We thought Yianni Charalambous was our friend, but do friends really break friends' websites?
Yianni is the man behind Yiannimize. For those of you unfamiliar with the brand, Yiannimize is a collection of several related automotive businesses including a custom shop that transforms clients' production vehicles into unique statements of individuality, a retail store, a media division that creates a range of content and a live events business.
On the evening of Thursday 24th April, the Yiannimize YouTube channel published a video entitled 'Exposing The World Of Number Plates'. The video attracted a lot of views and, as it featured Regtransfers pretty prominently, a lot of people visited Regtransfers.co.uk after watching it. So many, in fact, that our site was temporarily overwhelmed. We're used to a lot of traffic, but thanks to Yianni, the clicks came much faster than expected. The end result was kind of like an accidental denial-of-service attack!
Exposing the world of number plates?
Headlines are designed to grab attention, and this one certainly succeeded in that. Behind the sensationalist heading, however, was a very interesting video in which Yianni, members of his family and his friends from the world of cool cars spoke about the private plates they own, and have owned. Yianni also spoke to Kit, a self-confessed number plates geek, who furnished Yianni with a few off-the-cuff valuations as well as some little-known facts about diplomatic number plates and other such esoterica.
That's not to say that the title is inaccurate: there really is some exposing going on the video. There are a few tales of fraud and deception that show how inexperienced buyers can be duped by conmen. The clear moral imparted by those stories is always buy from a reputable dealer or someone you know and trust, rather than from a random stranger on eBay or social media.
There are also some examples of misspaced or otherwise incorrectly displayed plates that could see their owners slapped with a hefty fine (not to mention an MOT failure). The aspect that will probably grab most people's attention, however, is how much some private registrations can be worth in monetary terms, and how some people's carefully chosen plates have increased tremendously in value since they were originally purchased. Raj Singh Sangha from automotive electronics specialists Car Audio Security, for example. Away from the business, Raj is a content creator and a car collector. He estimates that he has spent around £100k on his collection of 30-plus private plates, and that the collection is now worth approximately twice that amount.
Raj Sangha is a master of matching cars to car-themed number plates. He has some plates that represent the cars displaying them so well that people assume they must be show plates, rather than legitimate registration plates.
A family affair
Yianni's two sons, Andreas and Nicolas have had their own private plates for a while now. Andreas has his AND 234S plate on his own car, while his younger brother, Nicholas, has yet to pass his driving test, so he's not quite ready to display NCO 114S on his own car.
Yianni's own private plate journey began with A7 BUB, which was bought for him by his grandmother. The BUB characters spell "Bub", which was his nickname at the time. He now owns a number of personal registrations, including some excellent name, initials and word representations.
The next family member for whom Yianni plans to go plate shopping at Regtransfers is his youngest child, 4-year-old daughter Leah Marie.
Controversy
We mentioned fraud earlier in this article. Jamie Sonuga of the Officially Gassed YouTube channel shared the tragic story of how DVLA withdrew one of his private registrations leaving Jamie with no avenue of appeal. Why tragic? The plate concerned was GA55 EED, which was a great fit for his Officially Gassed social media branding. Unlike cases where plates are withdrawn due to their resemblance to offensive or provocative words, the reason for the cancellation of Jamie's plate was that the person from whom he acquired it had purchased the number from DVLA fraudulently. Regtransfers has since supplied Jamie with a new plate, SO17 UGA, which spells his surname.
Expert Kit explained to Yianni how mis-spaced plates can earn a fine. A little later in the video, automotive influencer Tim Burton, AKA "Shmee", showed a large selection of his private registrations displayed on a wall. While the number plates on his actual cars looked fine, some of those in his wall display would not meet current regulations! The rules are so specific that even the small print at the bottom of number plates may only contain certain specific information. Cool though the slogans and quotes in small print on Tim's display plates were, they would have to be replaced by plate supplier ID information for them to be legal for display on the roads.
Variety
Yianni's video illustrates well the variety of reasons people have for choosing their plates and the range of prices that they pay. With nearly 3 million YouTube subscribers and more cars than you can shake a stick at, one might expect that Shmee could afford to splash out a lot of money on his private plates, but that's not the case. Many of Shmee's plates are inexpensive registrations that are simply ordinary, current style registrations. By luck or design, his nickname just happens to be one that occurs frequently in number plate character combinations.
At the other end of the price scale are the really exclusive combinations, those exceedingly rare single-letter, single-digit, number-one plates. Some of those are now estimated to be worth millions of pounds.
Worth a watch
Yianni's clickbait title might hook people in, but if the content wasn't interesting they wouldn't hang around to watch a video of that length. They certainly wouldn't have paid enough attention to motivate them to click through to Regtransfers in sufficient numbers to break our website!
Of course, even experts rarely concur on everything, and we don't agree with all the opinions expressed in the video. Some of the plates depicted feature mis-spaced characters and other details that mean they're not compliant with current regulations, but that's just a reflection of reality out on the streets. People frequently get fined for displaying their plates illegally, but many still do it. For our part, Regtransfers advises against it, and we will not supply plates with non-standard features or spacing.
All that said, it's a really interesting, well made video and we do recommend giving it a watch. Oh, and don't worry, it's fine for people to click through to Regtransfers.co.uk now: we've reinforced our site to cope with unexpected quantities of traffic, so we're ready and waiting.
