Last week I was reading a thread about ST1300 on motorfans and came across a posting from an owner of a legal K1600GT in Shanghai, who found that his Shanghai A plate had been copied and was adorning a very similar (same colour, same topbox etc) K1600GT down in GuangDong. He had photos of all his paperwork proving legal import, taxes paid, plates issued and so on (removing any identifiable information though). He had photos posted of his bike and the plate, and quite a number of the K1600GT with the copies of his plates, and showed the few little subtle differences. Two of the differences were how the plate had been mounted on the rear of his K1600GT using the standard top holes for mounting the rear plate, versus the fake plates upon which two new holes had been drilled to the plate so that very slight obstruction of the number/letters occurred. For the uninitiated they'd likely never notice, and the obstruction was only subtle, and really almost not worth the effort. Any traffic camera would still pick up the total plate letter, number combo, so to my mind little is gained, mounting the plate in the manner it has been. The other other only visual difference was that the Shanghai legit bike had a LED brake light bar integrated into the top of the topbox, while this was missing in the 'fake' bike.

The interesting thing was that the legit owner didn't really have a beef with the fake, and would like to meet the fake bike owner... as they share the passion of motorcycling. A few of the posts in reply also were of the same thought process, while some doubted the whole post.