Elderly Woman Hit With Flood of Expensive Traffic Tickets. Twist: She Doesn't Own a Car and Hasn't Driven in Years

A 76-year-old 'Star Trek' fan who stopped driving four years says she's being barraged with traffic tickets from across the country—because motorists apparently have replica versions of her old license plates.

Beda Koorey's love of the iconic 1960's TV show led her to get vanity plates that said NCC-1701, the call sign for the starship Enterprise that enabled its crew to "boldly go where no man has gone before."

Koorey, who lives in Huntington, on New York's Long Island, told New York City TV station WCBS that she turned in the plates, sold her car and stopped driving in 2020.

But since then, Koorey said, she's received tens of thousands of dollars worth of tickets in the mail.

"Red light, speeding, parking, school zone," she said.

During an interview, Koorey held up speeding tickets she said "came yesterday from Chicago."

"They are $100 each," she said.

Koorey said she even "got a phone call from Ohio, a police chief looking for plates because they were involved in a robbery."

"The whole country has my name and address for tickets I don't even owe," she said.

An online business called Celebrity Machines sells novelty replicas of license plates featured in movies and TV shows, including a New York plate that says NCC-1701 and sells for as little as $10, plus tax and shipping.

It pays homage to one seen in the TV series "Heroes" on a Mercedes-Maybach sedan driven by actor George Takei, who portrayed Mr. Sulu on "Star Trek," according the Celebrity Machines website.

A representative of the company, which also sells the "exact replica" plate on Amazon, didn't immediately return a request for comment on Saturday.

The New York Department of Motor Vehicles told WCBS that novelty license plates used illegally on the roads were a matter for law enforcement authorities.

It also said that there's nothing in its system that ties Koorey to her former plates and that each state or billing entity that sends out tickets was responsible for using current data.

Several lawmakers have pledged to help Koorey and she met Friday with a pro bono lawyer to try to solve her problem, WCBS said.