Nearly 800K Maryland License Plates Feature Link to Philippines Based Casino Ads
The default Maryland vehicle license plate issued from 2012 until 2016 has a patriotic web link on it – but today, it only redirects visitors to a Filipino online casino affiliate site.
Some 798,000 of the plates were distributed over that time. The bizarre mix-up was discovered by a Reddit user this week, who then posted about it on the /r/Maryland subreddit forum.
Maryland Department of Transportation’s Motor Vehicle Administration, or MVA, is now investigating the issue.
Related: The best online sportsbooks in Maryland today
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The license plates in question were first distributed in 2012. They were made to commemorate the 200-year anniversary of the beginning of the War of 1812.
Marylander Francis Scott Key wrote US national anthem The Star-Spangled Banner while watching British ships off the coast near Baltimore during the war. In a nod to that history, the Maryland license plates had a link to www.starspangled200.org, where they could read more about the story.
However, the domain has since changed hands multiple times over the years. Sometime between 2022 and now, it ended up in the hands of online casino advertisers in the Philippines.
Users visiting the domain name today are instead redirected to globeinternational.info, where a picture of a smiling woman in a revealing top advertises online casino bonuses at “the Philippines best betting site.”
“I was never a fan of having a plate celebrating the War of 1812. But I’m even more upset now that I (and tons of other Marylanders) are driving advertisements for international online gambling,” said the Redditor who first posted about the news.
Not Owned by the Administration
The Maryland MVA came out and commented to Motherboard of Vice Media.
“The website printed on the plates is not owned by the Motor Vehicle Administration,” a spokesperson said.
“The plates’ design and content originated from the War of 1812 Bicentennial Commission created in 2007. Star-Spangled 200, Inc. is the nonprofit entity affiliated with the Commission that led the efforts to raise funds for bicentennial projects and events.”
The Bicentennial Commission mentioned actually closed in 2016, shortly before the standard Maryland license plate was updated to a newer model.
That could explain why no one was in charge of monitoring the website, and it was up to internet detectives to break the story.
No official reason has been given as to how a piece of state documentation driven around by potentially hundreds of thousands of Marylanders every day was allowed to have a lapsed link in this fashion.
But one Redditor speculated that it could be as simple as an expired domain registration. With no one in charge of keeping the site running, nobody was there to notice when it expired – until whoever is behind the Filipino gambling operation snapped it up.
“The MVA not endorse the views or content on the current website using that URL, and is working with the agency’s IT department to identify options to resolve the current issue,” said a spokesperson for the state agency.
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