Texas Bans Paper License Plates Following NBC5 Investigation into “Ghost Cars”

Thanks to the team’s persistent reporting, the state will prohibit paper license plates that are being used to create untraceable vehicles linked to serious crimes.

NBC5 Investigates receives a duPont Award at the 2023 ceremony in New York

NBC5 Dallas Ft.Worth won a 2023 duPont Award for exposing a brazen black market trade of fraudulent paper license plates, and their story has just yielded big results. Through a series of more than 40 reports, investigative reporters Scott Friedman and Eva Parks showed how the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles had been infiltrated by wily criminals who printed and sold millions of dollars worth of these temp tags to create “ghost cars”—untraceable vehicles used in serious crimes including drive-by shootings, cross-border drug trafficking and human smuggling. 

Now, after an almost two-year investigation, Texas governor Greg Abbott has closed the loophole by replacing the paper tags with metal license plates. The bill was introduced in November after Grand Prairie police officer Brandon Tsai was killed in a crash while trying to stop one such “ghost car.” Though it will take two years to implement the law, the bipartisan coalition of lawmakers who sponsored it view the delay as a fair compromise to ease the transition to the new license plate system. 

The bill’s author credited NBC5’s investigation. “I didn't know how big a problem this was, truly, until your reporting,” Senator Craig Goldman told the journalists at NBC5. Now, he says, car dealers will have metal plates on hand at all times, and he’s confident this will curb the counterfeit trade that is making Texas roads unsafe. “When you leave the lot, you will have metal plates on your car that are yours,” the senator continued. 

“When we started reporting on this we never imagined the state would eliminate paper tags,” Scott Friedman told the duPont Awards. At first, he recounted,Texas took baby steps towards a fix, like implementing tougher background checks to prevent criminals from getting car dealer licenses to print tags with real, state-issued numbers. But that void was filled by counterfeiters who began printing entirely fake tags. The NBC5 team stayed on the state’s case until they got results. “It was fascinating to watch what the decision makers did with the information once we reported it,” Friedman said.

When asked what advice they’d pass on to our young journalists at Columbia Journalism School, Eva Parks said it was all about getting their hands on the relevant records and then pushing the investigation further with each finding. “The backbone of our team starts with the data,” she said. “The state’s own records were the roadmap for our reporting. Seeing the sheer volume of tags broken down by dealership took our reporting to the next level. From there we filed additional records requests to get dealership applications to see exactly who was behind the fraud.”