KENNER, La. (WVUE) – Fake license plates are creating safety concerns on southeast Louisiana roads and leaving victims helpless.

Amanda Holman experienced the issue firsthand when she was hit by a car with a fake temporary license plate.

“I was on the interstate, right past the Transcontinental Overpass on my way home from work,” she recalled. “There’s traffic always in that curve by Veterans going towards Kenner. I slowed down and got hit from the back by a car.”

They pulled over, but the police never came.

The other driver didn’t speak English and, fearing for her safety on the side of the interstate, Holman left the scene after photographing the tags.

“I was like, well, at least if I take a picture of the license plate, that should help,” she said.

Tracking down the other driver turned out to be impossible. Holman later discovered the plate was counterfeit.

There are likely thousands of fake license plates on southeast Louisiana roads. Over a few week, Fox 8 took pictures of license plates and cross-referenced them with the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).

Fox 8 found 719 fake temp tags in parishes all over the area. Fifteen vehicles had the same license plate number, 18347697. All were allegedly issued by Alexandria-based company Gladiator. The OMV says that tag number was issued once in 2009 to an auto group in Hammond.

Fourteen cars across the metro area had the license plate number 19072146. The labeling on who issued it varied from vehicle to vehicle.

According to law enforcement, fake license plates usually indicate uninsured drivers.

Holman had to pay for the damages to her car with her insurance.

“We already have the highest insurance rates in the country,” she said. “My insurance is now almost double. I pay $663 a month for two vehicles because I had to claim my own insurance.”

The car that hit Holman had a temp tag registered to Crosy Auto Title in Tickfaw. Terri Crosby closed that business six years ago but says she feels victimized by plates popping up all across the metro area with her former company’s name.

“A name that I used to use… of a business that’s been closed since 2018. And faking fraudulent documents and fraudulent temp tags, which is putting the public at risk,” she said. “And you go hire an attorney and the attorney can’t help you.”

She says she has gotten calls from roughly 100 law enforcement agencies ranging from nearby Jefferson and Tanigpahoa parishes, to as far away as Bridgewater, New Jersey, and New York City.

“I’ve never been to New Jersey. I don’t know anybody that lives in New Jersey. But the police officers said that this particular one in New Jersey was used in the commission of a crime,” Crosby said.

Crosby provided Fox 8 with receipts she’s obtained from buyers of the fake temp tags with her company’s name. Someone, using a fake OMV document with a fake Crosby email address, is charging up to $6,000 for counterfeit tags.

Some 20% of over 700 temp tags Fox 8 spotted had the Crosby Auto Title name on them.

Fox 8 easily found a Crosby tag on the internet. Ready to print and be fraudulently stuck on the back of a car. Crosby says it’s ruining her name and reputation.

“It’s the most important thing, I think, I live for. Other than my family and God. That is who we are. To see this, it hurts. It’s so puzzling because it’s like, just another form of crime that we’re experiencing now. There’s no way to stop criminals who want to be criminals,” Crosby said.

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Kenner Police Chief Keith Conley says he’s trying to stop it.

“This is the number one threat to the residents here in Kenner,” he said. “This problem is of grave concern to law enforcement. And it should be to every community in the area.”

“They can cause bodily harm with no recourse and harm to your car with no recourse,” Crosby said. “Then you’re stuck with a bill from somebody who was fraudulent.”

Conley says he has teams of officers working the street. In the last 10 weeks, Kenner police have confiscated 70 fake tags.

“Over half of them had no insurance attached to the vehicle. Some of the vehicles weren’t even registered. They have what they call skeleton VIN numbers, that they should be in a salvage yard,” Conley said.

“Somebody has to be able to stop this,” Holman said. “These should be something you could just duplicate on your home computer or make a copy of and have no ramifications. We are all paying ridiculous insurance prices in this state already and this is just making it worse.”

“I’m not sure if there’s an easy answer to this, but we’re gonna have to figure something out,” Conley said. “It’s scary.”

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture approved emergency financial relief for struggling crawfish farmers and fisherman for a 2024 harvest that is down 50-90% across Louisiana, according to the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center. However, the cash might not be enough to save next year’s season.

“Louisiana’s crawfish aquaculture industry will experience impacts from the 2023 drought for several seasons before an economic recovery is complete,” wrote the Ag Center’s Greg Lutz on TheFishSite.com. “Should drought conditions return before that takes place, the industry will be drastically transformed from the one we have come to know.”

Crawfish season is winding down across Louisiana, which produces about the majority of the nation’s crawfish every year, according to the Louisiana Crawfish Promotion and Research Board. Just in time for the summer heat, the mudbugs will burrow into the mud to spawn. But last year, a series of weather and climate disasters killed many. The high mortality rate of the crawfish meant fewer seeds for next year’s crop.

Drought, lack of rain, freeze took toll on crawfish

A historic drought in 2023, along with record summer heat, dried out the mud by late July through September when crayfish burrow into mud to spawn. They stay put until late fall when the usual heavy rains soften the plugs of clay soil that the moms carefully built to seal in the water, according to Lutz. 

“The mama crawfish don’t come out until they hear the thunder,” wrote Lutz.

Rain is usually not an issue for hurricane-prone Louisiana.

However, the mud dried up and was too hard for mothers and babies to dig out of. Trapped moms resorted to eating their young or starving, according to a Food and Wine report. Many suffocated because their gills dried up after cracks formed in the mud, allowing in dry air.

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The animals that did survive were very small from lack of food. A January cold snap also stunted growth and killed off much of their food source. Both farm and wild-raised crustaceans were too small to sell. Producers reported no young crawfish in their ponds until early December, when farmers would begin to see harvestable animals in a normal year, according to the Ag Center.

“Looks like we a little less than 50% of the catch up until the end of April,” rice and crayfish farmer Paul Zaunbrecher told the Ag Center. “The revenue is probably 75% of what it was last year. So the price has made up for it somewhat.”

He is talking about a four-times price hike at the height of the season for a pound of boiled crawfish. FOX Weather checked prices and found they had soared to $16 per pound when, a year earlier, one pound went for $4-$5.

Some farmers abandoned the land

Another part of the problem is that many farmers chose not to flood their crayfish grounds. Zaunbrecher was just one of the many farmers to abandon acres.

File: Farmer Chad Hanks walks by dry cracked earth on his farm where he usually grows crawfish on October 10, 2023, in Kaplan, Louisiana. 

(Getty Images)

“Some ponds never came into production because of the lack of crawfish or the inability to flood the ponds due to surface water issues,” the Ag Center’s Kenneth Gautreaux said in a video. “Some farmers feel that they were fortunate to catch what they could.” 

The state only saw 44% of its normal rainfall from May-October 2023, and the average high was 3 degrees warmer than average. Harvesting fresh water came at a premium, and the Mississippi River hit record low levels, allowing salt water to enter from the Gulf of Mexico.

“As drought conditions intensified going into the autumn of 2023, it became apparent that many producers in the southwestern region of the state, who normally rely on surface water from natural watersheds and irrigation canals, would be unable to flood their ponds at all, due to excessive salinity caused by saltwater intrusion,” Lutz wrote. “Many producers in other regions were also unable to flood their ponds due to low water levels.” 

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File: The sun sets over a field with crawfish traps near Crowley.

(Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle / Getty Images)

The Ag center estimated the potential losses to be about $140 million to the state’s $230 million a year crawfish industry. The crawfish add $500 million to Louisiana’s economy and employ about 7,000 people.

Industry hurt for years to come

This season’s losses will mean losses next year, too.

“Crawfish have a cycle, and at the end of the season, typically, around June, there’s still a lot of crawfish left in the ponds,” Laney King of The Crawfish App told FOX Weather in an earlier interview. “We call this our carryover crawfish crop, and we rely on these carryover crawfish to then reproduce and create the next season’s crop.” 

Lutz worries that mature crawfish stock will be hard to come by at any price. He estimates that the state would need about 1.5 billion pounds of mature stock to reestablish what was lost, along with the usual stock for farms that rotate between rice and crawfish. The state only harvests 100-120 pounds in an average year, according to Michigan State University.

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File: Boiled crawfish.

(Jeff Greenberg/Universal Images Group)

Several lawmakers made appeals to the government early in the year. The governor issued a disaster declaration for the industry in early March, which allowed the Small Business Administration to make low-interest federal disaster loans available. 

“Louisiana’s extreme drought conditions have affected our farmers, our economy, and our way of life,” Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said in a statement. “All 365,000 crawfish acres in Louisiana have been affected by these conditions. That is why I am issuing a disaster declaration. The crawfish industry needs all the support it can get right now.”

The USDA waited months to amend the Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honeybee and Farm Raised Fish Program to open funds to crayfish farmers. The last time crayfish producers were included was due to a deep freeze in 2021, according to Seafood Source.

About 85% of the state’s crawfish is farmed. None of the state is currently in drought.

Outlawing abortion is only a first step for some conservative lawmakers, who keep dreaming up increasingly invasive schemes to ferret out and punish anyone trying to circumvent these bans. The latest example of this comes from Louisiana, where House lawmakers voted this week to make the abortion-inducing drugs mifepristone and misoprostol Schedule IV controlled substances.

That would make possession of these drugs a crime—punishable by a mandatory minimum prison sentence of one year and up to five years incarceration and a fine of $5,000—unless they were “obtained directly or pursuant to a valid prescription” for something other than abortion.

The alleged rationale for this bill is especially insane. State Sen. Thomas Pressly (R–Shreveport) brought in his sister, Catherine Pressly Herring, to testify about how her husband secretly slipped her abortion drugs when she was pregnant. “I share my story because no one should have abortion pills weaponized against them,” Herring said at an April hearing.

But administering abortion pills is already illegal in Louisiana, where abortion is banned with few exceptions. The state wouldn’t need a new law designating them a controlled substance in order to punish her husband’s alleged deception.

There are also ways authorities could write a law to more narrowly target such behavior—which is in fact what Sen. Pressley is trying to do with Senate Bill (SB) 276, the larger bill to which the controlled substance change is attached. SB 276 “creates the crime of coerced criminal abortion by means of fraud to prohibit a third-party from knowingly using an abortion-inducing drug to cause, or attempt to cause, an abortion on an unsuspecting pregnant mother without her knowledge or consent,” per the state legislature’s website.

The True Target: Doctors and Pharmacists?

With or without this new crime, there is no reason the state needs to make abortion pills a Schedule IV controlled substance in order to target someone who secretly slips them into his pregnant wife’s drink. But this is a common tactic used by lawmakers trying to grant the state new power: using an extreme and sympathetic example of wrongdoing to justify a wide-reaching change that will be used in matters way beyond that example.

In this case, the most likely target is doctors who prescribe mifepristone and misoprostol.

Both drugs have multiple uses beyond inducing abortions. In fact, misoprostol originally gained traction as an anti-ulcer drug. It also has a number of obstetric uses, including inducing labor and treatment after a miscarriage. And Mifepristone is prescribed to people with Cushing syndrome and uterine leiomyomas.

Prescribing mifepristone or misoprostol for non-abortion reasons is still legal in Louisiana and other states where abortion is banned. But abortion foes worry some medical professionals may use this to covertly prescribe it for abortions.

If these drugs are controlled substances, doctors will have to have a special Drug Enforcement Administration license to prescribe them and the state will be able to track when they’re prescribed, to whom, and at what pharmacy these prescriptions are filled.

Effect on Health Care

“Louisiana law typically categorizes medications, such as opioids, as Category IV drugs because they are addictive and thus have a high potential for abuse,” notes University of California, Davis School of Law professor Mary Ziegler at MSNBC:

To prescribe such drugs, physicians in the state need a special license, and the state tracks the patient, physician and pharmacy involved in each prescription. Therein lies one of the primary functions of the law: The state has had a hard time enforcing its abortion ban in part because it is hard to identify when and how pills change hands. At least when a prescription originates in state, this bill might give Louisiana prosecutors an extra edge in identifying people to prosecute.

The bill explicitly exempts pregnant women who have misoprostol or mifepristone for their own use from prosecution—another example of the weird paternalism involved in anti-abortion laws. I’m certainly glad most states don’t want to criminalize women for attempting or having abortions, but it’s also somewhat crazy to act like the woman here is not culpable for her actions but someone who helped her get abortion pills is.

While the law might not result in sending women to prison over abortion drugs, it could be bad for the health of women with miscarriages and other obstetric issues for which misoprostol and mifepristone are prescribed, as well as for people with ulcers and Cushing’s disease.

Doctors are likely to be leery of prescribing these medications for people who need them, much in the same way that crackdowns on pain pills and ADHD medications have harmed people who legitimately need these medicines for health conditions.

What’s Next 

The bill seems likely to pass.

Louisiana’s Senate passed SB 276 without the controlled substances amendment by a unanimous vote back in April.

It defines the crime of coerced abortion by means of fraud as “a person knowingly and intentionally engages in the use or attempted use of an abortion-inducing drug on a pregnant woman, without her knowledge or consent, to cause an abortion,” and prescribed a punishment of five to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $75,000 if the woman was less than three months pregnant and 10 to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $100,000 if the pregnancy was further along than three months.

It also amends the state’s prohibition on “criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs” to include not just causing an abortion by “delivering, dispensing, distributing, or providing a pregnant woman with an abortion-inducing drug” but also with attempting to cause an abortion by these means.

SB 276 passed the House, with the amendment, on Tuesday, by a vote of 64-29. This version contains an amendment declaring “any material, compound, mixture, or preparation containing any detectable quantity of mifepristone or misoprostol” to be a Schedule IV controlled substance in Louisiana.

The measure now goes back to the Senate for another vote.

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