Back in 2008, a California man bought a truck but after getting a mysterious toll violation from a county 400+ miles away, he realized that the Dept. of Motor Vehicles had goofed and the license plate listed on his registration did not match the plate on his vehicle. The DMV sent him new plates but has done nothing to help him fight the thousands of dollars in toll road violations being racked up by some other driver.

Whoever got the plates he was supposed to receive back in 2008 has somehow managed to tally up $17,000 in violations with two toll road authorities in Orange County, CA, which is a 6-7 hour drive from where the truck owner actually resides in Suisun City, CA.

“Surprise, shock, I don’t live in Southern California,” he tells CBS Sacramento’s Kurtis Ming.

The man says he’s spent the last four years trying to get the DMV to tell the toll road folks that he’s not the driver they’re looking for. He says that while the offending vehicle is the same make and model as his truck the two vehicles are completely different colors.

“You go to DMV, you raise this red flag with them, you’d think they’d fix it right away,” he tells Ming. “Uh uh, year after year after year, ‘we can’t do anything about it.'”

He eventually did receive a letter from the DMV stating that the plates associated with these tickets did not belong to him. And with the help of Ming’s team, he was able to get that letter into the hands of the toll authorities who agreed to remove the charges.

Let’s hope that includes the violations that had already been passed off to third-party collections agencies.

A rep for the DMV would only explain the delay in getting this error fixed by saying that “sometimes mistakes happen due to human error. This customer’s issue has been resolved and the DMV apologizes for any inconvenience.”

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