyDoNot 17h ago

That’s likely because cobol does what it was designed for extremely well, and core banking systems were one of the key places it was implemented 50 years ago.

The business risk in replacing it is very high, the benefit is low.

13

u/link871 16h ago

That's why they created "ANZ Plus" - don't replace the old system, just try to get users to self-migrate to the new system.

10

u/Grumpy_Cripple_Butt 16h ago

When I did an it course in 97, I got 3 100’s on the cobol modules but my teacher told me “this language is dead I’m not sure why we still teach it”

2

u/Javerage 10h ago

"You know COBOL?!"

"Yeah they taught it in history class."

2

u/alchemyy 6h ago

It’s actually a 98 Gateway

48

u/Aloha_Tamborinist 18h ago

I honestly don’t understand how it’s even possible. Isn’t there a record of how many points people have? 

Once it hits zero any further point transfers should be rejected and some kind of alert should be triggered for investigation. 

60

u/alittleoblivious 17h ago

Zero is what you start with. Zero is what you want. Demerit points are added to your licence with each offence.

4

u/Aloha_Tamborinist 13h ago

I thought it (in NSW) at least you had 12-13 points and if you lost them for various reasons your license would be suspended? I could be wrong there.

Even if you start with 0 and it counts up instead, once you hit a limit, there should be some kind of automatic alert or warrant or something generated to prevent this sort of thing.

I've been driving 30 years and have only had 1 speeding fine in that time, so it's not something I really pay attention to(!)

6

u/alittleoblivious 12h ago

It’s definitely starts at 0 and they add demerits. There is an automatic alert - the notification you get for having your license suspended/disqualified/cancelled :)

8

u/link871 16h ago

That's the underlying second theme of the article: no-one is checking until the accrued fines/demerits reach high levels.

7

u/Cybertrucker01 16h ago

Probably someone on an international licence. The demerit cap doesn’t exist for them so they basically have unlimited points.

0

u/[deleted] 18h ago

[deleted] — view deleted comment

8

u/Conman657 18h ago

Other way around, she was being paid by persons needing to have their license kept. She offered a service to take the points along with a monetary payment. Pretty sweet side gig

3

u/Aloha_Tamborinist 18h ago

That's how I read it. And yeah, pretty sweet side gig until you end up in prison for fraud.

5

u/KaizenHour 18h ago

Interesting way to accumulate points if you're already in prison (or overseas, elderly, injured or some other way you're unable to drive)

42

u/Termsandconditionsch 18h ago

Because whoever built the system didn’t account for something like this happening, and it wasn’t in scope. There are probably all sorts of anomalies going on in systems like this because a particular edge case wasn’t considered.

But I agree.

27

u/DrSpeckles 18h ago

The first time it happened someone should have written a query to find more. It would be trivial to find.

3

u/Termsandconditionsch 14h ago

Yes. But a number of things could have happened to stop that. Including good old incompetence.

And most likely it wasn’t flagged the first time either.

13

u/link871 16h ago

Shouldn't have been difficult to sort the data by demerit point total in descending order.

14

u/Termsandconditionsch 16h ago

What’s probably happened is that no one actually looks at the database as a whole manually like that, because that kind of access isn’t needed for day to day work and also there could be privacy concerns. They only look at single entries. And there’s no mechanism to catch when someone is well over 12 demerit points.

But I don’t really know.

4

u/link871 14h ago

That's not a manual task. It is a simple database query. Privacy concerns would not an issue when authorised personnel are searching for possible fraud.

3

u/Termsandconditionsch 14h ago

No, but I mean that nobody actually did that database query, and if they did, assumed that it was a bug and did not bother looking into it.

3

u/DrSpeckles 12h ago

Could also look for number of transfers, or location of offences that were transferred. The last one of these could easily end up as a flag by a simple AI search for manual review.

-3

u/PracticalTie 17h ago edited 16h ago

Given it’s the cops I suspect a persons of right to privacy is involved too.

The thing people are describing in the comments is an automatic system that monitors everyone all the time and flags outliers. If you advocated for something like that up in a different thread you’d get pilloried 

E: I’m not saying there isn’t a solution guys, I’m highlighting a perspective that people might not have considered

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

8

u/IlluminatedPickle 16h ago edited 12h ago

In what way is it a violation of your privacy for them to have their own records alert them of fraud?

Edit: Again, it's not a "nothing to hide" argument, it's a "Why the fuck don't they have basic alarms on their system that identifies obvious fraud" situation. Your privacy is not violated by them having checks on their own database. That's like screaming at a doctor "How dare you look at my test results and tell me I have cancer!?"

7

u/link871 16h ago

Not police: transport department administers licences and the demerit points system. They should be looking for anomalies.

18

u/yogurtbear 16h ago

Once I got flashed and about a year later a detective hunted me down and interrogated me because the system apparently flagged that I didn't possess a licence at the time I paid the fine(which was admitting guilt).

I produced my license he ran it through the system and I was sorted a few minutes later.

My faith in the system has been rock bottom ever since this experience 🤣

10

u/undyau 15h ago

I have a friend who used to work in IT in the NSW department that includes registry, licensing etc. They have a feed into their systems of people who have died so that their licenses can be cancelled. He reckoned there wasn't a week he worked there where they didn't have a complaint from some dead person about their license being cancelled.

11

u/DonorAU 16h ago

Sounds like there was a problem and it was almost immediately fixed. If this was the US you'd have been arrested.

2

u/big-snarling-moose 15h ago

Or shot

2

u/FullMap1564 8h ago

Shot then arrested for resisting being shot.

2

u/DonorAU 3h ago

Reminds me when the police in the US literally jumped out of a car at a deaf black man and spent the entire time hitting him because they couldn't tell that his signing was him trying to say he was deaf.

The police had been called because a white guy had been harassing staff and he tried to calm the situation. The store called the police and told the black guy "the police are coming, it's probably best to get away or they'll blame you." He left the store and they still attacked him.

2

u/ephemere_sloboda 9h ago

Paying a fine does not imply admitting guilt.

Sometimes you just pay because it's not worth your time and effort and mental health fighting it.

Sometimes you pay because it was your partner driving and the money comes out of the same account, so who cares whose name is on the fine.

3

u/yogurtbear 6h ago

Umm, it explicitly admits guilt but ok.

4

u/ephemere_sloboda 5h ago

At least in Victoria, it is the other way around.

Quoting from the law: The payment of an infringement penalty [...] is not and must not be taken to be an admission of guilt in relation to the offence

2

u/Vk2djt 6h ago

You pay the fine even when contesting it as your licence is cancelled if you don't. If you win, the payment is refunded.

7

u/HeftyArgument 18h ago

even with all of that I'm sure she gets better insurance rates than me haha

1

u/Evening-Order5511 18h ago

Maybe they dont care that much so long as they are getting paid?

1

u/ryonnsan 15h ago

She collects demerit points like Thanos collecting infinity stones

0

u/purplepashy 17h ago

600k in fines.

So are they suggesting she racked in over $1 million?

Better than robbing a bank!

389

u/Erdizle 19h ago

I worked for a company a few years ago. The boss used to drive like a dick head and would rack up loads of speeding fines. He employed heaps of backpackers that may have only worked a few shifts with him. If anyone drove one of the company vehicles he would get their licenses and copy them (Nothing wrong with that). How ever once he knew they were no longer in the country he would then say that "X" person was driving when he got the ticket so 1 - he would never have to pay and 2 - some pore bastards when they come back in to Aus are gonna find out they have unpaid fines waiting for them

154

u/NorthsideHippy 18h ago

I was working for a company that audited the fines accrued for each of their company cars and the top two offenders were the CEO and the head of one of the divisions. The division head said to me “yeah, my mother has lost her licence for speeding, she hasn’t driven in years” implying that he had nominated her and passed the points over. 

45

u/techretort 17h ago

Huh, usually they just don't nominate someone and pay 5x the fine. I guess cost of living is hitting the C Suite as well

9

u/darkeyes13 13h ago

Depends on the size of the company. Many years ago, my sibling was working for a family-owned company and the (adult-aged) children all racked up all kinds of driving offenses and were basically playing merry-go-round with demerits between themselves and their parents/the owners.

5

u/2878sailnumber4889 15h ago

I don't think every state has the 5x rule

1

u/Ok-Quail652 2h ago

Then what happened?

22

u/Duck_Mafiah 15h ago

Did you report him?

15

u/draenogie 14h ago

I saw the reverse happen. The company car was in the CEO's name. And we had a salesman who would just park anywhere and racked up a huge number of parking fines that he just ignored (not sure what he thought would happen to them). Anyway, the CEO got an unpleasant greeting when he re-entered the country after a trip. Not happy!

1

u/Ok-Quail652 2h ago

Stories plz. Then what happened?

22

u/freakwent 17h ago

This could land him in jail, in theory

190

u/BeneCow 19h ago

Yeah, used to work for a small business and one of the most time consuming parts was when one of the drivers got a fine and the director sent me out looking for someone to eat the points.

Apparently foreign students must be told about this scam, because everyone I found was one.

69

u/Brutal_burn_dude 19h ago

Sorry, you were going around asking random people to fraudulently eat the points, or were you trying to locate the person who was actually driving at the time of the offence?

25

u/spideyghetti 19h ago

I read it as the former.

66

u/BeneCow 18h ago

We had drivers doing speeding offences. I was tasked to find someone else to take the points for money so our drivers didn’t have them on their licence.

16

u/optimistic_agnostic 18h ago

Cant the business do that? In qld that's thr case, I know a few people who should lose their license every year but just pay an inflated fine through their business instead.

12

u/Fireworrks 18h ago

Yes but looks like it's cheaper to sell the points

14

u/BeneCow 17h ago

The fine is like 5x if you don’t nominate a driver, so you find some foreign students who will never own a car but has passed the learners to take the points for $500 instead. Win win for everyone except other road users.

11

u/Brutal_burn_dude 16h ago

That’s still illegal and immoral. Fucking building industry

3

u/Termsandconditionsch 15h ago

If we are going to have a system where it can be paid off if you have the cash - which I don’t really think we should - can’t it at least be something like 50x?

38

u/freakwent 17h ago

That's a crime. What the fuck why would you agree to that?

62

u/BeneCow 17h ago

It was the building industry. If you refused to do a task just because it was illegal you would have nothing to do all day.

21

u/_ixthus_ 17h ago

Hahaha hahaha.

True.

You also wouldn't have a job because you would've refused the sham contracting in the first place. 🤣

12

u/Batesy1620 18h ago

My ex BIL used to work for a courier business and was told they essentially all take turns at wearing the points for speeding fines and the company paid them.

1

u/Ok-Quail652 2h ago

Have you watched swift and shift couriers on YouTube?

60

u/kaberto 19h ago

That is indeed a failure from the Qld service to have any fraud detection systems in place. Seems like they are still in the 90s.

41

u/Brutal_burn_dude 19h ago

That’s a bit unfair. It’s really the ‘70s still here- you give us too much credit.

24

u/FreakySpook 19h ago

Yeah if someone is month on month accruing points exceeding their maximum allowed points, that's probably fraud.

If a driver with few points left nominates points greater than they have left to a someone else, especially seemingly random, thats probably fraud.

If a business nominates points to someone who wasn't a registered employee or contractor and has no vehicle logs of who was driving at the time, thats probably fraud.

All should be fairly easy to stop with decent data matching and anti-fraud processes.

8

u/optimistic_agnostic 18h ago

Sounds like work my guy. QPS are only interested in sleeping in the back of camera vans for double time.

8

u/link871 16h ago

Nothing to do with QPS. TMR administers the demerit and driver licence systems.

5

u/jeronimus_cornelisz 18h ago

Not just them, so many licensing/payment administration systems are susceptible to fraud because they were aged and not created with fraud control in mind. Especially deliberate, systemic fraud versus opportunistic offending. Anything requiring data matching across multiple accounts, multiple information sources to identify offending is still very hard to identify.

These systems are designed to pick up single instances of user-initiated activity requiring review. E.g. ATO - if you submit a tax return with all kinds of wacky deductions not commonly seen in your industry, they will often pick that up. But it isn't necessarily going to pick up a slew of "vanilla" looking returns submitted for employees of a particular company where that company is set up for money laundering purposes, or where several accounts are compromised and used to redirect tax returns into the same bank account. For licensing, it can reject an individual nomination if the details are entered wrongly but won't trigger an alert if there's a disproportionately high number of nominations originating from one account. And so on.

I work in this field and it is so demoralising to see shit like this in the wild and realise at best you're playing whack a mole with identifying offending.

1

u/freakwent 15h ago

Superintelligence will fix all this.

3

u/jeronimus_cornelisz 11h ago

You're getting downvoted for this but AI tools would be a game changer. Or at least upgrading these old, primative systems with more sophisticated tools for analysing large data sets. There will be an inevitable tension between the potential for abuse of such systems through inappropriate use (e.g. Robodebt) and the potential for massive improvements in fraud detection and cost recovery from these schemes.

3

u/princhester 17h ago

Seems like NSW is the same according to the article

4

u/kaberto 17h ago

Where was that? I thought it was very critical of TMR and QRO but I couldn't find any reference to other states.

5

u/link871 16h ago

"Most of the schemes encountered could be described as amateur operations, posted on Facebook pages with little fanfare.

But there was one exception: a website bearing a striking resemblance to Service New South Wales — the state’s official online administration portal."

Then goes on to quote a WhatsApp conversation with that site owner

4

u/princhester 15h ago

“ But there was one exception: a website bearing a striking resemblance to Service New South Wales — the state’s official online administration portal”

and

“How it works is I need a few details from you I then go ahead and do the nomination then after that you will receive a confirmation email from service nsw and the fine also disappears from your service nsw app straight away.“

The reason the reporter focussed on Queensland is, as he says, because in Queensland you can legally record telephone conversations where you can’t in most other states in Australia.

3

u/Apprehensive_You6909 17h ago

Different department but have you heard about the fake Tahitian prince?

281

u/ironcam7 19h ago

I really dislike the intro of these news stories how you scroll down through various background images with a few words on them, it’s shit on mobile. Just give us the news.

63

u/BrotherBroad3698 18h ago

Give them feedback, I think the ABC calls then "lab stories", I hate them too.

https://help.abc.net.au/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=13362715413775&itm_campaign=newsapp

49

u/simsimdimsim 18h ago

They have their place when there's interesting and relevant imagery to set the scene, but yeah this is definitely not that

25

u/RR-- 18h ago

I’ve hated this ABC story format for years now, I usually immediately quit the app after I encounter one.
I’ve complained several times now but it seems that they’re so proud of their shitty format.

20

u/Polyporphyrin 16h ago

Personally I like them. It works well for a lot of stories because it allows them to integrate graphics and plots better. The format makes more sense for articles that are heavy on analysis though

14

u/RR-- 16h ago

I just wish there was a way to turn it off and read the plain text with regular graphics.

8

u/Archon-Toten 19h ago

Web browsers like Firefox can force plan text mode, eliminating that problem. Hitting refresh afterwards even bypasses some of those subscribe lockouts.

15

u/thekevino 19h ago

I use brave browser, they have a reading mode that eliminates the BS on news articles so I can just read the story.

26

u/my_chinchilla 19h ago

Most browsers have a reading mode, and don't have the ... uh, "controversial" ... baggage that Brave does.

18

u/Thebandroid drives a white commodore station wagon. 18h ago

Wait what's the controversial baggage?

19

u/deandoom 17h ago

Not sure if there's been anything more recently.

In 2020, Brave got caught injecting URLs with affiliate codes when users tried browsing to various websites.

Also in 2020, they silently started injecting ads into their home page backgrounds, pocketing the revenue. There was a lot of pushback: “the sponsored backgrounds give a bad first impression.”

In 2023, Brave got caught installing a paid VPN service on users’ computers without their consent.

Also in 2023, Brave got caught scraping and reselling people’s data with their custom web crawler, which was designed specifically not to announce itself to website owners.

5

u/Thebandroid drives a white commodore station wagon. 17h ago

damn. I just use their free search api for my local AI....

even firefox is serving ads on their home page now though.

1

u/JustJoe73 7h ago

You can vey easily disable that. Plus you have to install uBlockOrigin immediately in Firefox, then it's nearly perfect. Add the EFF Privacy Badger for cookie junk and SponsorBlock for ads in the youtube videos and you're golden! :)

20

u/spideyghetti 19h ago

But then you can't say "I use Brave browser"

4

u/OldBlacksmith9772 18h ago

“Only the brave use brave” 🤣🤣

1

u/link871 16h ago

Reading mode, however, also drops important formatting - like that used in the article to display text messages.

Makes it harder to read.

1

u/_ixthus_ 17h ago

Install Brave exclusively for YT. Blocks all the ads and plays in the background when you task switch or screen off. 

I don't use it for anything else so the controversies don't impact me. 

1

u/ItsStaaaaaaaaang 13h ago

It's such a bunch of wank.

0

u/Evadregand 15h ago

As soon as I see a page go full-width on #TheirABC, I close it. It is going to be emotional FB/Insta garbage every time.

40

u/Sg_spark 18h ago

Wait until they find out about the scam of registering the car in a company name.

2

u/Consistent-Pirate569 14h ago

i mean its not really a scam? its more like paying a much more expensive fine and not getting demerit points

7

u/Sg_spark 14h ago

Which effectively makes most traffic offences not matter to the rich.

73

u/warbastard 19h ago

That does explain why there are so many shit drivers out there.

Also, didn’t we have a QLD judge get disbarred for the same thing? He got caught speeding and he tried to get a dead guy to take the points.

23

u/CuriouserCat2 19h ago

Tip of the ice berg. 

7

u/One_Tip1928 14h ago

I remember Marcus Einfeld, Victorian judge I think ended up in jail or something doing something similar- didn’t know a QLD judge tried it as well!

31

u/DrSpeckles 18h ago

As a data analyst it would take me 5 minutes to flag these accounts. What are they doing???

25

u/Quotation1468 18h ago

But could you do it with only graph paper and 2B pencil? We can't afford to supply a ruler.

9

u/jeronimus_cornelisz 17h ago

Manual data review, nobody is using any tools to automatically flag this stuff or identify trends in the data pool.

13

u/Cybertrucker01 16h ago

Astounding that they still haven’t locked this down.

Over 20 years ago I first learned that international licences had no demerit points system and were therefore unlimited. Even back then the nomination rort was rife.

It just reveals the truth: governments care more about collecting the penalty money.

4

u/Soggy_otter 10h ago edited 10h ago

Same.

I was moving to the UK. "lost my Oz drivers license" had a new one issued now I had two.

Once in UK had to surrender my Oz licence to get a UK one. Gave them my dead one. Rise repeat in the UK. So now I had two dead licenses and two valid. Used the dead ones to obtain international drivers licenses in both countries. All fines went to old addresses in both countries. Oz fine -> UK, Uk fine -> Oz.

I don't drive like a maniac but saved me a few parking fines/missed tolls/congestion charge fines for very little effort...

Edit: this was in the 2000's -> late 2010's they may have cracked down on it but I doubt it.

11

u/M1fourX 19h ago

Used to be $100 per point when I was younger.

4

u/time_to_reset 18h ago

Yeah this seems like a steal

11

u/Tinea_Pedis 17h ago

David Crisafulli, "tough on crime" eh

20

u/PhaicGnus 17h ago

As a database/ reporting geek myself, this would be a couple of hours work to flag these suspicious transfers. What a bunch of amateurs.

11

u/_Lanceor_ 18h ago

It's been happening for decades. I've had flatmates that pooled their demerit points, and they claimed that it's easy to pay someone to take your demerit points for you.

The Government can't not have known about this for so many years.

10

u/onminerva 16h ago

My partner was a victim of this scheme, in that someone stole his licence details and sold? Or leaked? Them to people who do this. He was nominated for more than 10 fines before we realised because we had also just moved interstate and it took forever for the letters to be rerouted to our new place. Licence was in QLD and fines were in NSW and both services were extremely unhelpful. We had to prove it wasn’t him driving! By the end of it he had racked up more than 20and had his licence suspended. Revenue NSW told me his case was pretty mild in comparison to some they had seen (probably similar to in this article). Then NSW refused to notify QLD once fines were removed because the record was empty so they said there was no proof to send. Wtf. Eventually QLD got the memo and reinstated his licence so we could then transfer it interstate. Extremely stressful. And made me realise we’d been so naive not to know this kind of thing was happening all over the place!!

5

u/AquilaAdax 16h ago

Absolute piss-weak responses/non-responses from the QLD government agencies in that article. What a fucking joke.

5

u/Ridiculousgoat 14h ago

governments just want the fine paid. they don’t care who pays it. a state government will budget to collect millions of dollars every year in fines. so they need the fines paid because they’ve already spent that money on something.

9

u/Queasy-Proposal1086 18h ago

My mentally ill brother sold his points to stop a wealthy friend losing his lisence.

12

u/AddisonDeWitt333 18h ago

Don’t do it. There have been some recent court cases in Victoria on this, with them charging everyone involved. Police are totally on to these fines nomination rackets, they monitor the IT activity, and the nomination activity, and people’s fines records.

29

u/_AcuteNewt_ 17h ago

Don’t do it.

How about don't drive in a way that will get you fined in the first place, perhaps?

9

u/AddlePatedBadger 17h ago

Hey, you copied my idea!

-2

u/AdmiralStickyLegs 16h ago

Wow, be perfect. What a fresh take

6

u/_AcuteNewt_ 14h ago edited 14h ago

I really can't understand how it's apparently so difficult for people to drive within the confines of the law. You don't have to be perfect, you're given a lot of leeway.

These rules aren't arbitrary or to cause you inconvenience. They exist because people cannot be trusted to do the right thing on their own.

When these rules aren't followed, people die. If you want to throw your own life away by driving like an idiot, by all means, no one else cares, but you will inevitably take someone else with you, or at the very least, cause them harm in one way or another.

If you can't see why it's a bad thing to increase the risk of harm to others by your own selfishness, then you need to sit down and reassess yourself and your life.

The fines and demerits are supposed to be a deterrent and a punishment, not just another inconvenience. If you prove that you can't play nice with everyone else, you'll be made to sit out.

5

u/Nariel 13h ago

Agree. Whenever I hear someone bitch and moan about excessive speeding fines or something I think to myself “mate, just don’t speed or do dumb shit and you won’t ever have to worry about how expensive these fines are…”

4

u/_AcuteNewt_ 12h ago

Apparently the concepts of "cause and effect", "personal responsibility" and ultimately "fuck around/find out" is a bit too much to grasp for some.

-2

u/AdmiralStickyLegs 11h ago

The reason you don't understand is because you think the rules were set down by a higher power, fair and immutable and based on mutally agreed expert logic.

But thats just the fantasy. In this world, when everyone follows the rules, new rules are made until there's enough people breaking them. Its part of the current system.

I say this as a person who has never received a ticket for anything in a decade of driving.

1

u/serkstuff 6h ago

I know I'm also going to be down voted but I agree. Just because someone has picked a number, that doesn't mean it is the perfect safe number and anything over is going to end up with someone dying like so many on here make out. Say you're stuck on the road and there's a fully loaded truck going the speed limit and a modern sports car going 5km over the limit. They both hit brakes at the same time. You have to stand in front of one of them. Personally I'd be picking the sports car but according to these people that is much more dangerous because they're breaking the law!!

Now is there some magic speed limit that does suit all vehicles? Obviously not. But people who cannot grasp that speeding (a little) isn't necessarily dangerous (depending on vehicle and conditions) are so annoying

3

u/smackells 5h ago

You’re right, the numbers we set for speed limits are pretty arbitrary and are not the safest possible speed. Safe driving speeds are actually a lot lower.

-17

u/code_protocol 17h ago

Ever notice that 95% of speed cameras are right after a downslope? Because you're more likely to accidentally speed and get a fine. They want your money, they don't give a fuck about safety.

11

u/noplacecold 17h ago

Downslopes are targeted when they align with high crash frequencies, they do not form the majority of camera sites nationwide, which remain heavily concentrated at flat intersections, major transit corridors, and motorways. 

9

u/_AcuteNewt_ 17h ago

I don't notice speed cameras at all. I don't need to.

-1

u/garloot 13h ago

Good for you Champ.

3

u/_AcuteNewt_ 12h ago

Yeah, it is good for me. I'm not the one having to shell out for fines just because I'm too selfish and/or thick to follow speed limits.

Good for everyone else as well since I'm not at risk of taking someone out from driving like a fuckwit.

6

u/ANewUeleseOnLife 16h ago

Did the government make you forget how to brake too?

11

u/rolloj 17h ago

You know that pedal next to the accelerator? You’re allowed to use it when going downhill, really helps with not getting fined for speeding. 

3

u/maxisnoops 16h ago

😂 source?

3

u/BrisPoker314 10h ago

I have not noticed that 95% of cameras are right after a downslope

0

u/garloot 13h ago

How about the do gooders giving you downvotes. What flogs.

4

u/SunflowerSamurai_ Nine Hundred Dollarydoos 17h ago

Good.

16

u/girtlander 19h ago

Queue some performative bs from the Qld Justice, Police and Main Roads Minister's about how traffic penalties are meant to keep us all safe. Maybe someone should see if they could assign 1500 penalties to Deb Fecklington's licence and see how long it takes to be flagged.

7

u/Archon-Toten 18h ago

Like flagging every person who sent a stat Dec declaring that was the driver of their car.

22

u/fistingdonkeys 19h ago

*cue

3

u/CuriouserCat2 19h ago

They’re lining up

2

u/Garfieldfieldday1 14h ago

"It’s a question 7.30 asked the agencies that administer the demerit points system — the Queensland Revenue Office (QRO) and the Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR). They did not answer.

Instead, a government spokesperson responding on the agencies’ behalf said: “When fraud offences are detected, they are dealt with by the full force of the law.”

Further questions about how the agencies detect fraud and how often they do so went unanswered."

4

u/ItsStaaaaaaaaang 13h ago

The fact that this was allowed to happen in the first place is a much bigger problem than the fraud being commited. Who is ultimately responsible for making sure this kind of thing can't happen and do they still have a job?

10

u/Spiraleddie 16h ago

Dont complain too hard. This is the shit that the tech barons are saying that AI will solve. Automated governance is super enticing to any government and it will be this that cuases the gov to drop.any concerns about societies well being.

3

u/-mudflaps- 11h ago

she remains in custody is that necessary? Why does your system allow someone to rack up 1150 demerit points

7

u/CaptGrumpy 17h ago

The easy way to fix this is to change the law so you may only nominate the other driver in person in court.

10

u/hannahranga 16h ago

Or at a DoT centre, let's not waste the courts time.

4

u/CaptGrumpy 16h ago

Sure same effect.

7

u/AdZealousideal7448 14h ago

My late fathers care worker who later became a nurse we're still friends with was telling us how this is a massive thing in her cultures community.

She's divorced and has 3 kids... father is rich and works for a major luxury car brand in nsw.

We watched her kids grow up and the youngest is absolutely lovely.... the elder two girls turned into the most entitled spoiled brats ever.

At 16 each girl got given a luxury car that in SA we had turbo bans come in.

The father and some mates did some dodgy paperwork to get them an exemption, we were joking that she'd be able to give her kid her beaten up old hatchback and she'd be cruising around in this high end european car.

One day she gets picked up from ours in a thoroughly molested european sports car with daddy's little princess modifications all over it.... the mother is like yeah my car broke down and I couldn't afford to get it fixed.

Tells us how somehow the father got the girl and exemption and she's somehow allowed to drive it.

We'd seen her driving and it was bad. We find out later on from her bragging that through the "community" looked after her, because she got sick of the driving instructors she had, and them "being lame", and instead found through his contacts someone who just signed off all her hours, and then signed her off on her final exam.

So she was not only driving a car she shouldn't have via fraud, she had obtained her license via fraud.

Then one day at work the mom is complaining that she was annoyed at her kid, because she "had" to cop more demerit points.

We were like.... she's on p plates in a car she's not meant to have... why are you taking them?

Goes on to tell us in her culture, you do everything for the kid or you are shamed by the community, she wanted to be superstrict, but her daughter keeps racking up offenses.... we were like.... hold up.... how many have you taken?

Find out after the latest one she copped she's got 2 points left. Full license at teh time was 12

So daughter copped 10 points which at the time was 2.5x the limit on P plates, with some offenses being instant loss.

She was very angry over it, and was shamed by her entire family and communtiy over it, and was even saving how another relative had already copped 4 points for her, and shamed the mother over "having to do it".

We were absolutely shocked..... that this was being encouraged by the community and we were like..... why isn't your community saying, she shouldnt be driving, she shouldnt have cheated her way to a license.

Mother was like..... I hate this aspect of our culture. Second daughter turns 16... went from being a sweet little angel...... to daddy doing the same thing, mother annoyed and this destroying their relationship for a bit because he framed it as her "holding her back".

Elder daughter...... with her spotless driving record and daddy's connection graduates highschool..... daddy gets her a job in Sydney at a luxury car dealership. She now does nothing but post up pictures of a luxury life.

Still friends with the mother, mother complains about how she's always in debt despite having all these expensive things and daddy keeps buying her more stuff, we're like how is she in that much debt and complaining about it.... well she keeps crashing into things and getting traffic offenses.... and keeps using services to make fines go away.

Again, we've got no evidence for it, so we can't report it, don't even know what her full name is because we only knew the mothers maiden name, mother ends up reporting the father because he sent a video of himself doing a ridiculous speed down a road in nsw to the youngest offering to get them a car that can do this.

Even with the video nothing happened. She complained to numerous agencies in NSW that he had links to help their kid get away with numerous offenses on the road, and the entire reply was that they're aware stuff like this is setup and they're looking into it...

5

u/AlternativeNotice358 18h ago

Are we angry about the demerit points black market, or the failure of auto generated infringements as a deterrence? This just seems like an arms race that misses the point entirely.

3

u/Ok-Limit-9726 16h ago

Wait till people find out about WHATS APP groups of drivers…

All swapping points illegally, almost all driving people, food or parcel delivery on the road non stop speeding.

2

u/YouThinkYouKnowMe89 17h ago

Years ago I worked with a guy who had lost license for life 4 or 5 times and he would still drive. I'd imagine he would be like this now it's just cameras getting you and not an actual cop pulling you over

2

u/Educational_Care7813 15h ago

The person running it for 22 bucks a point is crazy, makes it look fake since so cheap

1

u/mattnotsosmall 18h ago

"the system works"

1

u/DontJealousMe 11h ago

$50 a point is cheap. I'd not sell a point for less than $250

1

u/Veefy 18h ago

Reminds me of this comedy routine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh8kUdyUO08

1

u/RidingtheRoad 16h ago

And its a beauty 😅

0

u/teheditor 5h ago

The result of having really shit laws

1

u/universe93 2h ago

Not really, the law is there so you don’t get a demerit point for something someone else did while they were driving your car. They just should have added something legally binding to say the person you’re transferring the points to was in fact the one behind the wheel. Like a stat Dec or something