I used to live in a bad place, people would steal anything and everything. I had to lock up everything, hide everything of value. Yes I cut up the registration sticker into 50 pieces to prevent theft. I have seen them stolen before.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2026
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Nope, never. That said, I don't live in a place that uses tiny brightly coloured stickers on the outside of the vehicle to prove it's taxed, so that might be a factor.
I assume even where these are used, the police could just check a database to see if the vehicle is taxed.
You forget cops are assholes.
They also know if you're vehicle is insured, but they still hassle you about having your physical insurance card.
What are vehicle tabs?
You may be more familiar with a tax disc, or registration sticker or a tag. The little foil sticker you put in your car to show you've paid your taxes in connection to your car.
We got rid of those in Ontario. Now no one drives with insurance or licences and hit and runs are common. Actual insured drivers have to pay more for premiums.
Ah, I know what you mean, we haven't had those for 15 years here in Sweden...
We have similar tabs in Germany to indicate that the vehicle registration plate is valid, the car is insured and the tax is payed. However, they are manufactured in a way that makes it impossible to remove them in one piece.
If you don't pay you vehicle tax or, even worse, don't pay your insurance, some official will search for your car and scrape the tabs off.
In Sweden, you don't need the tab to guarantee that the plate is valid, as the plates come directly from Trafikverket and have watermarks all over. However, for the other two reasons, tax and insurance, the system in Sweden relies basically on hopes and prayers. Even a former professor at my department at a Swedish university drove his car without insurance.
Uhm... what are "vehicle tabs" ?
EDIT: Oh, tags. I guess it's the anual sticker proving that your registration is up to date. Don't have those here anymore. My previous car had the 2012 stickers still when I sold it last year.
I think they might mean the registration tags. But I've never heard of those being stolen or that you should score them to prevent theft.
My dad taught me to score them. I find it strange, scoring them prevents the supposed thief from being able to get the tag off cleanly, so they wouldn't want to apply it to their car because it'd look sketchy?
Unlike your totally normal and not at all now damaged and sketchy looking tags?
The ones we've gotten have always come pre cut, if you want to remove one without tearing uses a flat razor, you can even dig into the paint on the license plate, the company that makes them probably makes extra to do this step and is probably the only reason it's still done.
I guess it would be theoretically possible with a razor blade or something. I remember the ones here in Norway being a PITA to take off, so it was usually easiest to place the new one over the old one.
Same in the US. My stack is nearly a mm thick. I imagin someone could steal them... but it would be faster to unscrew the whole plate and take it home to work on it
Or just cut off the corner with a pair of these bad boys
(Seriously, don't steal people's tags, that's shitty and stupid)
Only 1 mm? That's like two years
TIL i have been blessed with pre-cut tabs my whole life. Ontario and BC had fancy stickers to make them hard to steal, I never understood why. Eventually we got rid of them.
Never heard of it either, in the UK we used to have something called a 'tax disc' that was displayed in the window of a car but you'd have to break in to get that.
I've never had them stolen myself.
In PA, when they used to still use them, they had little wedge shapes cut into them when you got them, so once you put them on, they couldn't be removed intact.
Because they couldn't be removed, you'd see tons of cars with the corner of the license plate cut off.
Pennsylvania finally stopped using the registration stickers a few years ago.
No point to the registration stickers anymore anyway. The license plate scanners already know everything about you.
Lmao that's hilarious
Well first I'm hearing of this advice to score them. I have had someone attempt to steal them corner peeled up cleanly but didn't manage to get it all the way off...
One time, I had my expired plates stolen off a car I owned. The plates expired many years ago, the car died and sat quite a few years before I was able to get rid of it. What is someone doing with expired plates? The car next to it had valid plates. How dumb are people???
What is someone doing with expired plates?
Decorate the inside of their barn with them!
Fix a rust hole in a shitburger car. Though street signs work better.
Tell the kids long stories all about the cool (or not) car they used to be on!
What is someone doing with expired plates?
Stick em on a crime car. That way, if someone writes down the Tag, any investigation will go nowhere since they are expired.
Or to the previous owner, since that information doesn't just disappear after expiring.
When you do crime you need a different plate. Expired is dumb but at least its not registered to the criminal.
Add new fake stickers pretty easily. Details like that are often overlooked by cops unless they have a real reason to look further. Can get pretty far without plates, so just a cursory glance will pass.
Haha my Oma did this one year, as the sticker came off almost immediately, and the registry wouldn’t replace it for her
Real talk: the cops only look at the stickers if they want an excuse to pull you over.
For every thing else they run your plates- and usually before they even do that much. If your registration is current, then, they may just be letting you know they got ripped off, or checking if your drunk or just incredibly bored.
That said… if someone goes to the trouble of peeling off a sticker, it’s not going to do all that much good, and probably catch them more charges than just being unregistered.
(More likely they’d steal the entire plates. Particularly one from a similar car to yours- color, make, model, year, etc.)
I got pulled over by a cop for “expired tabs” because I was out of state and my husband had not put them on my car while I was gone and I didn’t realize. The cop walks up loudly states YOURE BEING RECORDED, points to his camera and tells me my tags are expired and he wanted my info. I had my license but not insurance on me so I had to call my spouse who’s like “can’t the cop just look it up?” The cop came up as my husband was talking over my car speakers and heard a man and was immediately deflated, hung his head, said he didn’t care and walked away like wtf??
Another poster mentioned that PA stopped requiring them a few years back (I think it was more than a few), but shortly after they stopped requiring them a NY cop pulled me over and said that was the reason. I thought that was pretty unlikely since NY cops wouldn't waste their time on minor out of state bureaucratic issues. When I told him that they weren't required he seemed skeptical but went back to his car. After a while he came back a said I could go.
Yup. The only reason places still use them is to give yet another pretext for stopping people.
Same, for example, the little dinky plate lamp being out, or failing to signal for the proper distance (a few hundred feet, usually.)
Cops don’t care if your car’s registration is up to date. They use it as an excuse to get to more juicy charges.
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Apparently tabs are tags.
Alberta got rid of them eight years ago or so, but before that they were extremely one-use items. Super-fragile with an incredibly strong glue. You could NOT have remove them with a razor blade and the precision of a master jeweller.
Besides, annual registration is what - 80 bucks? Not worth it.
See, that's exactly where my confusion comes from too! The adhesive on those things are incredible. I'm afraid to fuck up when I put them on, because there's no fixing it
I had my plates stolen several years ago, if that counts!
I think it’s largely dependant on location. I live in the northeast US and never heard of this before my cousin moved to California and has his registration sticker stolen the day after he got Cali plates.
I have.
Interesting. When did it happen?
Ummm. The summer of 1994? I went into a head shop to chat and buy rolling papers. When I came out, someone had used tin-snips to remove the entire corner of the plate.
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Family member had it happen. It's easy to take them off if there are 5 years of stickers on top of each other. But, just exacto knife the tag a lil and it's too much trouble to lift off.
My dad did once. Stolen off his pickup while on a work parking lot
If you means “tags” as in “license plates”, then yes. Not only have I had my own license plate plates stolen on more than one occasion, but I have known both brothers and friends who have had license plates stolen in five different states over the last 30 years.
Why do you ask?
I used to do this but now my state has virtual registration so they don’t send us free stickers in the mail.
I have never heard this in my life. It never even occured to me someone might steal them!
No because this is a double solved issue in Australia. Firstly the sticker was single application from the inside of the car. If you tried to remove it parts of the info would be left behind in the window which alsoade it a pain to replace them every year. Also if you have broken into the car may as well drive off with it.
Secondly, we don't have them anymore cop cars have plate readers and a hook into the department of transportation so they can look up if the rego has been paid.
I've only ever heard the advice to perforate the vehicle registration sticker from one person, but supposing that it has become normalized advice, I have to imagine that it's due to the low-effort, not necessarily the extraordinary security that it provides.
In a related situation, I'm often confused at folks who don't lock their cars when going to the shops, since it's adding an extra barrier for an opportunistic thief to cross. There's no question that a motivated thief could just take a brick to the window, but it is indeed low effort to lock the car and if that's enough to dissuade one theft of the car's coin tray, then that's good enough.
It is, after all, quite hard to prove a negative so we can't really know how much theft it deters. But it is very clear that a perforated registration sticker destroys any value to anyone who would even contemplate stealing it. But as you say, if there were zero such people to begin with, then it can't really be reduced further.
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