Black market bliss

June 13, 2009 by editor
Filed under Blog, Vietnam

by Quoc Dat

Even the smallest of things, like a motorbike’s registration plate, can cause a great deal of trouble, as I learned just last week.

Considering everything that could ever be stolen from me, the last thing on my mind was the theft of my motorbike’s registration number. But one fine day last week I took out my motorbike only to find that my registration plate had gone missing without a trace.

Being a logical thinker, I tried to figure out why someone would steal something so small and seemingly worthless; I didn’t think it would pay for much more than one meal.

The first thing I did was to report the incident to the local police. They took my information, but confirmed that it was too small a crime for them to spend much time on it.

“We can’t send out police officers just to go searching for a registration plate,” said Tu, a police officer at Bach Khoa police station.

They could only provide me with a piece of paper to confirm I was the owner of the registration number so that I could go to the general office to apply for a new plate.

It was here that I learned it would take about 30 days to get a new plate, including several day-long excursions to the registration office. Also, my motorbike was second- or even third-hand, so my biggest problem was finding the first owner, the only person that had the right to register for a new plate.

Then I tried to imagine how many times I would be stopped by traffic police to check my registration papers over the next 30 days while driving around town without one. I couldn’t come up with a figure.

I could take the bus for a month, plus all the walking and waiting under the summer sun. Or I could take a xe om, the price of which has become ridiculously expensive lately, almost as much as taking a taxi.

I was terribly close to giving up my comfortable way of life for a month, when a friend of mine enlightened me.

“You could just go to Cho Gioi (the only market in town known as the Heavenly Black Market). They sell all kinds of stolen things, including registration plates,” he said.

The rest played out like a fairy tale.

We got to the market and asked a random shopkeeper for a registration plate. She pointed us to another shop further inside the market. Another woman at this shop asked me for my registration number and the day the plate was stolen, and miraculously, within minutes, my old registration plate was handed back to me.

I realised at that moment that I was in black market heaven.

“We’ve got everything,” said the shopkeeper, who wouldn’t disclose her name to me. “Usually the plates will get here about half an hour or an hour after they’re stolen, depending on how far from the market it was stolen,” she said.

She also said that her shop was not the only one in the market selling stolen plates. Each shop would buy different plates from different thieves. Then when people came in to ask for a certain plate, they would contact each other to find out which shop had it, and swap with each other accordingly.

“Most of the owners eventually come to us,” said the shopkeeper. “They’d rather pay to get the stolen one back than go through all the troubles for a new one.”

This brought me to the nearest police station. I couldn’t help but wonder how an illegal trade like this could be left to operate.

An officer at O Cau Den police station, who wished to keep his name private, told me that it was very hard for them to take action on the issue. “The plates are small enough to be very well hidden,” he said. “We’ve swept through the market a few times before hoping to weed out the businesses, but they always grow back.”

“As for the thieves, even if we catch them, we are unable to charge them with a crime, because only a thief holding valuables worth more than VND500,000 (US) is chargeable. A registration plate is only about VND50-100,000 in the market,” he said.

The shop charged me VND500,000 to get my plate back, five to 10 times more than what they paid for it. I later learned that the more valuable your motorbike was, the more you had to pay for the plate. So if you owned a Honda Wave, for example, you’d probably have to pay about VND200,000 ().

When I left the market, I couldn’t help but wonder who, or what, I could blame for letting such a business exist. Was it the complicated procedure of getting a new registration plate? Or the people like me who would rather pay for the stolen item and a little piece of mind rather than go through the trouble to do the right thing?

But then again, the thing to do at that very moment was to find a way to protect my newly-acquired plate, now that I knew people were making money from it. Interestingly enough, when I left the shop a man approached me and offered to make a fake version of my plate. I could keep the genuine one in my motorbike’s trunk, he suggested. It would cost VND200,000. That sounded a lot better than paying VND500,000 every time a criminal ripped it off my bike.