Star-Spangled Banner National Historic Trail? You wouldn’t care about it if you were gambling instead.
Way back in 2012, you know, the before-times, Maryland issued a license plate to mark the anniversary of the War of 1812. The plates included a URL, www.starspangled200.org, which is supposed to lead you to the homepage for the Star-Spangled Banner National Historic Trail. And between 2012 and 2016, this particular plat was the default one issued for cars in the area.
At some point in the last year, however, that URL started redirecting to globeinternational.info. If you’re not familiar, that’s the page for an online casino in the Philippines. The first paragraph on the site absolutely slays me, by the way:
Filipinos love to gamble, so there is a growing need for new and improved gaming systems. Thanks, there are now a ton of excellent online casinos available in the Philippines. Filipino players are welcomed by many of the biggest and most reputable online gaming platforms worldwide. They all, without a doubt, have a lot to offer, from fantastic games to generous bonuses and everything in between. You can play a variety of exciting and fun games whenever you like.
It seems the first to notice this unusual redirect was a Redditor, libdd. libdd also posted evidence that the URL changed hands several times, though all of them were within the State or National Parks Service. A Maryland Department of Transportation representative told Vice that nearly 768,000 license plates have the URL on them.
The Wayback Machine narrows the window for when the redirect first appeared to somewhere between August and December 2022. Local reporting states that the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration is at work with their IT to get control of the URL back.
Source: Gizmodo
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