18-year-old Niclas Matthei has become known as the “Reporting Master” in his home country of Germany after snitching on thousands of parking offenders to the police.

Not all heroes wear capes! Some wear neon green overalls and ride bicycles around busy streets hunting parking offenders and snitching on them to the police as a hobby, and because they consider it the right thing to do. Niclas Matthei, a young man from the town of Gräfenhainichen, in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt region, first made national news headlines earlier this year, when several prominent media outlets wrote about his unusual hobby -riding his bike around town, photographing illegally parked cars and sending the proof to the local police. He called himself “Anzeigenhauptmeister” or “Reporting Master” and he claimed that he only did his civic duty.

At just 18 years of age, the self-proclaimed “chief reporter” knows Germany’s parking regulations inside and out, so he immediately spots illegally parked cars when he stumbles on them on his daily rounds. Armed with his trusty smartphone, he photographs the offenders’ cars and sends the images to the local police to have them fined.

According to his own statements, Matthei wrote over 4,000 police reports last year, which resulted in a nationwide amount of collected fines of 140,995 euros ($154,227). Most of his “victims” were in Saxony-Anhalt,, but after seeing his popularity skyrocket as a result of national media coverage, he decided to conduct his hunts all over the country.

As you can imagine, Niclas isn’t very popular with motorists, and there have been times when his efforts were met with violence, but that didn’t dissuade him from his mission. He claims that all he wants is for parking rules to be respected, and for those who refuse to comply to be punished. He isn’t impressed by threats and even the occasional punch in the face only makes him stronger.

All I want is to enforce the road traffic regulations because people think they can park however they want,” Niclas Matthei told German tabloid Der Spiegel. “But then people like me come along.”

“Chief Reporter Matthei,” as the 18-year-old likes to refer to himself when speaking with police, received mixed feedback from the German public, with some people applauding him for reporting parking violations that the police often ignore, and others calling him a snitch for waging a war on motorists who sometimes don’t have available parking spaces. Even the mayor of Gräfenhainichen criticized the teen for hindering the works of the local authorities by flooding them with his reports.

Interestingly, Niclas’ mother hasn’t been very supportive of his work as Reporting Master, telling reporters that he was bullied in school and that snitching on people who parked illegally was now a kind of act of revenge.

 

“She claims that I don’t understand what I’m doing. That’s wrong. I simply accept it. Life is dangerous,” Niclas told RTL. “I made a conscious decision to become the informer at school so that I could report things.”