I live in a different country and I can't imagine checking the "traffic fine registry PDF on a random government website" when considering which plumber to hire.
I don't doubt that this caused him problems, I'm just trying to understand how.
Also, I found out about his van getting towed because I scraped towing records from Autoreturn (the city's main towing provider - lots of corruption around that deal). Autoreturn's website at the time had a query parameter like "?towid=1", so you could increment that to pull all towing records.
I started working on a pretty in-depth data analysis and visualization, similar to what was done here, but I got caught up with my day job and some rock climbing dreams. I handed over all my research to a few local reporters a while back - they were really excited to talk to me in person about it, but I haven't seen anything published since.
> "?towid=1"
Funnily, incrementing that number in the country I live in would itself be a crime. If the company I did this to found out, they could probably take me to court and win.
A wonderful world we live in. :)
Incurring higher costs than revenue is a common cause of business failures.