This depends on where you live in the world.

Stealthplate is transparent to the naked eye. Once it’s in place, it is impossible to see that it’s there unless you are right up against it. In the UK, for example, it is illegal to cover your number plate with anything, even if it might be totally transparent. However, we have more than one serving Police Officer amongst our customers. Their opinion, and that of our lawyers, is that it is a ‘construction and use’ issue and not an endorsable offence. ‘Construction and use’ transgressions are dealt with by fixed penalty notices only and as of 2026 thats a £100 charge. If you get pulled over…

The issue may be different in your country, but we take the view that you should not use Stealthplate on the road because you may contravene local legislation. Use it instead as a technical ‘toy’ and if you apply it to a number/licence plate, do not put it onto a vehicle and use it on public roads. 🙂 🙂 🙂

Flashing Gatso cameras have become rare on UK roads. It has been claimed that in at least one case, the bright flash of a Gatso has caused a driver to be distracted and a fatality has resulted. Anyone who has seen them go off in the dark knows that it was a complete bloody idiot who allowed them on the roads in the first place…

Cameras that employ a bright visible flash that you can see WILL NOT be blocked by Stealthplate. That goes for any camera which produces a colour image because these cameras do not use the infrared portion of the spectrum to take a picture – they use ‘ordinary’ light that you and I can see.

Thinking about the UK again here, the mobile vans and the handheld systems deployed at the roadside can be configured with ANPR. But, of course, they also have a human operator behind them.

If, if, IF… the operator is doing his job, he should be keeping an eye on the traffic. IF he notices your plate hasn’t shown up on the ANPR, he can read your registration himself. Nothing much to be done about that.

We do not recommend that you use Stealthplate on the road because it might be illegal in the country you live in. What’s more, if you use it to try to evade road tolling charges, you might actually be breaking laws regarding fraud, so think carefully.

Stealthplate will block the IR road tolling ANPR cameras, but in some cases, the toll systems are accompanied by visible ‘overview’ cameras to monitor traffic movements. These are not used to read your number plate. They are needed to tell what colour a certain vehicle within the traffic stream might be. A sharp eyed camera system operator (if the tolling system has human operators – many don’t) might be able to read your registration from these colour visible cameras.

The situation with the ULEZ is complicated and get a lot of enquiries about it.

The ULEZ is monitored by many different cameras but the Siemens Sicore II is one of the main types on the entrance to the zone. We have not had a Sicore II in for test – they are not cheap and not easily available! However by looking at the publicly available information on this systems specifications, we are pretty sure that we block the ANPR camera in a Sicore II. That is not the whole story though. This is because TfL’s systems are extremely well developed over many, many years of operation and its not just the ANPR check on the entry to the zone which is the sole method to discover whether your vehicle is in the zone. The Sicore II camera:

https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:97cffb3db0008552606664ebd5ef4ffb0becab16/siemens-anpr-alpr-camera-sicore-ii-2-brochure.pdf

See how it has two cameras in the one body? One is IR ANPR, which we are as sure as we can be that we block, the other is a colour overview camera, which we don’t block. You go through a Sicore II and the camera can’t read your registration by ANPR, then an alert can go out to human operator in one of TfL’s control rooms. They scroll back the video on the colour camera and they can then ‘manually’ read your registration.

Of course, we do not recommend you use the device on the road!

Also see the answer to Question 1 above.

Stealthplate will block the IR ANPR systems in squad cars and that means you could come to the attention of the law. But what happens thereafter is in no way fixed.

ANPR has a “read rate”. It doesn’t manage to read all registrations. Dependent on the installation (the type of system, where and how its installed), this can vary between 90-100%. Its very rarely 100% and the UK Government provide guidelines on what it should be for different installations:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/909024/ANPR_-_Evaluation_Approved_Version_2.0.pdf

So the squad car ANPR parked on the M1 looking for vehicles, say, without tax, does not pick every registration out. The guidelines reckon 95% for moving vehicles is acceptable (Section 4.1.2 to 4.1.4). That means 5 out of every hundred can be missed. Not that they necessarily are missed. But this illustrates that the ANPR systems deployed on our roads are not catch all’s. The Bobby in the squad car is getting failure to read all the time…

This greatly mitigates the issues around failure to read a vehicle’s registration if its fitted with Stealthplate. In fact, we have serving traffic officers who are customers (!) and they tell me that unless a vehicle is flagged for some other reason (known criminal in it, make, model, colour maybe implicated in a recent crime, this sort of thing), then they would ignore a failure. There’s too many failures for them to go chasing every one.

OK, but that doesn’t mean they won’t stop you.

We do have examples of people being stopped. Nobody that we know of has been prosecuted so far. Now, we’re not legal professionals, but lawyers tell us that the offence is construction and use. Not driving, so not an endorsement. Simply a fixed penalty (it was £100 in 2026 when we got the latest advice from our legal people) and take your car to an MOT station to have your replacement number plates signed off as OK.

We can’t give you a definitive answer, of course. Depends on the exact situation. Are you a known armed robber? Then you’ll probably get pulled! Are you clean and a fine upstanding citizen? Then you’ll probably get left alone.

The only way you can see Stealthplate working is if you have a camera system that mimics the IR ANPR systems out there on the road. How much physics do you remember from school???

What that basically means is that you need to have a silicon ccd camera that has either an infrared narrow band pass filter or a dichroic long wave pass pass filter of appropriate wavelength over the front. They aren’t the sort of thing people have lying around the house, unfortunately, and ordinary cameras do not do the same thing (see Q7).

What you might be able to do is use your TV remote control to demonstrate the effect. If you hold Stealthplate up in front of your TV remote control receiver and try to operate the remote from the other side of the room, it should block the signal and not switch your TV. Most TV remote controls use IR LEDs with the same wavelength used by IR ANPR. Most, not all, so this test might not work.

General purpose digital cameras (such as those in your smartphone) are fabricated to view a scene in colour in the way the human eye does. Stealthplate cannot block these cameras without blocking the human eye view and it is designed to be as transparent as possible to humans for obvious reasons.

Most cameras that are sold as ‘IR security cameras’ are, in fact, NOT infrared cameras. They are ‘broad spectrum’ cameras that operate in the visible region and the IR at the same time. The ‘security’ aspect of their operation usually comprises an infrared illuminator that switches on in darkness but nothing happens to the camera chip operation itself – it is still viewing in the visible even though light levels are low and that is why it can see through Stealthplate.

ANPR controlled entry and exit systems, fuel station monitoring systems and the like have to have a ‘default’ algorithm – a method of dealing with a vehicle, the plate of which it cannot read. There are situations where you might have an obscured number plate and not know it. What if you have snow or mud covering your plate? You can’t be sat at a car park entrance with a queue forming behind you and nothing happening. So the barrier goes up and the charging system deals with you in another way. You might sit there for a couple of minutes while the system works out it can’t read your plate, but it won’t stop you getting where you want to go.

Stealthplate was initially designed for the standard EU sized number plates we use in the UK – 520 x 110mm in size. However, we also stock the following sizes for other countries:

380mm wide x 105mm high
372mm wide x 132mm high
440mm wide x 140mm high
302mm wide x 150mm high – standard size for US plates

Actually we make them a couple of millimetres smaller than these sizes because it aids fitting. We also stock standard UK motorcycle sized Stealthplates at 226 x 176mm.

Choose the size you require from the selection in the shop.

Stealthplate is self-adhesive and needs a substantial surface area for the adhesive to stick to. Pressed metal plates with raised letters and numbers only present the raised surfaces to adhere to and leave gaps that can fill with dust, dirt and condensation. Most customers who have pressed metal plates use readily available plate covers and stick Stealthplate to those. In the USA, for example, try: http://www.autozone.com/license-plate-and-accessories/license-plate-cover

We process thin polycarbonate sheet to achieve Stealthplate’s blocking characteristics and then laminate a double sided adhesive onto it so you can stick it to you plate. We are tooled up for the common licence plate sizes worldwide, but we don’t have every size. However, you can trim Stealthplate pretty easily:

Be careful when fitting!

If you have got the Stealthplate badly skew, it is probably ruined. The pressure sensitive acrylic adhesive is very strong because it needs to be. If it isn’t entirely attached, you can probably rip it off your number plate and any remaining adhesive can be cleaned off with white spirit.

If you’ve messed up and don’t think you can recover the Stealthplate, get in touch and we will see what might be done.

We are happy to consider discount for multiple purchases and the website shop automatically applies discount for 5+ and 10+ quantities.

We begin our re-seller discount structure at 25 pairs – please contact us if you want this many or more.

Well…. we DO NOT have a Trustpilot page! Why? I’ll come to that…

What you have probably been reading is a Trustpilot page associated with a UK company called ‘Stealth Plates Ltd’ in Sunderland, UK. Which as of Feb 2026 is about to be struck off the UK Companies Register and has not been operating since 2022. There are people commenting on this business’ Trustpilot page thinking it must be us.

Their complaints are that Stealthplate ‘hasn’t worked’ because they have a ticket. We don’t know how many times we have to say this: Stealthplate blocks infrared ANPR cameras and not every camera on the road. Everywhere on this website, we attempt to make that 100% clear. But some customers don’t read about what they’re spending their money on before they buy. Bloody stupid if you ask me because we know Stealthplate isn’t cheap. They get a ticket from a colour camera and get an arse on because they believe in magic and that we are Harry Potter. We block IR ANPR – read about it before you buy.

When we are contacted by customers who think Stealthplate has failed, invariably they have a colour image associated with their ticket. When thats pointed out and we explain, most people are happy. But of course, there are a lot of moan-y arsed bastards out there who refuse to confront their own lack of understanding. Hence the inappropriate ‘reviews’ on the wrong Trustpliot page.

We’ve not established a Trustpilot page because of all this. Internet reviews can so easily be bollocks anyway. You know that! What its difficult to argue with is your mate who recommends us… the fact we have a patent… and the BBC demonstrating that we do exactly what we say we do! Thats where most of our sales come from.

Use the contact form to get in touch and we will come back to you as soon as we can!