Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-13244469/Why-people-hit-5-fines-counterfeit-stamps.html

by gnabgib • 2 years ago

189 178 2 years ago

thisismoney.co.uk

nextos• 2 years ago

"It is unclear at what point these ‘counterfeit’ stamps have entered circulation, and their source — or whether they are genuine and Royal Mail’s scanning technology is at fault."

Given the precedents from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal, I think the second option is plausible.

My experience in the UK is that dysfunctional organizations try to hide issues by bullying their own customers.

toomuchtodo3• 2 years ago

It’s a scandal engine that occasionally delivers mail. No accountability, no repercussions.

matthewmacleod2• 2 years ago

Royal Mail and the Post Office are two separate organisations.

devnullbrain• 2 years ago

that occasionally delivers mail

Roughly once every two weeks, here.

bombcar• 2 years ago

Or it could be a bug in the printing, there have been cases before where things were accidentally duplicated that shouldn't have been.

https://www.mycurrencycollection.com/blog/1-2013-new-york-du...

nikdoof• 2 years ago

In the past six months I've had four letters returned to me because they went through the sort/scanner upside down and used the sender address on the CN22 as the destination address. I'd put money on it being a failure of technology.

ThePowerOfFuet• 2 years ago

Try putting the CN22 on the back instead.

quitit• 2 years ago

My experience in the UK is that dysfunctional organizations try to hide issues by bullying their own customers.

I noticed this from Royal Mail. I reached out to them multiple times regarding a scam carried out using one of their tracked products from an eBay purchase and they said there was nothing they could do about it. But there was something they could do, and it was already going on completely silently in the background.

I later received a letter from Royal Mail stating that the delivery did in fact not take place, and with that I was able to claim a refund from eBay. However my interactions with Royal Mail were not reasonable:

1. They did not disclose that the matter would be looked into, instead they stated unequivocally that it would not and there was no way to escalate the matter. This meant that my plans were altered on account of assuming that the funds were lost.

2. They were unwilling to provide any official statement to eBay regarding the limited "tracking" available for their own product, and naturally eBay won't accept second-hand statements. If they were slightly flexible this would have resolved the dispute promptly - and I doubt I was the first person to fall victim to this scam, so some communication between eBay and Royal Mail would seem reasonable.

3. They gave no notice that they found in my favour and would be sending me a letter as evidence. I only received that mail by chance as I happened to book the same accomodation in a later visit, and this luckily coincided with that letter's arrival.

The unhelpfulness, stonewalling and opaque investigation seem entirely designed to cover for their own shortcomings. They would have had location data for the signed delivery, and they would have immediately had visibility that this didn't match my address.

renewiltord• 2 years ago

These guys can't get anything right. I'd assume by default that their software is broken.

chrisjj9• 2 years ago

The real breakage is further up the chain ...

Ajay-p• 2 years ago

It is strange that a person would receive a fine for receiving a letter with a "counterfeit" stamp. That would make for a very nasty revenge operation - send your worst enemy letters with counterfeit stamps to cause them to incur a five pound fine.

ct0• 2 years ago

same goes for bad checks, the person cashing it pays a returned check fee!

HackerLemon• 2 years ago

You don't have to pay it. It's only payable if you want to receive the letter.

Leynos2• 2 years ago

The problem is that there is no way of knowing what the letter is. All you get is a slip through your door saying an item of mail is waiting for you and has a £5 fee to pay. If you're like me, you pay the fee, fearful that it might be something important.

toast0• 2 years ago

From the article, sounds like the recipient can pay the fine and get the mail, or not pay the fine and not get the mail. Maybe it'll get returned to sender, for insufficient postage? Maybe it'll be destroyed?

chrisjj9• 2 years ago

It is not a fine. It is a fee for optional delivery.

pacaro• 2 years ago

It's unlikely that it will be returned to sender. In the UK it is uncommon to write the senders address on the mail piece, and even if a sender address is procided, how do you know that the sender information is accurate?

kypro• 2 years ago

You pay the fine if want the post. You don't legally have to pay. Presumably it works like this because they can't always identify who sent the letter.

chrisjj9• 2 years ago

Presumably it works like this because they can't always identify who sent the letter.

Not to mention that this way targets the person that is far more likely to pay, and far less likely to challenge a false counterfeit charge.

jonatron• 2 years ago

It's impossible to say if this was detecting counterfeits, or incorrectly flagged counterfeits, without more information. I'd like to point to my recent experience trying to buy a mask from Amazon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39844229

delichon• 2 years ago

If this is really about a fine for counterfeiting a stamp, isn't £5 astonishingly low? In the US that's a serious federal felony with up to five years in prison.

https://puryearlaw.com/2015/12/27/federal-counterfeit-postag...

chrisjj9• 2 years ago

It is not. "Fine" is misreporting.

jcrawfordor• 2 years ago

The term "fine" seems confusing here. If you look at the form sticker, it seems apparent that £5 is just the on-delivery postage rate for an unpaid item. Different postal services handle this differently, but it's not unusual that a mailpiece that's lacking sufficient postage will be delivered to the recipient if they pay the postage, and it's also not unusual to make that a higher rate to account for the extra work involved in notifying the recipient and collecting it. Under some postal systems you can do this totally intentionally by marking a mailpiece COD.

Maybe Royal Mail really does call this a fine, but it seems like it's just a typical higher "postage due" rate, thus the still rather nominal amount. Paying is optional for the recipient, they could just ignore the notification and it won't be delivered.

The use of this approach for counterfeit seems sort of unwise considering the accusation involved in counterfeit postage, the USPS returns the piece to the sender in that case. But the items on the sticker make me think that Royal Mail has a general bent towards offering delivery no matter what. USPS would also return to sender if there's no postage at all, assuming the piece doesn't indicate the postage should be paid by the recipient. But you can see that the £5 sticker here is the same one used in that case.

Sometimes the situation is complicated by postal policy, for example UPU policy for international mail tends to strongly prefer attempting to deliver a mailpiece over returning it, so "postage due" stickers seem more common on international mail (particularly since the international rates can be confusing and it's easier to accidentally underpay).

adamm2554• 2 years ago

The issue is, the recipient is paying the fine.

I send you a letter with a fake stamp, you pay.

The £5 is an inconvenience, something you’d pay while tutting “what is the world coming to”.

The sender is none the wiser.

7.3bn letters delivered in 22-23 (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0032/272795/...)

If 0.01% of that are tagged as counterfeit, that’s £3,650,000 in fines.

jimnotgym• 2 years ago

Makes me feel like sending a load of them to the Daily Mail...

michaelmrose3• 2 years ago

It's worse than that. They introduced new stamps with barcodes and let you trade in your old lawfully obtained postage for the new barcoded stuff. They are marking some of their own lawfully obtained stamps as counterfeit and by dint of doing so stealing from their citizenry.

It's roughly analogous to having bought speed guns from an incompetent vendor which sometimes read 200 kph no matter what the speed and insisting their cops continue to use them and ticketing per normal because it would be very expensive to replace the guns.

RobotToaster3• 2 years ago

Forging stamps is up to 10 years in the UK, it's considered the same as counterfeiting money.

But I think it has to be proven that it was intentional, so if the sender was simply scammed by someone selling fake stamps that wouldn't be prosecutable.

duxup2• 2 years ago

I knew a guy whose hobby was drawing fake stamps on envelopes and mailing them.

He said someone eventually tracked him down and he was just told to stop doing it.

mauvehaus• 2 years ago

For today's lucky 10,000:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._S._G._Boggs

coldtea3• 2 years ago

In the US that's a serious federal felony with up to five years in prison.

For counterfeiting _A_ stamp? I guess in the US even breathing the wrong way is probably a serious federal felony.

Land of the free, and all that...

xnyan• 2 years ago

there are countries where it’s not a serious crime to counterfeit postage? I think the penalty is double (up to 10 years) in the United Kingdom for example.

boomboomsubban11• 2 years ago

I doubt they ever prosecute anyone for counterfeiting a stamp, but if the law only forbid counterfeiting 100 stamps a counterfeiter would do 99 at a time.

rtpg2• 2 years ago

I think it's important to internalize that stamps are like a form of currency[0]. Like you stick it on the envelope to pay the shipping fee. There are tax stamps/revenue stamps which are used to pay for things in a way that is hard for the fee collector themselves to steal.

I applied for a visa-related thing a month or so ago. The fee was 6000 yen, so I stuck 2 3000 yen stamps on the application form. I had paid the application fee, the money can't be stolen by the public servant taking the application form (well, not easily, at least, I'm sure there are sleight of hands), and the purchasing of the stamp happens at a trusted third party that could commit fraud but is heavily incentivized not to (on account of me being able to directly cite where I bought it, and the agency knowing who I am).

[0]: Pedants who want to say it isn't or that it's _exactly_ a form of currency: please go away

wkat42422• 2 years ago

It's not really a fine for using the counterfeit stamp. After all, the recipient pays it and they had nothing to do with acquiring or placing the stamp whatsoever.

So it's not really a fine in the criminal sense. And I assume you don't admit any wrongdoing or avoid prosecution by paying it. It's more like a processing surcharge.

adamm2554• 2 years ago

Royal Mail needs to be slapped with a massive Freedom of Information request. We need to see how many fines have been paid.

We had one of these a year and a half ago, similar story. Seemed BS back then, so this could be a big problem.

matthewmacleod2• 2 years ago

Royal Mail, as a private (well… public) company, is not subject to FOIA requests.

lmm• 2 years ago

They're a creature of the state, you can't practically opt out of Royal Mail. If they're not subject to FOIA then they need to be.

adamm2554• 2 years ago

Well… that’s convenient. The more you know. Isn’t privatisation great!

RobotToaster3• 2 years ago

While it would be completely unsurprising if this is yet another royal mail cockup, there's been loads of suspiciously cheap stamps all over places like ebay, so it's possible people are just getting scammed.

andrewaylett2• 2 years ago

The stamps have "unique" codes, but a genuine counterfeit must still have a code -- and to be useful it must duplicate the code on a real stamp.

If the counterfeit gets used first, the stamp is marked as spent, and when the unlucky purchaser of the real stamp tries to use it, they're told theirs is "counterfeit" because it's flagged as "used" in the database?

chrisjj9• 2 years ago

That would be dumb. Nothing prevents attempted reuse of a genuine stamp.

taylorfinley2• 2 years ago

Sorry, what about that would be dumb? Attempted reuse is exactly what would be prevented by scanning the barcode and seeing it had already been used.

This is exactly why gift cards have scratch-off material covering their secret keys, otherwise folks would just take a picture of the next card in the stack, wait for it to be funded, and then use it before the recipient does.

edit: And would you look at that, you can buy stamp sheets on Amazon.co.uk, and users have helpfully submitted a bunch of photos with barcodes visible.

taylorfinley2• 2 years ago

The barcode in the article decodes to "JGB S11221017031011395940006622112101 BC046285E760466C01" if anyone fancies having a crack at making a stamp keygen.

Leynos2• 2 years ago

I didn't actually realize one could fit so much into such a small barcode.

I do wonder if this now means it is in theory possible to track items sent by letter post.

1letterunixname3• 2 years ago

Likely, they use some authenticated hash like HMAC SHA-256 with a schedule of randomly chosen keys added periodically. (Can't really rotate out keys once generated.) GFL reversing the algorithm AND any working key.

Also, an "is it used" database has to be kept to prevent an analog replay attack by reusing the same barcode. The most efficient way to keep track of used stamps would be a bloom filter. A poor implementation would lead to false positives, and mailers being accused of fraud. It also has should be highly reliable, highly available, and geographically disperse.

cyanydeez4• 2 years ago

What's important is it doesn't prevent counterfeit to consumers, which is failed planning.

rightbyte• 2 years ago

There was this computer system scandal when lots of post masters were convicted of fraud even though it was known the computer system was buggy. So I wouldn't assume too much competence involved.

rkangel• 2 years ago

That scandal was the Post Office, which is a completely separate organisation from the Royal Mail.

michaelmrose3• 2 years ago

If this is a problem the UK government should ask for their money back and the developer should ask their college for their money back. The only useful property of the barcode is verifiability and its not hard to avoid this problem.

sentientslug• 2 years ago

If that was true it wouldn’t be marked as counterfeit, the other checkbox would be marked for “already used”

seabass-labrax• 2 years ago

Here's an excellent blog post explaining the anti-forgery features of Royal Mail stamps:

http://www.jolschimke.de/briefmarken-und-ganzsachen/erste-ge...

What strikes me most is how crude the imitation stamps are - most aren't even trying to emulate the genuine printing techniques. It's all quantity over quality, trying to minimise the cost of producing counterfeit stamps whilst hoping to sell bulk loads of them to naive (or unscrupulous) customers.

It sounds like the biggest problem is the conflict of interest that the Royal Mail has, since they currently get to keep the fine payments as revenue. They have no direct incentive to stop the sale of counterfeit stamps, let alone deal with a tiny proportion of false-positives from their scanning machines.

Perhaps the answer is for the Royal Mail to be required to forfeit the revenue from fake postage fines, but be absolved of the responsibility to deliver these letters. Therefore, false positives in detection would simply be losses for their reputation, and they can decide, as a private company, whether or not this is an issue for their shareholders.

Personally, I would go the other way, requiring that the Royal Mail always deliver letters with fake stamps without issuing fines, but have proper independent investigations into both the origin of the alleged fakes and the reliability of the scanning machines. This isn't going to happen without an Act of Parliament, unfortunately.

pavel_lishin• 2 years ago

What strikes me most is how crude the imitation stamps are - most aren't even trying to emulate the genuine printing techniques.

Of course. Their goal isn't to fool the post office; it's to be just good enough to sell to buyers.

alibarber• 2 years ago

Rather like how a person can lose their bitcoin stash by accidentally sharing a picture of a private key, can stamps now be 'destroyed' by printing out reproductions of the barcode onto bits of paper and depositing them in postboxes?

martinald• 2 years ago

Think the comments are missing the point it a bit - it was Royal Mail _themselves_ who provided these "counterfeit" stamps.

michaelmrose3• 2 years ago

I like the theory someone else offered of other people "using up" the numbers o pre-existing stamps which would be feasible if the numbers were predictable.

datascienced2• 2 years ago

What, another “computer says no; you is criminal” connected with Royal Mail?

edward28• 2 years ago

Why let a pesky human get in the way of justice.

1letterunixname3• 2 years ago

In Soviet Britain, the computer is always right, data is always perfect, and software bugs don't exist... and privately prosecute you.

dhosek2• 2 years ago

What caught my attention was that the first-class mail rate in the UK is £1.35 which is about $1.70 at current exchange rates. In contrast, in the US a first-class stamp is $0.68 (I buy forever stamps in bulk so I was surprised to discover it had gotten that high). The USPS really is a bargain.

vinay427• 2 years ago

Yes, Royal Mail tends to be far more expensive than USPS for letters and smaller parcels, including internationally (e.g. UK to US costs far more than US to UK), but they have relatively reasonable pricing on medium-sized parcels in my experience.

It definitely is apparent which is the private company based on their pricing schemes, even besides the more consumer-facing UK Post Office locations that are almost entirely franchised and often operate as a small convenience store, etc.

NeoTar• 2 years ago

The prices have been increasing above inflation for years, but especially in the last few years - e.g. in 2001 a first class stamp cost 0.27 GBP (0.49 in 2024), and even in 2019 in was 0.70 GBP (0.86 in 2024).

gnopgnip• 2 years ago

Postcrossing maintains a list of international postcard costs by country. Going by cheapest for food, the US is #20, UK is about #100. Bahamas is the cheapest.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1leBjOXKNneuPVZt2PRnI...

michaelt• 2 years ago

Bear in mind the services are kinda different.

In the UK, 93% of first class mail is delivered next day, including Saturdays, and you can often post things as late as 4pm.

Whereas USPS first class mail is delivered in 1–5 business days. Admittedly, in a much larger country.

dhosek2• 2 years ago

I think though, that the percentage of USPS first class mail delivered in 1 day (including Saturday) is probably pretty close to 93% since a significant fraction of mail will be within narrow regions (I would guess that the DC–Boston area itself accounts for at least half of first-class mail).

Back in the Netflix DVDs by mail days, it was rare that it took more than a day for the DVD to get to or from the Netflix warehouse (when they started shuttering warehouses in the last few years of service, that went up to two days each way for a DVD from Chicago to Columbus, Ohio).

I’d also point out that mailbox pickup in the U.S. varies by the mailbox, but many of the ones near me have late afternoon (3–4p) pickups and if I go to the mailbox by the local post office it’s 5.30p. I can even take it to the downtown Chicago post office for a 9p pickup.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK2• 2 years ago

Especially considering the average distance between two addresses is several times longer.

Chris_Newton4• 2 years ago

I don’t know whether I should post this as it may be an ongoing case, but not so long ago I sent off my old stamps to the official “swap out” service to have them replaced by the new barcoded ones. A few days later, I did indeed receive equivalent new stamps back — in an envelope that had clearly been tampered with, being roughly cut open all down one side and having the paperwork accompanying the stamps obviously bent and having been pushed back in awkwardly.

I immediately contacted Royal Mail via their online system and noted the problem and my concern that this could mean the stamps had been replaced with fakes before reaching me. I asked if there was any way I could verify that they were legitimate before I used them.

A few days later, I received a bizarre email back from someone at Royal Mail, saying they were sorry to hear that I wasn’t happy with their response (what response?!) and can certainly understand my frustration but we are not able to progress any further (than what?!), along with various other words that seemed designed to try to appease me while not actually saying anything of substance, and a recommendation to contact some other part of Royal Mail, which I may yet do.

It was a surreal experience, but having been prompted to do it by seeing several reports of people who’d sent their stamps in and either never received the replacements or had problems with them, and having received such an obviously tampered delivery, with the entire process from collecting the stamps from my local post box to delivering the replacements to my home being under the control of Royal Mail, I can’t say I was particularly reassured by the response so far.

I haven’t yet tried to send anything using the new stamps…

2-3-7-43-18073• 2 years ago

well ... it's the royal mail which happens to be identical to the royal mail from the post office scandal. that's about the reassurance you got to expect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

1letterunixname3• 2 years ago

I was just about to write this.

If you can't make money by criminalizing the service providers, find new ways to criminalize the act of sending a letter on the demand side.

Brilliant! ;@]

Perhaps:

1. Deregulation and privatization don't work well for some critical services. The BPO should be re-regulated as a government department.

2. Abolish private criminal prosecution, as only the CPS should be allowed to bring criminal indictments.

retube• 2 years ago

The Royal Mail and the Post Office are not the same thing! They are completely separate businesses. The Fujitsu/sub-post master scandal has nothing to do with the Royal Mail.

bscphil• 2 years ago

The article credits a docuseries I've never heard of for making this a widely known issue:

A four-part television drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, was broadcast on ITV in January 2024, after which the scandal became a major news story and political issue.

I swear I read some long form journalism on this issue years ago. Anyone know what I might have found? For the Brits who have previously heard of this scandal, did you know about it prior to January of this year?

veltas2• 2 years ago

Some mail machines cut thick or oversized envelopes by accident sometimes. So this might not have been tampered with.

The right way to deal with anything you receive by mail is to return to sender, as long as it has a return address. Cross out your address, clearly write RTS on the front and in small write e.g. "item not sealed on arrival / tampering" or something, then stick in a post box. The sender has more recourse to deal with issues in transit anyway. Generally refuse anything sent that arrives like this.

Chris_Newton4• 2 years ago

Unfortunately, in this case the item was delivered by Royal Mail themselves and left in our mail box, so there was no opportunity to do anything like that.

I might have bought the idea of a mechanical issue causing the opening if it had been a clean cut and the contents had been otherwise undisturbed, but with a very rough tear and the contents having apparently been shoved back into the envelope, it seems rather less likely.

tim3332• 2 years ago

It's surprisingly easy to get fake ones on ebay for any criminals out there wanting to do a swap. Here for example https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/266403486260

cyanydeez4• 2 years ago

Is england turning into a third world country similar to a far right African state. This sounds like some Mafia stuff.

rvba• 2 years ago

Few things come to my mind:

1) There is a general batch of stamps and also a second batch, that is used to exchange "old" for "new" stamps. The second batch either contains duplicate numbers, or is not activated in the post system at all -> so those get marked as counterfeit

2) The barcode system has no error correction -> the scanners just read the codes "as is", without any sort of error correction / verification if they were read correctly. The incorrect numbers (wrong reading) are then marked as counterfeit

3) Incorrect readings vs some generic "list of stamps that were used" -> fake (?) duplicates marked by the system.

PHGamer• 2 years ago

why do we need to track stamps. seriously.

kazinator2• 2 years ago

penalty for those who receive (and accept) mail posted using one

Insane!

Britain imitating Monty Python.

zbyszek• 2 years ago

Monty Python imitated Britain first.

kazinator2• 2 years ago

Well, yes, and art did life, more generally.

switch007• 2 years ago

I'm curious if this started/accelerated when they switched to only accepting super special stamps that only their super special machine can determine whether they're genuine and unused? That would sure be a coincidence.

The fee was increased recently too I believe

This definitely needs investigating properly and determining if we have another Post Office-like scandal on our hands.

jlarcombe• 2 years ago

from my own experience, yes it did (never before the change and twice since)

2-3-7-43-18073• 2 years ago

knew an artist (Germany) who would paint beautiful fantasy stamps for letters. not a crime and it often went through.

matthewmorgan• 2 years ago

I'm amazed how they managed to bring in barcoded stamps without a peep from anyone about privacy. Sending a letter anonymously is now impossible.

pxeger1• 2 years ago

Well that’s not really true. It’s not like cash is deanonynising because of the serial numbers. You can still get stamps on a grey market or send someone else to get them for you, and I’m sure they’re sold in lots of places that don’t have CCTV. The postmark would always have identified the approximate source location, it’s just a bit more precise now.

kevinventullo• 2 years ago

It’s not like cash is deanonynising because of the serial numbers.

Aren’t there cases where bank robbers were caught after the fact using knowledge of the serial numbers of the stolen bills?

graemep3• 2 years ago

You can keep your privacy, but most people will not bother. Most people will buy stamps with a card (or phone) payment so there is a complete chain of identify.

The aim is mass surveillance so a few people going to the trouble of avoiding it is not a problem. True, it is meta data (not letter contents) but we know that is pretty powerful by itself.

I do mean it is the aim - they never really explained what the real advantages of doing it for, and I suspect there is pressure from the security services who are accustomed to seeing most communications (or at least most meta data) to seal what they see as a hole in data collection.

rtpg2• 2 years ago

When you send a letter, it's usually stamped by the post office you are sending it from, so you already gotta do a bit of work to stay anonymous when sending things out. And in the CCTV-loving land of the brits, I gotta imagine there's cameras on every postbox in the country

You now have to be more careful about buying the stamps themselves though. You could make a stock of them and not use them for a year or so (not like CCTV footage lasts more than a week).

IanCal2• 2 years ago

The barcode does not link to your identity.

scotty792• 2 years ago

It links to identity of whoever purchased them with credit card. Or whoever stood in front of the camera when transaction for these stamps was registered.

fifteen1506• 2 years ago

I think most people are missing the point here.

Why, for Christ's sake, is the onus of verifying the stamps put on the customers?

The Royal Mail created the problem. Don't give them money.

Otherwise bureaucracy and Kafkaesque issues will increase in the private and public sector.

PS: not from UK

Jochim• 2 years ago

This happened to me. My employer sent me a card and it was marked counterfeit.

I raised a complaint and was basically told to go fuck myself.

Theodores• 2 years ago

Several years ago I bought a box of small toy Easter chicks and sent them in lots of envelopes over a period of a few weeks to my mother, as if they were 'migrating', getting workmates to write the labels and send them so they would have different postmark towns. The idea was for them to be anonymous. Some had several chicks in the envelopes.

They kept arriving at my mother's and provided much amusement, with all but one of them arriving. I also played silly games to keep the postman on his toes, sometimes leaving out the postcode (zip) or putting other typos in the address.

After the migration I visited my mum and she had the chicks everywhere, quite a collection.

Then, about three weeks later, she had one of those cards meaning she would need to visit the depot. So she went, saw the envelope and knew what it was. In this envelope the chick was standing up rather than laying flat, to make the envelope too large for standard letter rate, hence the fine. She paid up.

After hearing this tale I realised I had dodged about 57 bullets, for any of the envelopes could have ended up too large for the letter rate.

At the time the post was affordable, with it not costing £1.25 a letter. The stunt would have easily cost me £100 had I wished to repeat it this year. I would have also run the gauntlet of the fake-forged-stamp malarkey, with it randomly costing my mother £5 just because the Post Office deemed their own stamps-with-QR-codes fraudulent.

It looks like I won't be using the post for a while, which is a pity.

robk2• 2 years ago

Well after the first time you just ignore the post cards wouldn't you? Easy way to handle returns too for sellers who can't cancel an order.

ryukoposting• 2 years ago

I'll defer to Occam's Razor and say that the Mail probably has a machine that's a bit buggy or imperfect.

The US Postal Service processed 116 billion parcels in 2023[1]. If they had counterfeit stamp detectors that gave false positives 0.0001% of the time, that's still 116,000 bogus fines per year. And the engineers might have no way to reproduce the glitch, because it's so improbable.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/320234/mail-volume-of-th...

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK2• 2 years ago

It's not a fine - you are not going to jail for not paying it.

throwanem• 2 years ago

Putting sub-postmasters in prison for someone else's theft looks pretty played out at this point, so I suppose this must be the new grift.

karaterobot• 2 years ago

What's interesting to me is that the meaning of 'counterfeit' is being shifted. Counterfeit does not mean actually counterfeit, it means 'we couldn't process this stamp', which is a different thing altogether.

I guess that either the Royal Mail's system is failing to read the bar code correctly, or it's encountering a bar code it's already seen before, and assuming it must be malicious. But in the latter case, there's no basis for saying the second use of the code is the counterfeit and not the first. That is, apart from doing actual forensic analysis on the stamp, which my guess is they are not doing—not in every case at least.

If someone called me a counterfeiter, or even just said I was benefiting from counterfeiting, I'd be pretty angry. Especially if I found out they were accusing me without any evidence, without doing any diligence beforehand, and possibly as a consequence of their own error.

LorenPechtel2• 2 years ago

I think you're nailing it--some black hat has figured out the encoding and is making fake stamps. Same as gift card draining.

cyanydeez4• 2 years ago

Really sounds more like Mafia interdiction of good stamps and replacement

antifa• 2 years ago

Wouldn't surprise me if the "encoding" was just unencrypted UUIDs.

wkat42422• 2 years ago

If this is really such a huge problem, the solution seems simple: simply let every mailbox scan the stamp before accepting the letter. For parcels this is being done already at the drop off point.

The mailbox could verify the stamp barcode and refuse it if it's invalid, or require a simple contactless payment when no stamp (or an invalid one) is present. Problem solved. It would also be handy because you don't need to keep stamps in stock for that once off time you need to post something.

Of course this tech hasn't existed for most of the life of the postal system but it does now. So why not do that?

Fining the recipient who had nothing to do with the alleged crime in question is a bit disingenious. It's something that was unavoidable in the past but not now.

Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?

Related Stories