San Francisco is cracking down on the sale of illegal license plate covers, which obscure the numbers on the plates in an effort to stymie law enforcement.

The city sent cease and desist letters to Amazon, Etsy, Walmart and eBay stop the sale of the products in California, the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office announced in a release Wednesday.

Police officers in the city had found the number-hiding covers on cars involved in crimes.

“The only reason someone would put a cover like this on their license plate is to get away with a crime,” San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu said in a statement.

In addition to making it hard for cops to identify specific cars involved in crime, the covers also allow drivers caught speeding or going through red lights to get away with it, as the cameras cannot see through the cover.

There are multiple kinds of illegal covers, including vinyl wraps that display the wrong number, tinted and warped covers that make reading the number underneath harder, and electronic covers activated to drop down by the driver inside the car, the attorney’s office said.

The four retailers mentioned by the attorney’s office do not sell the license plate covers, but vendors are reportedly using their sites for private sales.

“We take issues like this seriously and are working to remove listings which violate our prohibited products policy.  We look forward to continued discussions with the city attorney’s office,” a Walmart spokesperson told the San Francisco Standard.

An Etsy spokesperson told the Standard that the platform “expressly prohibits the sale of items which are intended to evade the detection of illegal activity, including license plate covers … We continue to monitor our marketplace and improve the systems that detect and remove violative listings.”

“Sellers are obligated to comply with applicable laws … In addition to removing listings, we are updating our proactive controls to prevent sellers from listing these products,” an eBay spokesperson told the Standard.
License plate covers are also explicitly prohibited in Amazon’s Seller Central guidelines.

• Brad Matthews can be reached at bmatthews@washingtontimes.com.