Service NSW warns against selling minus points online

Desperate drivers illegally pay others to take their demerits to avoid losing their driver’s license.

Countless black market ads appear on online marketplaces, where the seller offers to claim for money that he drove with penalty points.

Vendors often have international driving licenses and as such can only be fined in Australia and do not receive points for driving offences. As a result, after paying the fine on behalf of the real driver, there is no record of the offence.

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Drivers who lose penalty points due to speeding or using a cell phone can charge exorbitant fees for lying, but cheating is illegal and both parties can be charged if the lie is discovered.

Half a dozen ads for the illegal act have surfaced in Sydney alone.

“Demerit points, $70 each … please message me,” read an ad on Facebook Marketplace.

“Tell me what penalty and how many demerits you need…I can sort it out,” another ad said.

“$150 per point, done in minutes,” says a third ad.

When contacted by 7NEWS.com.au, a seller said he was being inundated with messages about his offer.

“People text me all the time and say, ‘Do you want to buy?'” he said.

Other sellers say they have an international license and therefore do not earn negative points under the NSW system, only being fined.

It is not illegal for a registered car owner to transfer penalty points to another driver if that driver was actually behind the wheel at the time of the offence.

However, falsely naming someone else for these offenses is against the law.

And there is a hefty penalty.

“There are severe penalties for a person who mistakenly nominates another person as responsible for traffic offences,” Tara McCarthy, deputy secretary for safety, environment and regulation at Transport for NSW, told 7NEWS.com.au.

In NSW the fine for a person who wrongly nominates another person is US$723.

If convicted of the crime by a court, the maximum fine the court can impose is $11,000.

However, the fine is even higher for businesses that could face a $1528 fine. If convicted, the maximum fine the court can award a company is $22,000.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for Transport and Main Roads in Queensland told 7NEWS.com.au it was “an offense to make a false statement, including knowingly nominating a person who was not the driver at the time of the offence”.

“This is an extremely serious crime, punishable by a fine of up to $8,625 or, in some cases, imprisonment,” they said.