I would promise to take them down, but do it slowly. The sign police will remove them for you, if you’re slow enough.
Meantime, drive by your sign placements, and keep track of which signs are removed, and which ones aren’t. This will tell you where the sign police aren’t ‘patrolling.’
Some areas are sticklers, and other areas could care less, even if the rules are the same.
So, if you’re slow enough to remove this first batch, you can see which areas are lax and which areas to watch out for.
That said, it pretty normal to put up signs on Friday evenings, and take them down on Sunday evenings, if you want to keep out of trouble, but get your message out. The sign police don’t work weekends.
Also, signs that just stay up, become invisible after a while. They need to be changed out once in a while. People stop noticing them. So, a sign that goes up and down regularly, will be noticed by more people, more often.
As far as finger printing the signs and all, I’ve never heard of a codes administration ever spending the kind of money, and time, on a nuisance issue. They can barely keep up with graffiti artists, weeds and trash, much less doing forensic crime investigations on bandit sign posters. This just does not happen.
What will happen… the codes administrator will call on your sign, pretending to be a seller, and set up an appointment for you to see his property. You show up, and start asking questions about the property; he reveals his identity, and issues you a citation, on the spot, for posting illegal bandit signs. Whoopsie.
Another thing you can try to get around the sign police, to find private property that faces a busy street, and pay the owners to place your sign on their property for a fee. $10/week is a great start. That’s $40/mo. It’s usually not illegal to post on private property, where you have permission of the owner.
Some sellers will want ‘nicer’ signs posted, before they let you post signs. So adjust. Maybe you can post the less organic-looking (professionally printed) signs on the “paid lots” and post the more organic-looking ones (handwritten) on the weekends?
Meantime, it’s public property where you’ll usually have the problems posting during the week.
Hope that helps.