A man says he believes his motorcycle’s licence plate was partly cut off on Thursday in Halifax in order to steal the revalidation sticker on the plate.
“The motivation was clearly the sticker, that they just didn’t want to renew their plates and put the sticker on it,” Dillon Sambasivam said on Friday.
He said he made the discovery at the downtown parking garage his motorcycle was in at about 5:30 p.m.
A photo Sambasivam provided to Global News showed a rectangular section from his prior licence plate missing and the plate’s numbers almost completely untouched.
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“I guess somebody had taken some metal shears and physically cut the sticker off,” he said.
He reported the alleged theft to police, then visited an Access Nova Scotia office, Sambasivam said.
“Once they had stopped laughing at me, they very kindly replaced it for about $6,” he added.
Halifax Regional Police weren’t able to immediately provide statistics on these specific kinds of thefts, but Const. John MacLeod said police have received reports of thefts of licence plate stickers before.
Each sticker contains a unique set of numbers associated with the appropriate people. Regardless of the sticker on a plate, running the plate’s numbers and letters through a system will show if it’s expired, MacLeod said.
Marla MacInnis, a spokesperson for Service Nova Scotia, which Access Nova Scotia is a part of, said in an email that the replacement cost for a non-personalized plate is $5.80, and a replacement sticker costs $2.30.
In the past 12 months, the number of replacement plates has totalled 21,475.
Of those, 17,265 were for defective plates, 3,825 were for lost plates, and 385 for stolen plates, MacInnis said.
Sambasivam said although he was inconvenienced by having to wait at the Access Nova Scotia office for about 90 minutes to get a new licence plate and a new sticker, he appreciates the humour of the situation.
“I definitely thought this was quite amusing. This is something you would see on ‘Trailer Park Boys,’ and maybe not really in real life. Although, given it was filmed here, you never know,” he said with a chuckle.
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