A license-plate lookup searches for more than the exact characters you type. Some characters are easily confused — a capital O and a zero 0, a capital I and a one 1 — and a camera’s plate reader or an officer entering a plate can swap them, so a lookup also checks those look-alike variants. A plate logged as ABCI will still surface when you search ABC1.
Those variant results used to be indistinguishable from exact matches, which left you unable to tell whether a record was really for your plate or for a look-alike. Results that matched a variant rather than the characters you entered now carry a Variant badge to make that distinction clear.
#What the badge tells you
- It marks results that matched a look-alike of your search, not the exact characters you typed.
- Hover it (or tap it on mobile) for a short note on which substitutions we check:
O↔0andI↔1. - It never shows the plate, or which variant matched. As always, we don’t display plaintext plates — lookups run entirely on hashed values.
When a card is also a mismatch, the badges collapse to compact icons so nothing gets clipped on smaller screens, while the Variant and Mismatch markers stay visually distinct.
As always, reach out to humans@haveibeenflocked.com with any questions or concerns.