NC couple stunned by $1,000 in unpaid tickets. The only catch? It's from 3 states they don’t live in

Imagine following the rules and waking up one day to find that you've been slapped with penalties for violations in places you haven't even been to. Sounds unreal, but it happened to a couple from North Carolina that was charged nearly a thousand dollars in toll violation tickets for driving in states they hadn't visited in a long time. Initially, Greg Underhill thought the charges were part of some new scam when the attached pictures showed a trailer truck that didn't belong to them, passing through tolls in Maryland, New York, and New Jersey. But when they kept getting charged for the violations, the couple had to reach out for help, according to an ABC11 report. 

Outrageous Charges

The couple told the news outlet that when the toll violations allegedly took place, their trailer was parked in their driveway, about 500 miles away from the toll gates. Thus, Greg initially ignored the first few tickets thinking that they were a mistake or part of a scam. However, more notices started flooding their mailbox with pictures showing a similar trailer speeding through the toll booths. While the first ticket came from New Jersey, the following tickets were from New York and Maryland.

The couple then started panicking and scrambled for help as the amount reached nearly $1,000. "When I went to the DMV, they acted like this never happened before. I was like, there's no way," Greg told ABC11. 

The couple explained that the penalty from New York was more than $200, the ticket from New Jersey was over $100, and the one from Maryland was close to $600 including the fees. This is when his wife, Temperance got involved calling all the numbers on the toll bills that came from the three states. However, this too didn't help as she was put on hold over and over again. "One time I was on hold for 27 minutes," she said.

The couple went on to file a fraud report with the Johnston County Sheriff's Department as they believed that the original offenders had duplicated their license plates to dupe the system. Furthermore, they turned in their tag to the North Carolina DMV to stop further charges. However, they were told that they would still be responsible for the pending bills.

"I went ahead and wrote up three packets of disputes, mailed them all in and we got back from New Jersey that it was still got to pay it or pay the collections to resolve it, and then we reached out to you," Temperance told ABC11's Diane Wilson. After Wilson got involved, she reached out to the three agencies to get the charges removed. The troubleshooter shared that the Underhills' license plate looked awfully similar to the one in violation but there was a key difference. The driver at fault had manipulated one of the digits to impersonate the couple's trailer.

The number 9 was altered and made to look like an 8 to escape the tolls and violation tickets. Eventually, with the help of Wilson, the couple successfully got all the charges removed from their account. Wilson added that the concerned agencies had transferred the charges to the account with the altered plate, and one of them even contacted the police to investigate the altered plate to see if civil action could be taken against the owner.