I had a PO box where all the packages were sent to. I still can remember how excited I was, riding my bike (I was 15) to the postal office and open that treasure chest full of foreign packages. I'm from The Netherlands and did a lot of swapping with people from Belgium, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Yes, real good times with a lot of friendly people.
I think they've done it for 8 years now to good success.
One day the police was waiting in front of the post office and got a friend of mine.
What is a PLK card, and what did your friend do?!?
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PLK = "PostLagerKarte", literally "mail storage card". It was (abolished 1991) a way to receive letters anonymously; like a P.O. box without your name attached to it. The [Wikipedia page](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postlagerkarte) even explicitly mentions its "illegal usage in the computing scene", so GP was likely referring to his friend using their P.O. box for (illegally) cracked software.
Here's a shot at translating that Wikipedia paragraph:
> Until their abolition, PLK cards were especially popular in the cracker scene because, compared to a regular P.O. box, no personal data had to be shared with the respective post office. PLKs were primarily used for anonymous sending and receiving of pirated software on floppy disks. [citation needed imho] The PLK addresses themselves were often listed digitally in the cracktros.
EDIT: Found it "Postlagerkarte"[1], I have heard that term before, but never was aware what it was. It feels strange that at a time you could do things easily, legally and anonymously, all at the same time. As a minor, at that. Let alone anonymously sending things to strangers. Admittedly I miss that world more than the Demoscene.
He died in 2010, maybe that's why we haven't heard much of him recently. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, but he was a bit of an annoyance.
Friends of mine had the police search their houses in 1987 for exchanging cracked C64 games with people all over West Germany. They were still adolescents, so they got away with a 100DM fine.
I was just a harmless teenager, copying games from friends (but also buying quite a few), but it seems I closer to some high profile crackers than I would have imagined. I wonder how many of them became part of the Demoscene.
Some influencers on TikTok actually set up PO Boxes where fans can send them tons of stuff. The idea may not be too far gone.