
Fake IDs in the age of the internet - aaron695
https://melmagazine.com/there-is-a-fake-idgod-and-he-lives-in-china-641bdfd9745a
======
TazeTSchnitzel
The mass use of fake IDs of this sort is a bizarrely American problem. In the
UK, you're considered an adult at age 18. Most (aside from the unfortunate
17-year-olds) university students can legally purchase alcohol, smoke, or
gamble if they so choose.

But we don't have MADD, I guess.

~~~
delecti
I think a big part of the problem is that America is very large and very car
focused. If you can reasonably walk to where you're drinking (or more
importantly, walk home from there), then you're less likely to drive drunk.
Many bars in America essentially require driving to and from.

~~~
_jal
I think the car-orientation of the US would greatly benefit from a European-
style approach to teaching kids about alcohol.

I lived in Germany for a year as an exchange student when I was 16, the age at
which kids can drink without a parent present. They can't get a license until
18. The vast bulk of kids there, in my experience, seemed to figure out sane
drinking well before they got behind the wheel.

Coming back to the US and going to college, I watched kids drinking at 18-19
and driving, because they were inexperienced with alcohol, and in a culture
that tends to encourage binge drinking.

It'll never happen; the US simply seems culturally incapable of healthy
approaches to easing kids through becoming adults on a number of dimensions.

~~~
delecti
> the US simply seems culturally incapable of healthy approaches to easing
> kids through becoming adults on a number of dimensions

I couldn't agree more, and numerous problems are pretty much a direct result.

~~~
Someone1234
The worst part is that teaching kids about alcohol safely at home, European
style, is ILLEGAL in much of the US, meaning that social services might come
take your kids if they discover you gave them a glass of wine at Christmas.

I grew up in Europe. I was planning on letting my kid try a small glass of
wine with food in their early teens. But doing so in the US, I actually risk
jail and loss of parental custody. Let that sink in...

The US has a really unhealthy attitude towards alcohol that results in binge
drinking and excess in college, and society here almost prefers it that way
which is depressing.

PS - I know many parents ignore these laws, but the point remains, the law
makes no exception for parental consent or at home.

~~~
sotojuan
It boggles my mind that outside my small social bubble, people around my age
(23) spend their whole weekends drunk. I'm not out to stop them and I accept
their choices, but I wonder if it's also a result of our alcohol culture. Most
people can't seem to enjoy just one or two beers.

~~~
throwaway18917
I'd rather be drunk with them than hang out with you and risk falling off that
high horse.

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SamBam
> in my case, hidden inside a box of red chopsticks. Though I reflexively
> tossed the utensils out with a glut of election mailers and Bed Bath &
> Beyond coupons, I soon realized they just might contain what I’d been
> waiting over two months for.

This is the weirdest part of the story for me. Does anyone else get boxes of
chopsticks in their mail so regularly that they instinctively treat it as junk
mail?

~~~
rsync
"This is the weirdest part of the story for me. Does anyone else get boxes of
chopsticks in their mail so regularly that they instinctively treat it as junk
mail?"

Actually, every two months or so we will receive an amazon package with some
item that we never ordered and is not in our purchase queue, etc. Something we
never even looked at.

I used to think this was just a mistaken fulfillment, etc., but now I think
it's intentional. I think vendors are mining purchase history to determine
likely new customers for item X and then sending a "mistaken" shipment to
introduce the product.

I have no evidence to back up that conclusion.

~~~
ue_
If you don't already know, you should be really careful about this. It's
something which scammers do once they've got hold of your card; websites often
require you to purchase something shipped to the billing address already on
your card before changing the address.

------
The_Hoff
_> The options for payment were Bitcoin and Western Union; since I’m neither a
Russian hacker nor a Dark Web impresario, I opted for the latter._

This is so frustrating for me to read. Western Union has its own set of
problems and its users throw money away on fees, but why is cryptocurrency
being thought of as a only being used by Russian Hackers and Dark Web
impresarios?

~~~
Analemma_
> and its users throw money away on fees,

Have you seen the transaction fees for Bitcoin lately?

~~~
flyingfences
Still cheaper than WU. A typical BTC txn fee is somewhere in the ballpark of
$0.50 right now. The author of this article paid WU a txn fee of $14 if I'm
reading it right.

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Arcten
I've been interested in this topic for a while. The article was fairly good
but I did have a few minor quibbles. For one, ordering from IDGod (the vendor
in the story) is known to be very reliable. If packages get stopped at
customs, a customer can contact support to get a replacement shipped at no
charge. Additionally, the advanced scanner BarZapp is pretty much a non-issue.
Almost any ID purchased from vendors on the subreddit mentioned in the article
will pass those easily.

~~~
SamBam
How will a fake id pass BarZapp? According to the article (I know nothing
about this, so could be wrong) it looks up the id in a database and returns
the name and dob of the owner. How could the made-up name be in the database?

Or are they cloning existing IDs, and the buyer doesn't get a choice in the
name?

~~~
Arcten
It's neither. All BarZapp does is read the barcode and check that it contains
reasonable information and it formatted according to the standards. Vendors
have figured out proper formatting so they look appropriate to BarZapp. Of
course, no fake id will pass actual lookup in a database. Except of course
cloned IDs, which are extremely rare in my experience. I've heard of stories
of someone with a stolen DMV database who would sell fakes with real
information for about $700 each, but I've never seen it myself, and no
reasonable vendor doing anything like that would be selling through the
clearweb.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
At that point you're talking about identity theft which is a _whole_ different
ballgame...

------
tclancy
About 5 years ago I went to a getaway-type bachelor party. Along with us were
the groom's future brother-in-law and two state police officers (friends of
the groom, it wasn't that exciting a trip). At one point in the night, the
brother-in-law (18) hands his fake ID over to the cops, they both stare at it
and go, "Nope, no way I could tell that was fake."

Ever since I've been waiting for the US to suck it up and drop the drinking
age back to 18, highway funds be damned.

~~~
emodendroket
Don't hold your breath.

------
iplaw
A friend of mine from the University of Texas was arrested by Federal Agents
while eating dinner in the cafeteria at Jester dormitory. He had purchased a
card printing machine, a hologram printer, a blue portrait backdrop, etc. and
set up shop in his dorm room. He made quite a bit of money before the law
caught up to him and, despite being older and wiser, still has that felony
charge hanging over him. A disgruntled customer who was turned away from a bar
on 6th Street snitched. Nevermind that this kid looked 15 and it wasn't the ID
that sold out his true age.

I am confident that these shipments from IDGod are being tracked and recorded,
and a bust of the customers and/or IDGod is in the works.

~~~
SamBam
I feel like a good seller is probably also someone who is choosy about his
clients, and doesn't sell to baby-faced 15 year olds.

~~~
pavel_lishin
And probably doesn't keep his equipment in his dorm room in plain sight.

------
driverdan
I'm a bit disappointed in this article. Interviewing someone who bought fake
IDs and a small scale seller from 1994 isn't that insightful. He should have
tracked down a current seller and interviewed them.

Prices have dropped in the past 10 years which I assume means increased
competition. It would be interesting to hear how that has affected the
business. I'm also curious about the techniques they use. When I was selling
IDs 13 years ago it was teslin, PVC card printers, and Alps printers. I assume
the Alps printers are no longer used since they went out of production in 2003
or 2004.

A lot of IDs are _still_ fairly easy to replicate. The hardest thing is a real
hologram which most IDs don't have.

~~~
Arcten
Teslin and PVC are still big, although some states are using polycarbonate as
well. Real holograms got a lot easier. IDGod (among other vendors), apart from
selling IDs, also sells bulk holograms, so most vendors on Reddit now have
them. The bigger hurdles are the higher security states with perforations,
raised signatures, windows, etc.

------
ben_jones
Several of my friends are college bartenders who check these IDs regularly.
Most fakes are easy to spot but its generally more of a hassle to actually
bounce someone then let them get by. If a bar gets any heat, like a higher
percentage of incidents outside in a given month, they'll step up their
rejections. Attractive people, and specifically attractive women, are let in
much more often.

------
post_break
This reminds me of back in the day when someone broke into the Ohio DMV and
stole the machine that made the IDs and starting making exact "fake" IDs.

~~~
scurvy
Before the days of prevalent computers and searchable databases, one would
just take someone else's information to the DMV and get a real ID with their
info.

~~~
curun1r
You didn't even need to use someone else's information, you could just use
your own with a different DoB.

Growing up, my "fake" ID was my passport. When I applied for it, they read my
birth year wrong (I guess my 7 wasn't too legible and they thought it was a
2). I could barely pass for my own age, let alone 5 years older, but it worked
most of the time.

All my friends ended up using the flaw that I'd inadvertently exposed when
their fakes got confiscated. It was just cheaper and more reliable to use an
actual government-issued ID.

------
fivestar
So many interesting threads to discuss on this matter.

The problem in the US is too many people hate that others have freedom--hence
the MADD group's desire to remove any semblance of fun in order to make
everyone else as miserable as they are.

The US drinking age, if there should be one at all, should revert to 18 and
the ID problem would pretty much disappear.

I can't describe all the ways that people have become emotionally and socially
stunted simply because we have too many laws making typical, normal human
behavior illegal in order so that some company can earn higher profits (think
lawyers, think insurance industry). They've ruined our way of life and we need
it back. We are a nation in hiding, ducking too many laws, too many cops, and
too many restrictions. I'm not saying people should be free to drink and
drive, but I am saying that all the laws limiting behavior have had tremendous
negative consequences.

On to the lowly driver's license. Once upon a time, possessing one
demonstrated that one could competently operate a motor vehicle. No more.
Today, most "driver's" can't drive worth a damn, and the "license" they hold
is an over-regulated, poorly implemented national identity card that you must
have in order to get on a flight or enter certain Federal facilities. It's
utterly stupid. Identity cards in general are dumb and over-wrought
contrivances that are mostly totalitarian in nature "your papers please"\--how
soon we forget. And now we have RealID, which is even worse, and soon there
will be a massive data breach of all that RealID information the feds are
hanging on to with all the attendant negative consequences for the people who
willingly surrendered themselves to big government.

That there exists a thriving illegal Id industry in the 21st century makes me
happy because it means the trap of tyranny isn't completed shut--there is
still resistance, still a means of escape.

People, Americans especially, and HN readers most notably, need to forego
their fears and re-learn what it means to be free again. Free doesn't mean
"subject to incalculable bureaucratic restrictions on one's life." Quite the
contrary. Be free, resist the bullshit!

The other, related matter that irks me is the background check. Never was
there are more worthless, false sense of security than the background check.
But that is a matter for another day.

------
arprocter
Interesting that they mention Boston - along with NC it's the only place where
my green card has been refused as an acceptable form of ID. I have no idea why
a federally issued photo ID with my name, DoB and photo on it apparently isn't
enough to prove my age.

As a Brit, it amuses me that there are apparently so many balding 20 year olds
with grey beards in the US that I am suspicious.

They also don't seem to like my SO's GA driver's license in Boston.

Edit - I should add that the second time we went back to the place which
wouldn't take my green card as ID they didn't ID us at all

~~~
Fripplebubby
Boston is the real deal when it comes to ID crackdowns. About 150k college
students so some tens of thousands of fake IDs, plus a history of blue laws. I
believe that legally they are even allowed to refuse legitimate out-of-state
US drivers' licenses (most places do not do this, but they can). Foreign
passports also can be refused. And that's not even counting the notorious "box
scanners" which, to my knowledge, are yet to be beaten reliably with a fake...

~~~
Fripplebubby
Meanwhile in the UK I have had many places accept my expired US license from a
rural state most have not even heard of. Once at a supermarket, a cashier
asked me for ID and I absent mindedly said "No thanks". He was satisfied with
that answer, and I didn't realize what I had said until I had already left
with my drinks in hand.

~~~
arprocter
The UK is pretty relaxed.

If you're 16+ you can drink beer, wine or cider with your meal if it's bought
by an adult. And in that scenario it would be rare to be asked to prove you
aren't 15

~~~
Apfel
I'm a 28 year old British man who is still regularly id'd. It's not all that
relaxed in my experience...

~~~
arprocter
I think it depends a lot on the town you're in and how old/young you look

------
realusername
Is that seriously how the driving license looks like in the US? It looks like
a student card, I understand why it's easy to duplicate now.

~~~
swimfar
Compared to what? I've seen much simpler driver's licenses from other
countries. Up until recently (2013 maybe) the French driver's license was
literally a piece of pink paper with a picture glued to it.

[http://flawlessfakeids.com/wp-content/uploads/French-Fake-
Dr...](http://flawlessfakeids.com/wp-content/uploads/French-Fake-Driving-
Licence-2.jpg)

~~~
danielbln
Compared to Germany for example with a bunch of holograms and whatnot:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/DE_Licen...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/DE_Licence_2013_Front.jpg)

In contrast to e.g. the French, our drivers licence is a valid means of
identification though.

~~~
Symbiote
That's the standard European driving license, which everyone has used since
2013, but many countries used from much earlier (2006-ish?).

This can prove your name and age, but not your nationality.

~~~
danielbln
That's a fair point, you can't use a EU driver's licence for traveling.

