Driving with excessive speed, skipping a traffic light or parking in a double row can lead to not only economic sanctions but also the loss of one of the 15 points that a driver has at most. Would you be willing to buy them from a stranger so as not to lose them? These two editors have done it.
What a feeling to open the mailbox and find an envelope in your name with the stamp of the General Directorate of Traffic. You pray that it is not very serious and you curse that radar that you did not see: fine for speeding, 500 euros and six points. This does not mean that you have been identified as an offending driver, the letter comes to you because you are the owner of the sanctioned vehicle. Now you have two options. The first (and legal), assume your fault and identify yourself as the offending driver, for which you will have to pay the fine. And the second (based on the Spanish picaresque), identify another person as the driver, be it a family member who does not take the car or someone who offers to be one through an economic exchange.
We wanted to check if it is true that there is this type of illegal sale of driving license points on the Internet. Simply typing in the search engine “I sell driving license points” hundreds of ads appear for people who offer themselves to this exchange for a generous amount of money.
You just need to call or write them an email to start the transaction. The first to answer was Miguel Ángel MA, a 43-year-old man living in Madrid, who had already done this operation on other occasions. He said that these sales are very simple. “It’s very easy. What you have received is a ticket notice that asks you to identify the driver responsible for the offence. They send it to you because you are the owner of the vehicle that has committed the offence, but they do not really know who is driving. If you want to identify me, no problem,” he explains in an audio of more than seven minutes on WhatsApp.
In addition, Miguel Ángel counts the three forms of identification of the driver: by post, through the web or by fax. He prefers that if we do the operation with his data (name, address and DNI or driver’s license) we send them by fax since a receipt is issued that guarantees that we have sent the documentation within the indicated period. “Through the Post Office nothing has to happen but you know that from time to time a letter is miraculously lost. The problem is that if your identification does not arrive, the administration, so to speak, gets angry and what you already had to pay , an extra fine is added, which used to be 900 euros and now they have risen to 1,100 – 1,200 euros for not communicating on time,” he says. Thus, our supposed fine would be canceled and a fine would be issued in the name of Miguel Ángel.
Screenshot taken from the Mil Announcements website on 12/11/2017.
Once the procedure has been explained, he asks the amount that we would be willing to pay him. We offer him 400 euros with a fine included (that is, our supposed fine of 500 euros if we paid it before time would remain at 250 euros, he would earn the rest). He tells us that it is not much and raises the figure to 500 euros (therefore, the point would come out to about 42 euros). He has no problem sending us his documentation before making the payment, so we accept the deal to check if his data is real. He sends a photo of his driver’s license on both sides, his postal address and an account number so that we can make the deposit after sending the fax.
More cases
Michelangelo’s lack of care is unusual. There are many who do not respond to email or when calling them the number no longer exists. If you manage to locate one, such as Carlos or Ángel, they will immediately ask you to call them by WhatsApp on the phone. Carlos had put the ad on the Internet “a thousand years” ago. “It’s very easy: we meet, you bring the fine, it’s put in my name and I’ll take care of paying it. Oh, and you bring the money, of course,” he says in a telephone conversation. It is not the first time that Carlos has made a transaction like this: “I did it a long time ago with a boy who took away many points at a traffic light, he put my name and that’s it. Absolutely nothing happened,” he explains while defining himself as a person legal, “another thing is that we are out of money, period”. In this case, he asks us for 100 euros per point. We tell him that, in order to accept the deal, he should send us a photo of his passport just like Miguel Ángel did, but he refuses: “I shouldn’t, I don’t know if you’re asking me for something weird. I can’t send you my data without knowing who you are. I’m going to show them to you when I see you and you’re going to copy them. This is done very often”.
Something very similar happened with Ángel who, unlike Carlos, does not have a profile picture on WhatsApp. None of them agreed to reveal their last names or send us their documentation by phone, they preferred to meet in person. “If you want, we can stay and talk about it in person. I’ll sell you a pen. I don’t sell points. I’ll leave it to you at 150 euros each,” he says in a phone call. Like Carlos and Miguel Ángel, he confesses that he has already done this type of operation other times and nothing has ever happened: “No, and I hope it doesn’t happen with you, that you’re not a police officer. You have to say that I was driving, we agreed and you bring me the money for the fine or you pay it first”.
The bic pen business
As we have seen, the points cost from 42 to 150 euros, although the most common is to see advertisements in which the famous bic pen is sold for 100 euros, but to what extent is this phrase legal? This type of publication supposes a fraud of law and an administrative infraction that could carry heavy sanctions for the eventual buyer, in addition to the consequent civil and even criminal liability for the seller according to Víctor Salgado Seguín, managing partner of Pintos y Salgado Abogados y expert in Law of New Technologies. On the other hand, with regard to web pages such as Mil Ads, Foro Fines, and Avisoneon, where these ads are published, the lawyer points out that, based on Article 16, they are not responsible for these publications, except in those cases in which those who demonstrate effective knowledge on their part and refuse to remove the advertisements from the web.
For example, Forum Fines warns in the conditions of its website that it is a forum for private messages. “We do not interfere, participate or favor that,” emphasizes Alberto Lorca, administrator of forummultas.es. “There are people who over time have asked me to delete their data from the web. Above all, they were people who sold points five or six years ago and now want to delete their contact,” he adds. During the interview, he also confessed that the police had never contacted them about this type of message, although he pointed out that they would obviously be open to collaborating. “I understand that the fact of offering is not a crime as such, the crime is to do it,” he says. In addition, he believes that the people who risk committing these crimes have an economic need: “It is still a reason for subsistence. There are people who are having a very bad time.”
Screenshot taken from the Fines Forum website on 12/11/2017.
The work of the National Police or the Civil Guard to identify these crimes is not easy. According to Salgado, the radar images should be checked to find the person who was driving, investigate the situation of the affected people, the relationship between the owner of the vehicle and the falsely identified driver, as well as request user data from the website where publish the advertisements, identify the IP number of the offering and/or infringing equipment and analyze the files, among other activities. “Fortunately, the police have groups and brigades specialized in the prosecution of this type of activity on the Internet, as well as in computer forensics, although they need to be better endowed with both material and personnel resources,” says Salgado.
Family members, are they also criminals?
Another cheaper but equally illegal alternative is to identify a family member as the driver of the offending vehicle. “This also supposes an infraction with the same responsibility for the beneficiary although less for the relative, as there is no profit in the transaction,” says Salgado. The beneficiary could face fines of up to double or triple the original sanction, eliminating the right to the 50% bonus.
Despite these sanctions, there are those who risk committing these crimes. Laura – who did not want us to give her her real name – received two fines for speeding on the M-40, which meant the loss of 4 and 6 points respectively. The maximum speed on this Madrid road is 100 km/h, so the loss of these points indicates that Laura was driving at 151-160 km/h on the first occasion and 161-171 km/h on the second. “The fines were with the SEAT Ibiza that is in my mother’s name, so in one I put my father as driver and in another my mother. Thus, I avoided losing 10 points,” she details.
Laura’s case is not isolated. Tamara and Alejandro (again, fictitious names) also did the same: they identified their parents as drivers of the infraction. “We are in the country of the European Union with the largest number of offending grandmothers,” jokes Mario Arnaldo, president of Associated European Motorists (AEA). “Our system imposes the obligation to identify the driver, if he does not identify himself, the sanction is triple. What is necessary is more police presence on the roads to identify the offender at the moment, if the system is not distorted and loses the exemplary meaning”. For Arnaldo, the problem lies in the law: “We went from being the most active defenders of the implementation of the in Spain, which followed the French model, to detractors. They deceived us.”
The card by points law entered into force on July 1, 2006, however, according to Arnaldo, it had many shortcomings that have been ‘patched’ over time. For example, this year, driving without points has been introduced into the Penal Code as a crime, previously considered simply an administrative sanction. In addition, the president of the AEA regrets that “propaganda” has worked but points out that the decrease in mortality is explained by other factors: “There has been an improvement in roads, especially secondary roads and in the car fleet, in active safety and passive”. From the association they ask for certain corrections such as monitoring that the municipalities comply with the laws: “There are mayors who do not apply them in the electoral campaign,” he warns, or that foreign drivers also suffer the loss of points on their country’s license, something that the DGT already…