Tasty
In the vast majority of cases, these plates are found on vehicles that have been normally retired, a procedure that involves the return of the plates for destruction.
The cars are then sold for export by shady dealers to equally shady foreign buyers (mostly in Ukraine.) Both parties are aiming for maximum profit and have little regard for rules and regulations. If sold without the knowledge of danish authorities, the seller doesn't have to pay taxes of the profit and can therefore sell the car at a cheaper price, which the buyer is very interested in.
The problem now is, that this way you can of course not get proper, legal export plates, but this isn't really a problem, since the buyer has no intention of playing by the rules anyway. The cars leave Denmark unregistered on trailers or car transporters, then, once arrived in the new country it's time to put plates back on.
The original danish plates have been destroyed, of course, but the buyer knows the old number so makes a new set of plates with that exact number and sells the car to yet another shady person: the new owner, who gets a cheap car and doesn't have to pay taxes, because the sale takes place on the black market.
By using the original number, you gain the advantage, that you know for sure that the number matches the model and that the car is not reported as stolen. If law enforcement in the new country is weak you can get away with this. A casual license plate scan will report, that the number belongs to a non-stolen car of the correct make, and that the plates are danish. I very much doubt that the police officers will check deeply enough to discover, that the car is no longer supposed to be registered.
Very often the fonts and spacing on these plates are completely wrong and they almost always get a Euroband, even if the original didn't have one. I suspect this may sometimes be on purpose, since the Euroband will instantly tell any law enforcers, that this is a danish car. Without a Euroband, they may have been tempted to stop the car and check, where the plate is from.
This particular car was deregistered in Denmark in 2018, no damages listed and never officially exported. To the danish authorities, it is "seen" as still being in Denmark and waiting either for a new owner or for scrapping.
The scrap flag has only been used regularly for a short time in Denmark - until last year, it wasn't mandatory to fill in an electronic scrap form, so there are thousands upon thousands of cars that have been retired years ago, but officially they're still listed as existing, although most of them have been scrapped.
Thank you for the information! I will be on a look for these deregistered plated cars being towed. Just because it's interesting too think that car could potentially be exported to Eastern-Europe and will never be on a Norwegian road again