A 45-year-old refinery worker from Chelmsford, England, used ChatGPT as his lawyer for three years to fight a parking fine. He won without ever stepping inside a courtroom.
Rafal Goral parked at Tower Road car park in Newquay, Cornwall, on August 4, 2023. The pay-and-display machine only accepted cash, so he downloaded the RingGo app and created an account to pay. Poor mobile signal added to the delay. By the time his payment went through, 16 minutes had passed since his entry. Smart Parking Limited then hit him with a £100 fine.
Goral appealed in September 2023 but says he received no response. Instead, a debt collection agency sent him a letter in January demanding £170. He then turned to ChatGPT. He uploaded every letter and email to the chatbot and asked it how to respond each time.
“From start to finish I was asking ChatGPT every time I got a letter what to do,” Goral told media sources. “It was telling me what to say, where to go, and everything.”
After four months of AI-drafted correspondence, Smart Parking put the case on hold. However, a different debt collector picked it up in November 2025 and warned the matter was heading to court in October 2026. By then, the fine had ballooned to approximately £300. Smart Parking also offered to settle for £60. Goral refused.
“It was not about the money. I could pay it, but it is about the principle,” he said. “I am their customer. How can you treat your customer like that?”
Goral used ChatGPT to prepare his court defense as well. Then, on September 25, 2026, weeks before the scheduled hearing, Smart Parking dropped the case entirely. The company made no admission and offered no settlement.
Users reacted to the news on the internet, particularly on Reddit, where one user put their two cents:
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In his own words, Goral called it “kind of a David and Goliath battle” and said he “won the war without the final battle.” He is not the only one using AI this way. Loren Cole from Lancashire used ChatGPT to find weaknesses in a Parkingeye case against him. A court ordered Parkingeye to pay him £462.15 in costs and interest in November 2025. Meanwhile, DoNotPay claims its AI service has contested 250,000 parking tickets with a 64% win rate.
Smart Parking did not respond to requests for comment.
