Stunned that I somehow owe Fastrak upwards of $5000?!?!

Demand line by line details and the license plate capture records.

Also check your payment history compared to a calculation of your estimated total toll fees. You may find you've been underpaying because some tools weren't recorded to your tag, but we're captured via license plate cam at the toll booth. Or maybe they are just double charging you + violations & late fees.

Fight the good fight

Did you sell a car that was previously on your account? If you didn’t remove it from your account, whoever’s driving it now - with the same license plate - is mooching off of you. FasTrak scans license plates as well as pings the transponders/toll tags so even if there’s no transponder in a car, they will still bill. Find out what license plate is associated with the violations/unpaid tolls.

This 1/12/2021 ABC7 story may be of interest. And you might want to contact 7 On Your Side.

"I never got a single notice," said plaintiff Michael Saliani,of San Rafael. He said he racked up more than $9000 in penalties before he saw a single invoice. Fastrak said he should have known to look for them and inquire, since he'd crossed multiple times without paying.

Continuing...

Class action attorney Adam Gutride believes the trial did force FasTrak to treat the public more fairly. "That's a good thing for motorists in California," he said. "They can't pile on penalties if the mail is returned and they will waive up to 75 penalties if you call to complain."And what about that policy that FasTrak tried to keep secret? FasTrak has stopped tacking on penalties if the post office can't deliver an invoice. If you get a FasTrak violation under the new system, let 7 On Your Side know.

Is your car registered to the correct address? Also are they all bridge tolls or other violations?

Fastrack is awful.

I had a rental car recently and since the rental company charges $4 per toll, plus the toll amount, I went to the fastrack website to pay tolls.

The website does NOT tell you what you owe, or allow you to select a date range in the past for the license plate. You literally have to approve a transaction without seeing what you are going to pay.

Who knows if this car has a whole bunch of past violations, like the one you mention? I decided since I only crossed bridges a few times, I'm going to go with the rental company rather than have Fastrack charge who the hell knows how much. Maddening and unacceptable.

If you have some time to spend, call in to their call center (don't yell at the reps, it's just a job to them) or wait at the walk-in center on Beale.

Ask for a printout of all these alleged violations, and check your travels.

Transponders fail ALL THE TIME. In fact, the license plate reader is more reliable. That's why Fastrak lets you do BOTH. And you should, to make sure ALL of them go to your account.

And it is also VERY POSSIBLE that someone else's plate was misread as yours (or someone put on a fake plate that looks like yours). Those plate readers are not very smart.

OR you forgot to remove a vehicle from your account. Or an old transponder.

There was a story out of UK... Man got a ticket in the mail for "driving in the bus lane", in a city he had never driven to. When he opened the mail, the ticket photo did not show a car. It showed a grandma wearing a t-shirt that says KNITTER walking in the bus lane.

The guy's plate was KN19TER

When the city that issued the ticket was contacted they had a good laugh and canceled the ticket and the late fee.

https://jalopnik.com/british-driver-fined-because-traffic-camera-misread-som-1847885292

You can check all of your fastrak charges online. Does anything show up?

Not sure why you would have any violations though if your llcense plate is tied to your fastrak account.

Goddamn...

My biggest suggestion is to get a detailed list of every item and instance so you can look it over and prepare to counter it, if false.

I've had a couple issues with Fastrak billing, only 1 resolved, the other they just terminated my account (it's fine). For the resolved one, I parked at SFO short term parking to drop off someone, checked in with Fastrak, but their machine was down for exiting, so paid in cash instead of checking out in Fastrak. Didn't know it until months later when I tried to park at SFO using Fastrak again and I couldnt because their system said my car was already parked there (despite also showing my using various bridges over those months). My case it was fairly easy to call and argue that I couldn't have my car in 2 places at once so they cleared my car from the airport parking.

Did you every have an account linked to an old vehicle?

Check to make sure someone didn’t steal your front license plate. A lot of times people will take a front license plate off a car and put it on the back of their own vehicle. Then they might put back a different license plate on the one they stole to avoid detection. Most people would not notice their front license plate missing and it’s even less likely they would notice if their was a license there but the numbers suddenly changed.

Fuck fast trak. THIS is exactly what they wanted getting rid of the toll booth. These bridges should be free anyways.

You confirm your FT is updated to the correct car? Make sure you get a detail list of each “violation” hope it was a misunderstanding. Good luck

They said I went over the Richmond bridge and have a picture of it but I never went over that bridge I went over the Golden Gate Bridge. So I believe they have been messing stuff up.

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Piggybacking here in case anyone can help- I have crossed toll bridges probably 5-10 times since they moved to invoice-only system last year but I have still never received an invoice. I don't have a FasTrak tag. It's my car, CA plates, I lived at the same address for 3 years (until moving recently), and I receive other mail from the DMV. I'm in denial hoping I have just gotten lucky, but am also afraid I owe some huge amount and don't know it.

I just created a License Plate account on FasTrak so I'll get emailed about it going forward (perhaps foolishly...) but there was no record that I owed any money. Any ideas? Has this happened to anyone else?

Ask for the evidence and also why they didn't notify you.

Serious question- do you not have an Online / Autopay account? I get an email every month about my Fasttrak Statement and its set to Autoload from a credit card.

Fastrack is off the chain.

I had $3000 in past toll charges , with a toll pass in my car.

I SOLD MY CAR, and the fastrack fees disappeared with the license plate

I hate Fastrak so much. I’ve been paying by plate on their website since COVID. I had issues years ago with their transponders so I refused to get another one.

With pay by plate I would look up the invoice notice and pay all of the open tolls every few weeks. I noticed in summer that many of my tolls were listed as closed with a $0 balance and there literally was no way to pay them so I assumed I had paid them previously. Huge mistake. This month I got a pile of invoices now saying those same tolls all have huge penalties applied and I owe thousands of dollars. I appealed the invoices and they told me that because they were more than 90 days old, that I have to pay in full or wait for the DMV to have it on file to dispute it with them. The weird thing too is that I just got my car registration and it doesn’t have any old tolls on it or any penalties. I have no idea what’s going on.

Even worse, they still have a huge balance for the transponder for my old car from years ago! They had been sending invoices on that car to the wrong address. It had previously been “fixed” but apparently not.

Between three vehicles they say I owe $15,000. And not once have I heard a peep from them until these new invoices showed up. It’s absolutely insane. And it seems criminal that they could stop people from being able to drive for this.

Need to call them tomorrow but am dreading it because I know they will be no help :(