About us

HandicappedFraud.org* was founded by Mike Birdsall in 2007 as a frustrated response when he noticed how often people park where they shouldn’t.

Tens of thousands of incident reports later, the site was acquired by SmartSign, the fastest growing signage retailer in the United States and owner of MyParkingSign.com. We promised the founders that the site would continue to serve its original purpose, and we’re keeping that promise. Here’s how we’ve added to the site:

• We’ve expanded our legal content, making HandicappedFraud.org a one-stop site for learning about your rights, including demand letters you can use to request accessible parking from an employer or property manager and some state-by-state legal information on the appeals process.
• We’re forwarding our visitors’ incident reports to 21 participating states to help them identify problem areas and improve law enforcement procedures from the top down.
• Although the overhauled site is hosted on one of our commercial domains, it’s still accessible from the old URL, and now it’s completely ad-free — we’re not dependent on donations, or the sale of products or ads from the site. We sell more than enough parking signs to support HandicappedFraud.org — and we think it’s important to fund the vital resources that it provides. This site is a way for SmartSign to give back to the community it serves.
• Soon, our site will send incident reports with photos to social media in order to amplify our message and raise awareness of the problem.

If you have any feedback or have ideas on how we can expand the site, please email:

[email protected]

*A note on nomenclature

The original site was called “HandicappedFraud.org,” and although “handicapped” is a word that we don’t typically use, we’ve kept that name for the sake of ease because a lot of people do use it. When many people look for parking-related websites, that’s the term they search for, so it’s the one we’re stuck with, at least for now.

We prefer the phrase “accessible parking” rather than “handicapped parking.” We encourage you to use language that accurately characterizes the parking, instead of a word that inaccurately characterizes the people who use it, many of whom don’t feel particularly “handicapped” by variations in human ability.