That’s outrageous. Well I live in Los Angeles and my experience is they do anything they can to trick people into paying more or paying a fine even if they’re parked legally. Two examples:

The parking meters are broken, shitty, screen unreadable, or if it does work, it takes so long to approve your card or tap that it tricks you into swiping/tapping multiple times and by the time it’s approved you see you paid for your parking spot two or three times the time amount you intended. And there’s no option for canceling & starting over.

Yesterday I was the first one to park along a particular curb where the parking meters are not perfectly aligned with the parking spots. The nearest meter to my vehicle appeared to be in the next spot forward but I surveyed the area carefully and was confident that was indeed my parking meter so I paid it up. A couple hours later a car had parked in front of me thinking that his spot was paid for. Hope he got a ticket LOL