If you looked up the license plate of Beda Koorey, a 76-year-old Long Island resident, you’d think that she is both the most well-traveled and worst driver in the country. After all, according to CBS News, she has thousands of dollars worth of traffic tickets that originate from just about everywhere in the United States.
The problem: Koorey hasn’t driven in four years. She doesn’t even own a car. At that license plate of hers that keeps getting tagged with citations? She turned those in years ago. So what gives?
Back when Koorey was on the road, she had a custom license plate that paid tribute to her favorite show, Star Trek. She secured the plate number NCC-1701, the registry identifier for the Starship Enterprise in the original Star Trek television series.
To get that ID on a Constitution-class starship, you have to go through the United Federation of Planets. To get it on a car in New York like Koorey did, you have to pay $31.25 per year to renew the custom plates. But for just $15 on Amazon, you can get yourself novelty plates that bear the NCC-1701 identifier and, rather unfortunately, will contribute to the ongoing terrorization of this poor retiree.
Here’s what appears to be happening: People buy these novelty plates, in most cases because they think it’s a fun reference, and drive around with them on their vehicle. When they commit some sort of traffic infraction, the plates get pinged and ultimately lead back to Koorey, who owned the actual plates registered with NCC-1701. So when the tickets get sent out, they end up going to her address.
Koorey has been fined for just about everything imaginable. She’s gotten tickets for speeding, parking infractions, running red lights. She regularly gets E-ZPass toll fees when the license plate scanners spot the NCC-1701 plates. “I got a phone call from Ohio, a police chief looking for plates because they were involved in a robbery,” she told CBS.
At this point, Koorey has been hit with tens of thousands of dollars of fines — none of which actually belong to her, as she does not drive. But she’s still in theory on the hook for these tickets, which just keep ending up in her mailbox. The retiree spends more time than she should have to responding to various summons and trying to clear up the confusion.
For their part, the New York Department of Motor Vehicles seems unable to fix the issue. The agency told CBS that there is nothing in the state’s system that connects Koorey to the plates, which she gave up years ago. The problem, it seems, stems from other states. The DMVs for each respective state are on the hook for making sure they are operating with the most recent data from other states. The fact that Koorey is still getting fined suggests that many states are working with databases that are at least four years out of date.
Part of the issue may be that DMVs are woefully behind the times when it comes to information sharing. Wisconsin became the first state in the nation to make non-commercial driver information available electronically to other states, and that only happened in 2022.
Whatever the cause, here’s a simple request: leave Beda Koorey alone, already. Finding peace from the DMV should not have to be the final frontier for her.
