Licence to steal: How ‘idle’ vintage numbers drove ‘Rs 500-crore’ RTO scam

A digitisation loophole enabled officials and agents in Rajasthan RTOs to revive prized vintage numbers, transfer them to new vehicles, and forge records, triggering a statewide fraud probeTwo years ago, Shankar Sisodia (name changed) did what thousands of car owners in Jaipur do without thinking twice: he hired an agent to renew a registration certificate (RC). His car had a coveted number from Rajasthan’s old seven-digit series — three letters and four numerals — from before the state moved to newer formats. Sisodia submitted the papers, paid the fee, and waited for the updated certificate.The update was a shock. The RC had been renewed and transferred — without his consent — to the name of an official posted at the regional transport office (RTO), Jaipur (I). Sisodia thought he was merely renewing the number. But it had been hijacked inside the system that was supposed to protect it. “I realised something very fishy was going on,” he says.Renewed, Reactivated, TransferredSisodia’s problem was not an outlier. Across several districts in Rajasthan — Jaipur, Sawai Madhopur, Jhunjhunu, Dausa, Rajsamand, Jodhpur — owners learnt that their old registrations had been “touched” in the govt database: renewed, reactivated, transferred — used as stepping stones to move prized vintage numbers onto new vehicles.What looked like routine digitisation of pre-1990 records had become a pipeline for laundering registration numbers — an alleged scam that the transport department’s probe committee says caused a revenue loss of about Rs 500 crore.At the centre of the scheme was a simple truth about Indian car culture: a “fancy” number sells a vehicle twice — once as a machine, next as a status symbol. In Rajasthan, the older seven-digit series carries a cachet: it looks “classic”, signals seniority, and is scarce. Scarcity creates a market, which creates middlemen. And middlemen found a way to turn digitisation into a number-minting operation.How It Came OutThe scam surfaced in March 2025 — through a pattern that didn’t quite fit. While reviewing daily transactions, offi-cials at RTO Jaipur (I) noticed something odd in backlog entries: transactions posted later than the date they ought to have been recorded. Backlog work typically spikes in March because of year-end revenue collection, but the volume is small. This time, it wasn’t.On March 12, March 15 and March 22, the office recorded 237 backlog transactions — more than 80 on each of those three days. “Usually, two to three backlog transactions are done in March, but in each of the three days, over 80 backlog transactions were recorded, which raised suspicion,” says Rajendra Singh Shekhawat, regional transport officer for RTO Jaipur (I). The office dug in, found irregularities tied to vintage numbers, and suspended two officials. Shekhawat escalated the matter to the transport department and urged checks beyond Jaipur. A month later, in April 2025, the department formed a four-member committee to investigate. What the committee described was not a single-office fraud, but a method replicable anywhere old records were being migrated to the Vahan portal, the national vehicle database.‘Idle’ Numbers… The Soft TargetsThe opportunity lay in the digitisation drive itself. Rajasthan was uploading more than five lakh old vehicle numbers — many allotted before 1990 — onto Vahan. In that transition, investigators say, clerks and their collaborators identified “idle” numbers: registrations that existed on paper but had not been used for years, where no transport-related services had been availed of, and where the owners were unlikely to notice a change until it was too late. These were the soft targets.Renu Khandelwal, additional transport commissioner and a member of the committee, describes the loophole: while digitising, officials and agents found ways to re-allot numbers that should have remained tied to their original vehicles. “An idle number was of key interest to those involved in the fraud,” she says. The alleged mechanics were bureaucratic: forms, entries, transfers, and forged documents. But the effect was the same as theft.First, the coveted seven-character registration was “revived” in the system by attaching it to a ‘virtual vehicle’ — which existed only on paper. This created a cleanlooking digital footprint.Second, the number was transferred from the virtual vehicle to a real buyer — someone with a new car and a willingness to pay for a premium registration. The buyer, officials say, often paid the govt fee for the number and may not even have known the number’s backstory. They got what they wanted: a rare, attractive plate.The third step was to “balance” the books: the new vehicle’s regular 10-digit series number was assigned to the vintage vehicle’s record. That swap made the database look consistent: every vehicle had a number, every number a vehicle. The original owner of the vintage number, however, was left with a registration that had been quietly detached from them.A Numbers GameThe committee said such numbers were being priced anywhere between Rs 2 lakh and Rs 10 lakh. The people who profited, according to the department’s own findings, were a network — clerks inside RTO/DTO offices who could move files and approve entries; agents who sourced customers and handled paperwork; and vehicle dealers who could bundle a “special number” into a sale. Govt lost revenue — from alleged under-the-table premiums and from distortions in the fee process.The committee’s report, submitted in Nov 2025, warned that 30,000 to 40,000 numbers might have been compromised. That estimate was tied to the scale of digitisation — over 5 lakh old numbers — and the fear that the same trick could have been repeated widely before anyone noticed. The report also described how documents were allegedly fabricated: fake papers prepared in Jodhpur and Nagaur for vehicles registered in Jaipur, and numbers fraudulently transferred to other vehicles from the Salumber RTO office. The fraud was so brazen that registration numbers from 40-year-old mopeds were ending up on luxury cars. “Some cases did come to light where numbers of old two-wheelers were allotted to new cars… or registration numbers of a tractor were allotted to a four-wheeler,” a senior official on the committee says.On Nov 25, 2025, O P Bunkar, additional transport commissioner, issued an order that framed the conduct as fraud and criminal conspiracy. It stated that employees, vehicle owners and private individuals across transport offices had used forged documents to register seven-digit numbers of old vehicles, “likely… for personal gain and to cause loss to the state’s treasury”. The department instructed all RTOs and DTOs to file FIRs against staff involved.The first FIR came on Jan 4, 2026, when RTO Jaipur (I) filed a police case against unnamed personnel, brokers and private owners. The FIR followed a departmental probe into 2,128 old vehicles registered under the seven-digit series before 1989. Jaipur’s numbers show the immediate administrative fallout: registration certificates were suspended for 1,160 vehicles, and 496 RCs were cancelled out of the 2,128 under scrutiny.Other districts followed, with FIRs in Sawai Madhopur, Jhunjhunu and Chittorgarh, even as Jodhpur and Sriganganagar were in process at the time of reporting. A department official said a statewide inspection revised the scale downward: instead of 30,000-40,000, the department now believed 1,000-1,500 numbers were involved, and that “almost 100 personnel” across roles had been identified.Unanswered QuestionsThat swing — tens of thousands down to a few thousand — captures the story’s biggest unresolved gap. The public has been given two very different pictures of scale: an early estimate tied to potential exposure, and a later estimate tied to confirmed irregularities. The department has not published a district-wise breakdown of suspected-versus-verified cases, nor explained the methodology behind either figure. Without that, the Rs 400-500 crore loss estimate also hangs in the air: is it based on confirmed transactions, projected market premiums, or a model of what could have happened had the loophole ran unchecked? Another difference is between the buyers. The narrative suggests several people paid the official fee and may not have known the number was “washed” through a virtual vehicle. But the FIRs, as described, include “private owners” among the accused categories. The line between victim and beneficiary is crucial: were buyers duped, complicit, or was it a mix of both? There is also little detail on the internal controls that failed. Backlog transactions were the red flag, but what permissions allowed 80-plus backlog entries to be pushed through on a single day? Were user IDs shared? Were approvals bypassed? Did the system lack alerts for unusual volume, cross-district transfers, or mismatches between vehicle class and historical registration? The committee’s description of the method implies repeated manipulation, which usually leaves audit trails. The public has not been told what those trails show, who had access, and whether the department has frozen or revalidated credentials.What authorities are doing now is a mix of policing, paperwork triage, and damage control. FIRs are being filed, RCs being suspended and cancelled, and the department is urging owners of vintage vehicles to update records and to scrap only through authorised dealers — as dormant vehicles and informal scrapping create the very “idle number” pool that scammers exploit. Shekhawat has argued the department lacks resources to investigate the full depth and has called for specialised agencies. Officials have said the ED and Anti-Corruption Bureau have taken cognisance, and that the Special Operations Group should investigate.Transport commissioner Purusottam Sharma says the department plans to write to the ministry of road transport and highways about the loopholes in the portal and how it can be misused. “These gaps need to be addressed. Along with online work, a provision for physical verification of documents or some kind of audit must be there so that such incidents can be stopped,” he says.