ChatGPT Letters Outlasted a Three-Year Parking Charge

Rafal Goral, a 45-year-old refinery worker from Chelmsford, saw a £100 Newquay parking charge cancelled on September 25, 2026, after ChatGPT drafted his letters. Smart Parking Limited still says he overstayed. No judge ever heard the defence he sent in.

The file had run since August 2023, through two collectors and a refused £60 offer, up to about £300 and an October 2026 hearing. Goral calls it principle. The operator calls the ticket correctly issued. Those two clocks never met in court.

Sixteen Minutes on Tower Road

Goral pulled into the Tower Road pay-and-display car park in Newquay, Cornwall, at about 10:12 a.m. on August 4, 2023, for a day at the coast. He says he joined a long queue at the machine, found it taking cash only, and switched to the RingGo parking app. Poor signal slowed the download and the account setup. He paid, then went on with the day.

Smart Parking Limited issued a parking charge notice on August 25, 2023, for £100 (about $130). The notice listed insufficient time paid. It said his payment came through 16 minutes after the car entered. In September he appealed. He says he heard nothing back.

“I appealed straight away and I heard nothing from them,” Goral said. “They were harassing me and sending me letters saying that I had to go to court. They were trying to make me scared. You have to give people the time. I told them exactly what my problems were. They could see on the cameras that I was trying to sort it out. I am their customer, how can you treat your customer like that?”

ANPR cameras start the clock at the entrance, not when a driver reaches a machine or finishes setting up an app. A queue, a cash-only terminal and a weak signal all sit on that clock. That is the gap his appeal tried to name.

Smart Parking Says He Overstayed by 11 Minutes

The operator tells a different story about the same visit. A Smart Parking spokesperson said the firm was brought in to manage Tower Road “to stop parking abuse and to ensure people are treated equally,” and that signs require payment at the machines or on RingGo.

“In the case of Mr. Rafal Goral, he used the RingGo app to pay for 4 hours of parking but stayed on site for over 4 hours and 11 minutes, so was correctly issued a charge,” the spokesperson said. “Importantly, if Mr Goral felt he was in danger of staying in the car park over his allocated time, he could have topped up his payment using the RingGo app which would have alerted him to this fact.”

On his appeal about broken machines, the firm said it checked. “We checked this, and ascertained that they were working and were used by numerous other motorists on that day at Tower Road. In light of this we rejected his appeal and passed the matter onto debt recovery to resolve.” Smart Parking said it belongs to the International Parking Community and follows that group’s guidelines, including an audited appeals process.

TWO CLOCKS ON THE SAME VISIT

On the company’s figures, the overstay is 11 minutes against a 4-hour payment if time runs gate to gate. The private parking sector’s single code of practice, published by the British Parking Association with the IPC, mandates a 10-minute grace period at the end of a paid stay. An 11-minute overstay sits on that line. Goral’s 16 minutes to pay is a different clock, the time from entry to completing payment. Neither version was tested in front of a judge.

Why the £100 Charge Lasted Three Years

After the silent appeal, a collector wrote in January 2024 demanding £170. Goral contacted them. He says the letters ran about four months, then the file went on hold. About a year and a half of quiet followed.

In November 2025 a second collection firm wrote. The amount was then about £300, with a hearing listed for October 2026. A mediator became involved. Smart Parking offered to cut the charge to £60. He refused.

“From start to finish it was not about the money, I could pay it, but it is about the principle,” he said. “If you know you are right then you shouldn’t be paying any money to them. This is kind of a David and Goliath battle. They have lawyers and they are a big company and they just gave up in the end.”

THE THREE-YEAR FILE

1. August 4, 2023: Enters Tower Road at about 10:12 a.m. and pays through RingGo after a queue and a cash-only machine.
2. August 25, 2023: Smart Parking issues a £100 notice listing insufficient time paid, 16 minutes after entry.
3. September 2023: He appeals and says he receives no reply.
4. January 2024: A collector demands £170. Letters run about four months, then the case is put on hold.
5. November 2025: A second collector warns of an October 2026 hearing. The sum is about £300. He refuses a £60 cut.
6. September 25, 2026: An email says the claim and the charge are dropped, weeks before the listed hearing.

He tried the Citizens Advice helpline a few times and found it less useful than the chatbot. The money at stake stayed in the low hundreds. The file still ran for three years, which is how these claims are built: a small original sum, then collectors, then a court date that most people never want to face.

Every Collector Letter Went Into the Chatbot

Goral’s method was simple and repetitive. Each time Smart Parking or a collector wrote, he uploaded the letter or email to ChatGPT and asked what to send back. He had it draft the defence he filed for the listed hearing.

From start to finish I was asking ChatGPT every time I got a letter what to do. It was telling me what to say, where to go, and everything. I did it all with the help of AI. They even prepared my defense which I sent to the court. I want the public to know that they can do it and they shouldn’t give up. People don’t want to go through the hassle, so they just pay but it is wrong. It is shocking.

Rafal Goral, refinery worker, Chelmsford

OpenAI does not sell that workflow as lawyering. Its usage policies, updated on October 29, 2025, bar the tailored legal or medical advice that requires a licence, unless a licensed professional is involved. The same rules also bar using the tools to automate high-stakes decisions in legal work without human review. Drafting a reply to a parking collector is still on the user. The person who hits send owns the words.

That is the part the parking industry already automated on its side. Cameras log the entry. Template notices go out. Collectors add fees. County court claims follow in bulk. Goral used a chatbot to keep answering at the same pace, for free, for three years. He was not buying a barrister. He was refusing to be the defendant who goes quiet.

No Judge Ever Heard the ChatGPT Defence

On September 25, 2026, weeks before the listed October hearing, Goral got an email saying the case was over and he owed nothing. “I am so happy. This is something that properly raised me up after three years of this fight,” he said. “I was so ready to go to court. I would have gone all the way to the high courts. I won the war without the final battle.”

Smart Parking has not said why it withdrew. A discontinuance is not a ruling that the 16-minute payment delay was lawful, or that the 11-minute overstay was not. It is the operator choosing not to spend a hearing on a claim that began at £100. In the small claims track, a defended private parking file often dies at this point, because sending someone to a local court can cost more than the ticket.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The drop: An email on September 25, 2026, told Goral the claim and the charge were cancelled.
• The defence: He filed a ChatGPT-drafted defence for a hearing listed in October 2026.
• The operator’s line: Smart Parking still says he paid for 4 hours and stayed more than 4 hours 11 minutes, and that the machines worked.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The reason: The company has not said why it discontinued.
• The weight of the chatbot: There is no public record that any ChatGPT passage persuaded a judge, because no judge sat.
• The true clock: The 16-minute payment delay and the 11-minute overstay have not been reconciled on evidence.

Credit the chatbot for keeping a working-age defendant in the correspondence. Do not credit it with a judgment it never received. The cheaper move, for a firm that issues volume tickets, is to stop once the other side keeps writing.

One in Six Legal Disputes Now Hits a Chatbot

Goral is not an outlier in the intake figures. On September 1, 2026, the legal charity JUSTICE and the Administrative Fairness Lab published the first large UK survey of this habit. They found about one in six people with a legal problem had used an AI chatbot for help, advice or information.

THE JUSTICE SURVEY

• The sample: 3,287 people across the UK; 1,428 had a legal dispute in the previous two years.
• Chatbot use: 233 of those 1,428 used an AI chatbot; 77 shared transcripts of the queries.
• Not a substitute: Only 6% relied on AI alone; users also went to search, government sites, advice centres and family.
• Who uses it: 26% of 18- to 24-year-olds with a recent problem, against 10% of those aged 55 to 64.

The problems people took to chatbots were the ones legal aid rarely covers: housing, work, debt, consumer fights and family issues. Users asked for jargon in plain words, checks on a lawyer’s email, draft complaints, and, often, reassurance. JUSTICE warned that a warm, agreeable bot is more likely to back a false belief, and that the most anxious-sounding users can get the least accurate answers. Chatbot users were more likely to be younger, male and in work, which is a poor match for the people most shut out of advice.

The question is not whether AI becomes part of people’s legal journeys – it already is. This research provides a unique insight into who is using it and how. The challenge now is ensuring people receive reliable support, while addressing the unmet legal needs that drive some towards AI in the first place.

Ellen Lefley, Deputy Legal Director, JUSTICE

County court claims rose 30% from 319,242 in the fourth quarter of 2022 to 415,807 in the fourth quarter of 2025, a stretch that begins with ChatGPT’s public launch in November 2022. JUSTICE is careful: that is correlation, not proof the bots caused the surge, and the figures do not strip out the rebound from Covid-19. Advice charities, meanwhile, say they are wading through more AI-written packs brought in by clients.

A year before Goral’s email, Lancashire chef Loren Cole, 37, used ChatGPT to pick at a £60 Parkingeye charge from Two Saints Retail Park in Ormskirk. Parkingeye dropped that claim in April 2025. Cole then used the same tool to pursue costs. The parallel is the workflow: feed the operator’s letters in, send the replies out, stay in the case until the firm steps back.

An Arizona Appeal Collapsed on Bad Citations

The cheap-letter trick has a hard ceiling once the document has to cite law. In Dineen/Shibata v. Kotchka, decided July 15, 2026, the Arizona Court of Appeals sanctioned Jeffrey Kotchka, a self-represented son in a probate fight, for generative-AI citations in his opening brief. The panel found six of the eight citations deficient. Two of the cases, the judges wrote, simply do not exist.

WHAT THE ARIZONA BRIEF GOT WRONG

• Volume: Eight citations in the opening brief; six did not check out.
• Inventions: Two cited cases did not exist.
• The rest: Wrong pages, and rules or facts pinned to cases that did not contain them.
• The excuse: Kotchka said he used generative AI and internet research and did not verify the cites; the court refused a good-faith defence.

Judge Brian Furuya, writing for a unanimous panel, treated invented authorities as sanctionable whether or not anyone meant to lie. The court pointed to a database of AI hallucination cases kept by legal technologist Damien Charlotin, which at the time of that opinion had logged 1,751 instances of AI-invented content in legal paperwork, 1,208 of them in U.S. filings. Kotchka was ordered to pay the share of the other side’s fees spent untangling the fake cites. Use of the tools was not banned. Filing them unchecked was.

Submission of hallucinated case citations, intentional or unintentional, is unjustifiable. To accept a defense of lack of ill intent would legitimize reckless indifference to the truth and accuracy of court filings and tolerate some level of misrepresentation. This we will not do.

Judge Brian Furuya, Arizona Court of Appeals

Goral never had to cite a case that a clerk would pull. He was answering collectors about a car park visit, then filing a small-claims defence. If the bot had invented a British authority, the harm would still have been a few hundred pounds, not a probate appeal. That is the limit of the Newquay story, and it is also why the method spreads: the tickets are small, the letters are endless, and the firms blink when someone writes back.

Smart Parking still says the Tower Road charge was correctly issued on an 11-minute overstay. Goral still says the cameras watched him try to pay. The claim is gone. The facts were never found.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did a Court Rule That ChatGPT Beat Smart Parking?

No. Smart Parking discontinued the claim, which ends it without a judgment on the merits, so Goral does not pay and there is no finding that the 16-minute delay or the 11-minute overstay was right or wrong. In England and Wales a parking operator that files a Notice of Discontinuance before a small-claims hearing typically recovers nothing from the defendant, which is why a fully argued defence so often finishes these files short of a courtroom.

What Is a UK Private Parking Charge?

It is a civil contractual claim by a private operator, not a council penalty and not a criminal fine, and it is usually issued after ANPR cameras log entry and exit on private land. If unpaid it can proceed as a county court money claim; ignore the claim form and a default County Court Judgment can sit on a credit file for six years, which is a separate risk from the original £100 notice.

What Do OpenAI’s Rules Say About Legal Advice?

The usage policies in force from October 29, 2025, also bar using the services to automate high-stakes decisions in legal work without human review, in the same “Protect people” list that covers housing, employment, credit and essential government services. That sits beside the ban on unlicensed tailored advice, so a motorist who pastes collector letters into ChatGPT is still the person responsible for every sentence that goes back to the operator or the court.

How Did Loren Cole’s Parkingeye Case End?

After Parkingeye dropped the £60 claim in April 2025, a judge on June 21, 2025, held the operator liable for Cole’s costs under Civil Procedure Rule 38.6, and a default costs certificate set the sum at £462.15 using the £19-per-hour litigant-in-person rate. A court order dated November 13, 2025, required payment, which Parkingeye made on December 1, 2025, after a final enforcement warning.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of a completed parking dispute and related public research. It is informational only and is not legal advice, is not a recommendation to use a chatbot for court filings, and is not guidance on whether to pay, appeal or ignore a parking charge. Anyone facing a notice, a collector’s letter or a claim form should consult a qualified solicitor, an accredited advice service or the operator’s independent appeals body before acting. Amounts, dates and case statuses are those given in the cited statements and filings and may change if a party issues a new claim or a court later rules on similar facts.