In what can only be described as a “dick move”, a Hong Kong man tried to foist a parking fine onto another driver by rewriting the ticket and leaving it on their car.
The sneaky scheme, however, unravelled quickly after dash cam footage emerged catching the man in the act.
The episode began on Saturday when the unwitting target of the ploy, a 21-year-old man surnamed Mui, parked his Volkswagen on On Yiu Street in Sha Tin and went off to have dinner with his friends.
He returned to his car 40 minutes later to find a HK$320 (US$41) parking ticket under his windscreen wiper. Something was up, he thought.
“The entire street had cars parked but for some reason only my car had a parking ticket, so I thought ‘that’s really weird’,” Mui told Apple Daily.
Upon closer inspection, Mui found the ticket, which looked old and frayed at the edges, had been altered, with someone changing the time stamp and crossing out the registration number and replacing it with his.
The forgery, though, fell short of a masterpiece, with only the date on one side altered.
The ticket stated the car was found illegally parked in Luen Cheong Street in Fanling — a 20 minute car journey from where Mui’s car was actually parked.
Suspicions firmly aroused, Mui looked at footage recorded from his dash cam video and found it, a man with glasses and a black t-shirt walking near his car before putting the parking ticket under his windscreen wiper.
After reviewing the footage, he posted it online and reported it to the police.
According to the newspaper, police have arrested a 37-year-old man surnamed Yu in Sheung Shui on suspicion of possessing false instruments, which can land you up to 14 years in jail.
Apple Daily reports, though, that the arrested person is not the person caught on dash cam. The newspaper, however, did not clarify exactly what the detained suspect’s link to the crime was.
