Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
thisismoney.co.uk
thisismoney.co.uk
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…
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.
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.
When an envelope gets jammed in a sorting machine and some postal worker has to quickly clear the jam, stuff the contents back, and restart the machine, what you receive will look like a complete mess.
The whole process is pretty daft if you think about it, though. Many of us had perfectly good stamps before. Royal Mail decided not to honour them — itself an ethically dubious policy, given how those stamps had been marketed and sold — and effectively forced us to swap them out.
To enable that, they set up a system where you had to send them old stamps collectively worth up to (IIRC) £200 without any verifiable proof of what you’d actually sent, in an envelope clearly recognisable as containing that type of stamps. Then they’d send you back replacement stamps, also in a clearly recognisable envelope, which ironically should now be voidable in the event of a problem, but evidently without any willingness on their part to actually do so. For as long as I can remember, the public have been advised never to send cash by post, so the postal service forcing everyone to send a cash substitute in clearly identifiable packaging both ways was an… interesting… strategy.
In a surprise to seemingly no-one except Royal Mail, there are now widespread reports of the clearly identifiable, untraceable, fungible value tokens going missing on the way in or their replacements themselves being replaced by counterfeits on the way back. There also seems to be a not-at-all-dodgy secondary market now, where you can buy the aforementioned replacement tokens for less than their “face value”.
However, based on my experience, Royal Mail don’t seem to think there is any problem here. Based on reports such as the one we’re discussing today, a significant number of innocent people might already be out some extra money as a result, and that money seems to be ending up with Royal Mail. A cynic might think someone had set up a scheme openly inviting theft and counterfeiting, forced a country full of people to use that scheme or lose money, ignored the obvious problems even when they were explicitly reported, and then directly profited from the criminal activity.
(For avoidance of doubt, in my previous comment, I meant that we had no opportunity to refuse the delivery.)
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Not to be confused with Royal Mail.
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.
The CPS can already stop a particular private prosecution - take it over and then drop it.
I agree with 1. The Royal Mail is a de facto monopoly for sending letters (less so for parcels).
> 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?
Yes, I've been aware of it for about 10+ years, it's been covered on-and-off in the mainstream media for years. I think the (excellent) ITV series was well-timed to coincide with the current investigations and has improved understanding of the industrial scale of the injustice.
Thinking about all the mistreated sub-postmasters and mistresses and how for some of them it ended, ruined, or dominated their lives is heartbreaking. To be honest, even just thinking about those shunned by their communities and neighbours because everyone was told they were criminals is awful, never mind the lives cut short.
I do hope that now there is such clear evidence of the injustices available that people can be compensated properly and have their reputations restored.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240089230/Bankruptcy-pr...
>A seventh postmaster, Alan Bates, refused to sign his weekly accounts, saying it would have made him liable for any losses. He has called for a public inquiry.
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.
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.
Of course. Their goal isn't to fool the post office; it's to be just good enough to sell to buyers.
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?
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.
There's no need to have crypto if you're the authority on both assigning and verifying the barcodes. That way, no attacker will be able to create a barcode and have any hope of it working.
The spec is here: https://www.royalmail.com/sites/default/files/Royal-Mail-Mai...
I do wonder if this now means it is in theory possible to track items sent by letter post.
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.
Reused barcode does not mean counterfeit.
> Attempted reuse is exactly what would be prevented by scanning the barcode and seeing it had already been used.
Sure, but the alleged crime here is not attempted reuse. It is counterfeiting - as shown in the pic of the Royal Mail fee request label.
And the fact it did not tick the reuse box suggests it does not.
https://puryearlaw.com/2015/12/27/federal-counterfeit-postag...
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).
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.
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.
This is called "fraud" and in any properly-run country people would be doing long prison sentences for it.
Sadly, the UK is not a properly-run country.
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...
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
So much so that the original Ponzi scheme involved arbitraging the price of stamps via international reply coupons (and then promptly got way out of hand).
And by the second batch they'd have counterfeited 198, so I fail to see the problem...
In essence, it's easier to make any counterfeiting illegal, and then not prosecute the person who once prints a picture of a stamp and tapes it to a letter. Trying to make counterfeiting legal in certain situations can be abusable.
Seriously, as a rule of thumb, none of those extremely simple loopholes you can come up in five seconds of thinking work: there people were before you, and they too could think (even though in case of lawmakers it can sometimes be hard to imagine that they can actually think).
And yeah, these loopholes don't work because people tried them and now counterfeiting one stamp is illegal. That's my point.
Imagine I own a setup that allows me to produce counterfeit stamps. Every fifteen minutes I make 99 and then place them for sale. I sell them, then make 99 new counterfeit stamps and repeat the process.
All the risk is offloaded to anyone that buys more than 99 stamps, while the person capable of making them is safe barring some sort of mistake. All their money comes from a legal sale, meaning they're under no obligation to make sure their customer isn't reselling the stamps. So if the middle men gets arrested, the operation can continue immediately.
Yes, I can think of issues too, like eventually they stake out your location (though they'd probably need warrants of some sort.) I still think it shows that allowing someone to counterfeit 99 stamps opens loopholes the current law stops.
Oh, and from your other post, there are $9 and $30 stamps, meaning this method could counterfeit over $10,000 an hour.
All a prosecutor needs to do is show that you made two batches. If you make a batch every 15 minutes, how do you expect not to get caught?
If they catch the middleman delivering two batches, and the middleman snitches, you're done. Or even if they have one batch, but they get offered a reward to say where they got it. Then the authorities only need to get evidence you made 1 more stamp.
And don't tell me you're going to sell to a brand new middleman every 15 minutes.
Even if the middleman flipped, unless you made them in front of them you could say you got them from someone else.
Yes, they may eventually be able to pin it on you, but under the current system they can instantly charge anyone that is a serious counterfeiter and ignore someone who counterfeit one stamp. They don't need to bother making someone flip then somehow proving you've made at least 100 stamps.
I will say, this explains most of our disagreement, with a bit more coming from my opinion that making this a misdemeanor would still allow some abuse, depending on the punishments.
And I'm done, I no longer find this fun. I don't think the current law is being used to unjustly punish people, and that's good enough for me.
Then why did you say "if the law only forbid counterfeiting 100 stamps"??
I'm done too, because my entire argument was based on what you actually said, not what you secretly meant and never clarified.
Also the "unless you made them in front of them" excuse about proof could be applied to making even 1. You're grasping at straws to make conviction sound more difficult than it is.
You then kept defending it.
> you can see the edit I made
Even after that, you were still insisting there were loopholes.
After clarifying my position, I figured you'd either reply with "yes, we were on different wavelengths" or you'd accept we were talking about possession. So when you continued, I assumed you were talking about possession too. My mistake.
I think you/the other person (assuming that's what their question meant) took it as "each page printed only has 99, but they're still printing multiple pages per run" while I meant "each run has 99 stamps, then they distribute them."
edit or you think the law could be based on how many counterfeit stamps they had made, not possession. Dunno, we're really spending too much time attacking my bullshit hypothetical that was meant to say "make it hard for the law to have a loophole."
In that case they're not making much money per batch and they have to only ever get caught once in their life, so it's not much difference to them, it only makes a significant difference to someone that isn't mass-producing stamps.
> Dunno, we're really spending too much time attacking my bullshit hypothetical that was meant to say "make it hard for the law to have a loophole."
Well I don't think the original had any loopholes, which is why I'm pushing back on your attempt to say that by pointing out a loophole.
I took issue with somebody criticizing that law by saying only counterfeiting one stamp shouldn't be a crime. So I pointed out that if you made some arbitrary non-one number the breaking point you're opening up loopholes. I'm not trying to introduce loopholes, the law is what it is to prevent loopholes.
And the ridiculousness of counterfeiting one stamp being a felony is avoided by not prosecuting anyone who only counterfeits one stamp.
You're suggesting a lot of loopholes that don't work.
He said someone eventually tracked him down and he was just told to stop doing it.
This caught my eye:
Boggs was first arrested for counterfeiting in England in 1986, and was successfully defended by the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC & Mark Stephens and acquitted.
I'll leave the QC -> KC edit for others and wonder how many dated QC's are on wikipedia and whether a QC who died before the Queen remains a QC or becomes a post mortem KC ?
Transgenderism follows the opposite convention: once you transition to a new name and gender, you do so retroactively and all existing publications about you become dated, inaccurate and offensive. But I think that's the exception here in normal writing style.
I note that:
After being turned down by several leading lawyers, Dennis and Anderson secured the services of barrister and writer John Mortimer, QC (creator of the Rumpole of the Bailey series) who was assisted by his Australian-born junior counsel Geoffrey Robertson; Neville chose to represent himself. At the opening of the trial in June 1971 Mortimer stated that "... [the] case stands at the crossroads of our liberty, at the boundaries of our freedom to think and draw and write what we please".
is on the money, Mortimer was a QC at the time (1971) and Robertson was yet to be appointed (1988).
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.
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.
put your enemies' address as sender (not legal advice)
"Pay us $ (even though legally you don't have to), otherwise we'll be keeping and/or destroying your stuff".
Extortion :)
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.
We had one of these a year and a half ago, similar story. Seemed BS back then, so this could be a big problem.
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.
> I imagine the main reason to do it was to make it harder to use fake stamps
it was never put forward as a reason IIRC. How common are forged stamps in the first place, to make it worthwhile
Aren’t there cases where bank robbers were caught after the fact using knowledge of the serial numbers of the stolen bills?
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).
How do you think this happens? The codes are not scanned at the shop.
> when transaction for these stamps was registered.
Where is this registered?
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.
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.
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.
My receiving a letter by actual mail now usually means I have forgotten to set up e-invoicing for a service I subscribe to.
Yet, most of the infrastructure required to handle the (vastly reduced) volume of mail remains.
(I would be surprised if an increasing amount of packages being shipped due to online shopping offsets the reduction in letters mailed)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1leBjOXKNneuPVZt2PRnI...
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.
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.
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...
I raised a complaint and was basically told to go fuck myself.
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.
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.
Insane!
Britain imitating Monty Python.
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
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.
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.
https://www.mycurrencycollection.com/blog/1-2013-new-york-du...
If you told me yet another UK institution had systemic issues (NHS?), I would not be surprised, and that is very sad. It should not be this hard to do better. Right? Or am I just an ignorant Yankee?
Roughly once every two weeks, here.