The chapter follows the speaker's journey of uncovering a black market for fraudulent temporary car tags issued by used car dealerships in New Jersey. Through months of investigative reporting and interviews, they reveal the lack of regulation and oversight that allowed this scam to flourish in states like Georgia and New Jersey. The chapter also discusses the recent efforts in New Jersey to address the issue with a new law reforming the temporary tag system.
Jesse Coburn is an investigative reporter at Streetsblog. He won the Polk Award for Local Reporting for "Ghost Tags," his series on the black market for temporary license plates.
“You can imagine this having never become a problem, because it’s so weird. What a weird scam. I’m going to print and sell tens of thousands of paper license plates. But someone figured it out. And then a lot more people followed. It just exploded.”
This is the second in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism.
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