In recent years, the police have identified hundreds of companies and individuals that regularly change the registered owners of cars in their names so that their users can escape traffic administrative fines, the traffic blog Traffix wrote in early April, citing an internal police information. The topic has been on the agenda at the National Police Headquarters for years, as the traffic police monitors in which cases the owners of the cars did not respond to the decisions sent after the non-stop inspection.
The most common of these is when a portable or fixed speed measuring device records speeding, and then automatically transmits the images and data necessary for proof to the center, where decisions with the amount of the fine are prepared on an assembly line. Previously, the minimum fine for speeding was 30,000 forints, and for the most serious cases 300,000 forints, but recently this has increased to 39,000 and a maximum of 390,000 forints.
Since there are few police officers in Hungary, in the majority of speeding cases, drivers who break the rules are not stopped on the spot, but later it is difficult to prove who was behind the wheel. In such cases, an administrative procedure is initiated based on the principle of strict liability, so the fine must be paid by the owner of the car, unless he names the perpetrator of the violation or indicates that the car was stolen or sold before the violation was committed. The statutory deadlines give a lot of room for fraud.
Automated decisions on violations treated as administrative matters are sent by the police within eight days to the owner of the car, who receives them immediately only if he has a Customer Portal registration and previously requested electronic administration. Otherwise, the post office will deliver the registered letter from the police, but if the addressee does not accept it, then additional weeks may pass before the presumption of delivery is established in the event of delivery attempts or their failure.
The person concerned then has 30 days to appeal or pay the penalty. If, on the other hand, he does not react at all, then the police notifies the government office several days later to remove the car with which the violation was committed from the traffic. The problem comes to a head when the government office indicates that the car has already changed hands, because no sanction can be applied to the new owner, i.e. the car used to commit the violation cannot be taken out of circulation.
An important element of the method is that the car trading companies can sell and buy vehicles among themselves free of charge, but according to Traffix, they ask interested parties for a few thousand forints, and the businesses based on fraud often run in the name of homeless people, who cannot be found by the authorities with any official letter. , and when the company accumulates too many debts of this type, it is simply closed. During the fake sale of cars kept under the radar, a second sales contract without a date is drawn up, with which the seller can take it back at any time, and can use it with a loan contract in the interim period.
According to the previous answers of the police, the number of cases in which the withdrawal of the vehicles used for violating the rules was initiated within eight days after the expiry of the payment deadline has increased in recent years. The police chose this solution in nearly 49,000 cases in 2020, roughly 60,000 in 2021, and 67,000 in 2022. The growing trend was presumably also influenced by the curfew and significant drop in traffic introduced during the coronavirus epidemic. The total amount of administrative fines imposed due to traffic violations in an average year is around HUF 20 billion, but roughly a fifth of these were not paid in previous years.
In recent years, the police have noticed that companies and private individuals who collect fines change the right to operate the vehicle or vehicle fleet they operate every 2-3 months on average. The size of the problem is clearly indicated by the fact that, according to the answer, proceedings were initiated against the owners of the phantomed cars in a total of more than 128,000 cases due to the violations listed in the twenty-first paragraph of the Road Traffic Act, including the most common speeding, and since these were not paid, the police contacted the tax authority applied for the collection of the fine.
Based on the legislation, possible cases include not only speeding, but also illegal crossing of a railway crossing and driving through a red light. In addition, the use of the highway’s stop lane, as well as the violation of the rule regarding the prohibition of entry and the mandatory direction of travel, as well as driving without a permit in nature conservation areas, the cases can therefore range widely. Since we are talking about unidentifiable motorists, it is assumed that there may be perpetrators of car transcription fraud among those who drive away from gas stations without paying, or those who ignore the payment of the road usage fee.
According to Miklós Herpy, a traffic lawyer, there can be no more than a few hundred people behind such cases, or companies that were originally founded not for business, but for fraud. Although the authorities are not in an easy position when trying to find them, it is not impossible. According to the lawyer, the number of abuses of this type would be significantly reduced if the legislation on car registration were changed, and the prerequisites for a fee-free registration were that there was no pending administrative procedure or an irregular administrative fine related to the car.
According to the police, between 2020 and the end of 2022, the number of open claims for administrative fines based on the principle of objective responsibility exceeded HUF 10 billion, but part of this was due to the fact that offenders requested payment in installments or deferred payment. At the same time, also in this period, a further 2.5 billion forints in fines for failure to pay road tolls were collected among the accounts receivable, and another nearly 1.7 billion forints were not paid by motorists for violations that did not fall within the scope of objective responsibility.
The traffic police initiated criminal proceedings in these cases due to suspicion of budget fraud, but the investigation is carried out by the National Tax and Customs Office. This is a timely step, because according to the Traffix article, tens of thousands of cars are involved.
The information provided to Telex by the ORFK ends with the comprehensive revision of the traffic rules system and the legislation taking place based on the new KRESZ government decision to reduce the possibility of evading traffic fines. Fraudsters can still be prosecuted if they can be identified. In these cases, the suspects can not only be made to pay the accumulated traffic fines, but depending on the amount, they can be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison.
