Vanity license plate guidelines probably vary slightly from state to state, but a few basics include banning plates that are considered offensive and not allowing someone to get a vanity plate that is exactly the same as another resident’s vanity plate.

What’s considered offensive is not the same to every person. For example, one mom was told her vanity plate was offensive after she had been driving around with that plate for 15 years. Thankfully, the governor stepped in to tell the DMV to back off.

In order to get around the guidelines, some people are a little bit creative. It’s not immediately apparent what they are trying to say through the combination of letters and numbers they choose for their plate. For example, someone posted a picture of a license plate on imgur that some people are calling “genius.”

This California license plate doesn’t even look like a vanity plate at first glance. It looks like a random assortment of letters and numbers. The plate reads “3JOH22A.”

This is definitely a custom vanity plate though, and if the owner had made it more obvious what the plate actually means, it most likely would’ve been rejected by the DMV. You see, the plate looks completely different when you look at it in your car’s mirror. Look at the picture below.

While this may not be what we would call the “best license plate ever” like the person who posted the picture did, it is definitely one of the most creative ways of getting around the rules that we have ever seen.

Multiple people have commented about how impressed they are with this license plate and also joked about what it would sound like if the police tried to call in this plate. One comment reads, “Radio, I’ve got a Toyota Tacoma, license plates says ‘asshole’ backwards in the mirror, can you run that for me?, over.”

Do you think this license plate is genius? Do you think the DMV will eventually figure out the real meaning behind this license plate and recall it?