The Fort Worth Police Department is detailing its effort to crack down on fraudulent paper license tags.
Deputy Police Chief Pedro Criado addressed the City Council during its work session Tuesday afternoon.
Deputy Chief Criado says the department's crackdown is actually underway right now.
"We currently have three open investigations on three locations in our city that are distributing and selling these tags illegally," Criado told the Council.
District 5 Councilwoman and Mayor Pro Tem Gyna Bivens says fake paper tags have become a huge problem in her district.
"Whenever you see a paper tag, there is a good chance that that's a driver who should not be on the road," Bivens said, "and who knows what history that driver has."
FWPD is working with the North Central Texas Council of Governments and the DMV in addressing the issue.
Some of the things they're doing include creating a task force to conduct covert operations on emissions inspection stations and to set limits on the number of eTAGs that a licensed dealer can create and issue in a calendar year.
Chris Klaus, senior program manager of air quality planning and operations with the North Central Texas Council of Governments, says fictitious tags put everyone at risk.
"If you're getting a fraudulent registration, then you probably don't have [an] inspection [and] you probably don't have insurance," Klaus said.
Criado says when an officer runs a paper tag, it's usually not easy to determine whether it's genuine or phony.
"The majority of the time it comes back legitimate - it's a legitimate eTAG or paper tag," Criado said. "So that's not enough to pull the vehicle over."
Criado says these fraudulent paper license tags are a catalyst for people to commit crimes.
"We've actually had some of our covert units witness some criminals in the process or about to commit a crime," Criado said, "and they pull over and physically take the hard tag - the aluminum tag - off their vehicle and put [on] a temp tag prior to committing the crime."
Criado says fraudsters are sometimes getting the information for the phony paper tags directly from the legitimate tags themselves.
"They're duplicating it [and] triplicating it," Criado said, "and they're putting it on several different vehicles when they go out to commit crimes."
And the crimes Criado said they're committing run the gamut.
"It goes from something minor as not paying toll tags, insurance, avoiding taxes to committing felonies - they've been involved with felony theft, stolen cars [and] robberies," Criado said.
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