W 97484 Y

The Croatian plate under it looks like it's probably fake... the coat of arms is wrong and "MO" never existed as a code

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It's not Croatian This is from the Herceg-Bosna region (~1992-1998) of Bosnia and Herzegovina. MO = Mostar. Each of the 3 regions at the time issued their own plates (Croatian style, Serbian style and 'EU' style), I have a photo somewhere of them altogether in my collection but I lost the photo and they are back in the box for now, so I can't show it... Sorry

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Thanks for the info, Mostar for MO crossed my mind, but I've never thought that a Bosnian region has a Croatian checkers symbol

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Yeah it is similar
I have individual photos of my plates, you can compare the crest to a modern Croatian plate (I can't say if I have one in my collection or not, because I am not supposed to have Croatian plates ), and the other designs. The Republika Srpska plate is shorter but won't look it in these previews.

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Cool pieces of the collection
How do you mean "not supposed to have Croatian plates" ? Are they theoretically illegal to own, or did you somehow get in trouble about them?

0

Thanks
I have been told that they are illegal to have. But I think they are less strict than Switzerland and Austria, because I have never heard of Croatia sending local police to someone in another country to recover plates (as Switzerland and Austria has been known to do in the past). Many countries are "illegal" to have, but in reality they do nothing about it once the plate has left the country, so there is no problem showing those plates. There are some plates in my collection that will never be seen online but I won't say what they are (And ALL of them have been obtained legally from registration centres around the world ).

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This may seem stupid, but where do you guys get plates from?

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Those plates mentioned by you as "EU style plates", were being issued in Muslim Bosnia.
All kinds of plates being issued in 1990s in three republics (Bosnian Serbian Republic, Herceg-Bosna and Muslim Bosnia), were totally replaced by 1998 plates having no geographic coding, by insistence from European peacekeeping politicians. The reason for this replacement was preventing vandalism between Bosnians from different ethnic and religious groups.

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Not a stupid question at all. I can't speak for other users of the site, but myself I go to collector meetings all around the world, and exchange with other collectors online. Also I have got plates from registration offices in some countries, scrapyards, dealerships, "car boot sales", friend's old cars, and very rarely for me (but I know some people get very good luck) roadkill plates left on the streets. You can if you have a lot of money to spend buy them from ebay too, but I find that ebay is too expensive for most plates, way above the "market value" found at a collectors meeting for example.
If you are wanting to collect some, also be very aware there are a lot of fakes circulating the internet, some of them look quite good, so always find out if the plate should have security features or who is the official manufacturer (if applicable). Most collectors will be happy to give advice on this as most of us hate the fakes, although there are quite a few bad people who will try to sell or exchange a fake plate to a new collector

Correct, I wrote "EU" style because of the blue band, so it was clear which style I was talking about, and I see I didn't at any point write about the Muslim territories to make this clear.

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