A forged Apple employee badge
cabel.com
cabel.com
Pedantic point: electric typewriters (which have existed since the 1960s) do type in a way that looks exactly like this.
(In fact, note that the text on the real employee ID card, shown later in the article, doesn't look any less clean! It's just set in a different, narrower font.)
The smudginess of mechanical typewriters comes from 1. them striking (and especially, releasing) at the same speed you're depressing the key, and 2. having many of the keys necessarily approach the ribbon from an angle.
The keys being swung weakly by your fingers, also has the additional implication that the ink ribbons used in mechanical typewriters have to be soft and squishy (so: made of cloth), and use thin inks. These properties ensure a transfer from even a low-velocity impact. But the trade-off is that cloth ink ribbons transfer only a rough outline of what's struck; and thin inks are high-bleed inks.
An electric typewriter, playing out a pre-buffered line with a crisp, predictable report, using linear actuators and a rotating-ball type-head to bang a tape ribbon loaded with high-viscosity ink onto the page, can create text indistinguishable from books/newspapers of the same period, or from modern laser-printer reproductions of the same font faces. They're essentially character-at-a-time letterpresses!
(Also, ignoring electric typewriters for a sec: inks bleed more on thin, cheap paper. But this is [a forgery of] an employee ID card — where, for durability, a nice heavyweight paper or cardstock would have been used. You're always going to get a better-looking result inking such paper.)
The machine you just described is an IBM Composer, except the ribbon was not "high viscosity". Rather it was essentially solid, being a carbon ribbon with a mylar back.
Most electric typewriters were not Composers, so they did not pre-buffer lines. In fact most electric typewriters were not Selectrics so they didn't even use a ball. The IBM Executive for example used swinging type bars just like a manual typewriter, and it produced excellent copy that was frequently used as a master for offset lithography. (Source: Me. I used to own a print shop.)
The presence or absence of swinging type bars, pre-buffering, or balls makes no difference. Carbon ribbons and the repeatability of impression that electric provides are what matter.
And produced the most crisp type imaginable. I'm not sure any laser printer can compete.
Daisywheels were common, IIRC.
The oldest (late 1800s) mechanical typewriters were designed simply, with type mechanisms engineered under the assumption of a slow hunt-and-peck typist who would only be pressing one key at a time.
And this worked well, until typing as a skill developed, and people began to activate keys concurrently (with one type-bar potentially beginning to swing forward, before a neighbouring type-bar finished its return.) This caused the neighbouring type blocks on the end of the bars to end up binding together — usually at the end of their bars' travel, causing both keys to remain stuck down.
According to folk history, this type-bar-binding problem was solved in part through the development of the QWERTY layout — moving frequently-successive English-language letter-pairs so that they wouldn't be done using neighbouring keys. Regardless of the veracity of that, this still didn't truly solve the problem — early QWERTY typewriters still end up binding for many common words.
Later mechanical-typewriter manufacturers sought to solve this problem "for real", through internal engineering tweaks. Look up patents from the early 1900s-1920s, and you'll see many of these proposed. But one two-part approach stood out, and became nearly-universally adopted:
1. chamfering and carbon-lubricating the edges of the type blocks on the end of the type-bars; and then
2. allowing the type-bar linkages a bit of horizontal travel.
These two tweaks together, allowed the type blocks on the end of the type-bars to slip past one-another (at least when travelling at differing velocities, or with one rising and the other falling.) And this virtually eliminated binding — but not without trade-offs.
Mechanical typewriters with these fixes, have a slight looseness to the type-bars, and so a slight random wobble in the horizontal placement of type on the page (especially when the key was depressed slowly). And if two neighbouring keys are depressed in quick succession, either one or both keys are liable to shove the other slightly, resulting in one having quite a bit of horizontal displacement, and even a slight "edge-on impact" where one side of the type doesn't get fully inked onto the page. These characteristics can be easily observed in type specimens from the early 1900s, to the point that they are often used to date such specimens.
Nobody wanted to use these typewriters for professional typesetting if they could help it; they were just too "sloppy" at that point. (The earlier designs weren't, but the typebar-clash problem was just too bad for any "modern" professional typist of the era to volunteer to use them.)
The introduction of electromechanical typewriters in general, allowed large changes to the type-bars and type, for the same reason that drive-by-wire in cars allowed large changes to the transmission and linkages: without a sloppy human in the circuit, things could be far more crisp. Key-clashes could be solved without mechanical slop; and so the mechanism could be tightened back up.
At first, electromechanical typewriters — having nothing like a memory — were instead wired in a blocking fashion to avoid key-clashes. If you pressed two neighbouring keys in quick succession, the second key would "jam", refusing to depress until the first one returned. Essentially, all neighbouring pairs of keys were interlocked. This made typing on them very annoying — but required no fiddling to unstick, just a very attentive approach to typing, involving watching/feeling for unstruck keys, immediately stopping to re-key them. And the results were very crisp. So these typewriters were one of the first "enterprise hardware" — forced on typists (who didn't like them, but did tolerate them) by companies who wanted clean typed reports.
The next natural step was to turn the blocking solution into a non-blocking / asynchronous one. This was done through one-key buffering — with the typewriter using two loops of analogue(!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory as registers, to hold alternating key actuations and then play them back out. For most key actuations, this replay was instantaneous, with the electrical linkages to the type-bars being actuated concurrently. But neighbouring keys, again through electrical interlocks, would "put a hold on" their sibling key's replay (if that was the key struck) until their own replay was done. (One could compare/contrast these typewriter mechanisms with pinball-machine mechanisms, both being invented around the same time.)
When digital electronics came along, the delay-line memories were now storing digital serial codes instead of parallel electrical voltages; and the number of bits able to be buffered and refreshed in the delay-line memory increased, so multiple keypresses of neighbouring keys, or the same key, could be buffered as fast as they could be pressed, and then replayed in sequence. (Some early computer TTYs were built using this sort of typewriter platform!)
Some electronic typewriters in the late 1960s also switched from delay-line memory to the just-invented shift-register memory — which made them much more accessible to the mass-market, rather than only institutional buyers.
And now we get to the original IBM Selectric Composer: it used magnetic tape for memory — and didn't immediately replay it, instead buffering indefinitely until you manually trigger replay.
Which, mind you, isn't what made the Composer really good for printing. The thing that did that, was that the buffering allowed it to measure text and then typeset it using proportional-width type. But this actually required you to type everything twice (in immediate mode) or for it to read the magnetic tape twice (in buffered mode) — so really, the advancement here wasn't the memory, it was the compute. The ability of the Composer to accumulate the widths of keypresses, given a loaded table of widths of glyphs for the font in use, into an accumulator register, was what made "online" proportional typesetting possible.
The Composer's use of external magnetic tape, also enabled the use of a cheaper sibling (the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_MT/ST) to input the text and test-print it monospaced; while the Composer would just be used for proportional-type replay. In this use-case, the Composer itself was essentially playing the role of a typesetting machine, rather than a typewriter.
But in terms of printing monospace text cleanly, the Composer wasn't any big advancement. Everything above since the first blocking-key electric typewriter was printing monospace text cleanly. Look at type from (expensive, niche) electrical typewriters from the 1930s on — they'll be crisp†. Telegrams from the period were printed on such machines, and look great.
† Well, okay, there'll be some bleed; those ultra-crisp type edges did indeed only come along with polymer ink ribbons, and those were introduced/popularized along with the first Selectrics. But — presuming a fresh cloth ink ribbon — the type will always be fully inked, square on the page, not smudged, no wobble, no unwanted horizontal offset, etc. Mechanical-linkage typewriters had all of those problems!
It's just that nobody really cared about any of that (other than those companies wanting really clean-looking reports), since nobody was doing offset-lithography mastering using monospace typefaces.
It's only once the marketable use-case changed (with the Composer) that people really started to notice that typewriters had slowly become as good at producing a nice typeset page as a professional publishing house was.
Also found this in a quick search, basically an ereader + keyboard: https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-traveler
People need all sorts of excuses to just calm their mind and say it’s some disorder.
But I’ve literally never met someone who genuinely tried meditation and it didn’t help them.
I used to run a meditation group at work and the dozen or so people who consistently showed up reported that it changed their life. And I’m no expert I just do breathwork and concentration on a single object like a red dot sticker.
They rather use medication or spend money buying gadgets and toys.
Oh well. Not my problem when the solution is literally built in.
Get off your high horse. My brain is literally, physically, developed wrong. It's broken. I need treatment, medication, therapy, not a fucking meditation tape. Not that meditation is bad or wrong or worthless, because I used to like it, but it's not medicine.
Do you also insist people with bad vision just try looking harder? Maybe squint a little bit more? Who needs glasses, the fix is built right in!
I am in my 20s and I use a typewriter somewhat regularly to journal. I was raised on computers, getting the jumble from my brain onto paper is faster with a keyboard than a pen/pencil and paper. And a typewriter is nice and analog - no screen, no lights, no battery. I'm disconnected, focused, and performant.
No harder than finding ink for a stamp.
https://www.ribbonsunlimited.com/default.asp
There, solved it for you ;) They make the stuff
https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-smart-typewriter...
but I'd really like to bring my own keyboard and have the e-ink display at a more ergonomic height. Combine that with Vim, and that'd be something I'd use
I was just looking at some today but the biggest downside right now is that they're pretty expensive for what you get.
Nevertheless carrying a nice pen and a good notebook always beats having a heavy typewriter with you.
(i don't have a typewriter, but i prefer to type anything because of this).
At least from typewritten documents that you did not torch or shred etc.
I have too, for that matter, but I haven't touched one in over 25 years.
1977 was a long time ago, even in typewriter years.
https://www.scribd.com/presentation/419638824/typewriters (slide 21)
Searching for those keywords came up with this, which uses the exact same wording:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Scientific_Examination_...
Thats the best kind of correct. ;-)
Wrong. Literally gooogle "selectric type sample" and see dozens of examples of them not typing anywhere near in a perfect line. Maybe machines with very low hours or kept in excellent condition might have excellent spacing, but there's plenty of examples of them obviously not having perfect spacing.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nicksherman/14249132603
https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/e7xxct/typefac...
Another example where misalignment is even more obvious:
https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/sc519r/ibm_sel...
http://www.jollinger.com/typewriters/typewriters/IBM_Selectr...
you can also see inconsistent letter spacing, more obvious on some fonts than others, but you can see some characters are connected and others aren't. And no, it's not just the position of the character relative to others on the ball.
As the author points out, these characters have perfect vertical alignment.
Then go look at high speed footage of the 'golfball' in action and you can see the substantial deflection caused by how fast and forceful the movements are. You can see the entire assembly is bouncing around as the rails it's on flex:
Notably, the Red Cross invoice is much worse: additionally to what has been noted in the article already, why would you have a hyphen in "Verkäufername"? Also mind the reoccurring use of "#" for "Nummer", which would have been rather unacceptable in a formal German document.
Magnify it to full screen and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Now go back and look at the samples I linked to, where you can clearly see vertical misalignment.
I remember everyone in my school system had selectrics when I was a kid, and I assure you, they could produce text that was all over the place. Probably because the ones in a public school saw heavy use / were not properly maintained and serviced to the degree required.
BTW, also mind the drop of the "0" in "10".
Edit: We can all pretend it's perfectly aligned print, but, regardless, whether purposefully manufactured or genuine, there are obvious misalignments in that image.
1) A German date is always written DD.MM.YYYY
2) PLZ not ZIP 3) „Wir danken für ihr Unternehmen“ is a bad translation for „Thank you for your business“ … but it means a complete different thing -> „Thank you for your company“
But I‘m still impressed how much effort this guy put into all this. And I‘m sure my friends would have bought me this badge, because they had no idea it‘s fake.
- As stated in one of the linked mastodon posts, the abbreviation for the Deutsche Mark was DM, not DEM
Also, I have no idea how the seller thought the German Red Cross would emboss their paper with a circle of stars. If anything, embossing the cross itself would make the most sense. Probably they had the tool on hand from another forgery where it may have made more sense.
Perhaps because of European Union flag?
https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
Without the aim of trying to insult anyone, frills like that are more common in the US when trying to emphasize the official nature of documents (e.g., notary public embossing).
Even so, on top of all that, it would make exactly zero sense for the embossing to be the EU stars.
Future defrauders will love both Cabel's post and this discussion :)
That it’s collected in this one post might be somewhat useful to someone specifically seeking to produce a counterfeit ID badge made to appear as if it had been created circa mid-1970s, but only to a limited extent as the processes used at the time for such things varied much more widely than they would today.
There’s also the fact that the person who performed this fraud was successful, despite this being reported to eBay by multiple sources before the auction concluded. So there’s not much motivation to expend the additional time and energy drilling down farther on tiny details, if their inaccuracy hasn’t caused them to fail thus far.
If anything, I’d imagine this will be useful to prop designers and miniatures hobbyists, who will exert substantial effort to achieve maximal accuracy just for its own sake.
For close to $1000, a little bit of effort is not unexpected.
(Also, why assume this was a guy?)
So if you type 459 on a keyboard, a natural jump to something in the middle would be 68. 4-5-9, then 6-8 quickly. Right hand finds another letter "L" and then jumps back into the usual 59.
This is not definite but adds slightly to the suspicion.
But then there are multiple things which are obviously and subtile off, the most glaring is the obviously AI-translated phrase at the bottom. I'd love to know the mind of the forger. They did put some serious work into the invoice but then AI-translated an idiomatic American phrase (wrongly!) which wouldn’t by used on a German invoice.
It’s accepted that the US movies and television industry can’t get contemporary Germany right [1], often for economic limitations of the productions, but something that still get’s me is when the badly pronounced dialogue was obviously written in idiomatic English and only then translated mindlessly word for word, as if other countries cultures and languages are semantically the same, only the words are different. Maybe that’s what happened with the forger - you can’t know there would be differences if you don’t have a sensibility for difference.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAGerman/comments/1ct1k73/what_is...
The US movies and television industry can rarely get any language right. This reminds me of the Dutch-speaking scene in Oppenheimer which no Dutch speaker can understand [1]. It's like a sped-up pronunciation of a nonsense Dutch sentence by an English-speaker trying to speak a horrible German accent.
To be fair, they do this with a lot of location in the US as well. "New York" is often Atlanta or Toronto in many American movies.
However a novice in a foreign language will speak more slowly than natives, not more quickly, even if reading a prepared speech (as was likely the case in that setting, and especially given the advanced language used that no beginner would have mastered), so not sure what the thinking was there.
I will admit that they nailed the German-Dutch accent.
However, the weird choice to use “translatie” which, while technically is a Dutch word, wasn’t common even back in the period this is supposed to take place and feels more like a lazy translation of… well the English word “translation”, combined with, what I can only describe as “just blurt it out as fast as you can” direction, makes this very comical.
This is especially stupid because LLMs like ChatGPT CAN output phrases that wouldn't be out of tune. I assume the forger got that phrase by literally asking the LLM to translate an english phrase to german, rather than asking the LLM what would be a good german phrase to use.
I tried it a few times on arena.lmsys.org and given the prompt "Please translate "We thank you for your business" into German", the most common result was "Wir danken Ihnen für Ihr Geschäft", I got one bad result from some random tiny model and some more extensive responses from Gemini with suggestions for more idiomatic expressions. Modern LLMs are typically smart enough to understand this nuance when translating to German.
That’s my point: You can make a semantically and possible idiomatic translation but it would be still _culturally_ wrong to use it in this context.
There is more than ChatGPT and Google Translate
We joked our documents were high quality than the original, which they were.
Used them for years.
Do it. It all makes sense after actually doing it yourself. People think forgers copy pixel by pixel but it's remaking assets.
We guessed the iso standard on the barcodes. We were no experts. We probably got it right, but you have to do this on every asset.
The photo and card inside the plastic lamination show signs of wear. Parts of the photo are rubbed off around the edge, and the paper is stained. At the same time, the lamination is relatively clean. How does that make any sense? That's suspicious, even without seeing Espinosa's badge.
[edit: the photo of Espinosa's badge shows a worn lamination and clean, unworn paper and photo]
On top of that, the lamination has a cutout so it can be attached to a lanyard or retractor. The cutout shows no sign of wear.
It's as if the forger imagined company badges work like library cards: You keep them in your wallet, and only remove them to check out a book. In the forger's head canon, the company must have later decided to laminate the badges (without replacing them!) and require everyone had to wear them visibly (hence the cutout).
It makes no sense.
https://www.watson.ch/digital/wirtschaft/272982293-vom-hacke...
http://gdcvault.com/play/1034707/The-Playdate-Story-What-Was?
That was just a month after the release of the original iPod, that eventually brought back Apple to relevancy. Apple was still the small competitor that Microsoft kept alive to avoid more problems in their anti-trust lawsuit.
It's kinda like asking a painter to paint.
Doesn't mean they'll be good, but they probably like doing it
[1] And by 2001 was not that far from there being reasonable discussion whether you should not instead get an Atari ST if you wanted to do electronic music. (there was sorta ecosystem for ST as midi controller that was still surviving, at least in Poland, partially thanks to disco scene)
A few month later Apple released Mac OS X 10.3 „Panther“, to be sold still on DVDs in shrink-wrapped boxes. There was only one, small, store in my city which sold Apple stuff. Not an Apple Store, those are still very rare in Germany, but a chain local to Germany (which went out of business this year). For the release of Panther they made an evening party, for enthusiasts.
My city has a population of 0.5 million but it is part of a metropolitan region of 5 million people. That local shop would have been the shop for at least half of the region.
Including me there were less than 20 enthusiasts there that evening. You felt like a part of an obscure BDSM cult or something.
Apple in public opinion then was mostly inexistent in Germany. Partly because of the marketing incompetence of the Apple D-A-CH local organization, but also because Apple then had the image of a computer only for graphic designers with no practical usage for other computing and seen as hugely overpriced. Germany was and still is rather cheap in regard to computers. A big tech store chain at the time was using the slogan “Geiz ist geil” (“Parsimony is sexy”).
If you were into computers in 2001 you'd have heard of Apple, for the general population I'd bet a reasonable percentage would have had little knowledge of them then, and key to the argument here - far far less knowledge or interest than people would today.
Regardless of their significance at the time, there's no way a bit of Apple memorabilia would have commanded the same price or interest then as it would now. Be like selling an autographed John Oliver photo in 2005. He was hardly insignificant on the UK comedy scene at that time, he had a radio show, was on TV shows. But he was _far less significant_ than he is now
Oh come on, G3 is 1998, G4 is 2002.
No other objections though. My favourite anecdote about that time is what Sex in the City had a MacBook, specifically PowerBook G3, as, well, a solid part of the story and even had a dedicated episode!
An old startup I worked at used customer IDs in communications that started from an arbitrary 5 digit number to give a false impression of our customer base.
It's definitely not how people act these days, at least with indie/solo game developers.
Can you guess what I did in the early days to eventually grow the server to over 2000 real active players?
Maybe some portion of the 2000 organic players were also running bots?
I ran some personal bots back in the Diablo 2 days with D2Loader and some shareware bot plug-in I bought on a shady site for like $12 in ~2003-2004 or so. Wish I could remember the name.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100813125735/http://d2loader.b...
Apparently there are modern versions of D2Loader type software. I haven’t really followed the game or the bot scene much these days, but I like the cat and mouse game in general across the physical and virtual space. Red teaming scratches that itch I guess.
Employee IDs pretty much start happening when you end up getting actual space that isn't your garage or repurposed residential buildings, especially if you're doing manufacturing of any kind.
Then you might want to have employee IDs if only for minimal security (contractors! Visitors!) or workplace safety reasons (tracking who was left in the building, for example).
It is, also, a sign of "making it somewhere", yes - along with some of the above parts also making up the "corporate social capital".
Similarly using customized paperwork, having logos, branding style etc. all helps to build up a company image that might help in landing sales or investors or whatever.
"I honestly hate to sell it but since Covid19 I'm unemployed and need to support my family."
No, you make the money by offering to sell real certificates of authenticity to authenticate the fake certificates of authenticity to people who those who calls and asks.
And yes they would want you to say "yes/no, it is/isn't authentic" to anyone who calls and asks.
But if you screw up your records and say "yes" to fake certificates of authenticity that imitate yours then people will stop paying you very quickly. (Also you may end up in jail)
On August 9, 2010, Symantec completed its approximately $1.28 billion acquisition of Verisign's authentication business, including the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate Services, the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Services, the Verisign Trust Services, the Verisign Identity Protection (VIP) Authentication Service, and the majority stake in Verisign Japan.
But yeah; until somebody gets a different trusted party to look at the item.
Fraud generally pays pretty well until you get caught.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/285841371389?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid...
I've basically given up on the auction format entirely because of the number of people that try to "pull out" not realising that their offer is binding.
Your friend pulls out the fake badge, proud of himself for having the winning bid on eBay... "check it out! badge #10!"
Do you tell them that it's fake? Or let them live happily in their joy-filled bubble?
Dont we all live in the joyful bubble of beliefs many of which have no basis ?
EDIT: I reported it myself including the original article.
I casually collect coins and on Ebay there are known high volume scammers selling fakes or coins with heavily doctored images, Ebay doesn't care.
It's to the point that I only by cheap stuff when it comes to thinks I collect that is less likely to be faked or I just don't collect at all. Sad situation.
I participate in a community that has some historical literature, where early editions of our literature fetch fairly significant premiums. It’s a relatively obscure community, so there’s a pretty limited market.
There are some extremely well-done forgeries. I am told they come from China, but I suspect the means to make them, are available in many venues.
I heard a story about a guy that purchased a Winchester rifle from an estate auction. It was one of those old western-style guns, with the repeater action. As an original, it was worth a great deal.
He took it to an expert, who almost immediately declared it a forgery. He said it was mainly because it was in too good a shape. It was supposed to be over 150 years old, and looked like it was only ten years old.
I have also heard, from a watchmaker I knew, that Rolex forgeries are so good, that even seasoned watchmakers are fooled, and the only way to tell, is to open the watch.
https://www.iclarified.com/17844/hand-drawn-floor-plan-of-ap...
That [picture of employee] wasn’t taken with a Polaroid with a flash.
Not worthwhile for a forger (unless from a Hollywood movie) to go extra mile for. There is some lesson there for a budding forensic investigator.
Not trying to be rude, but this doesn't seem like anything anyone would care about, but this definitely not the case.
There are a lot of comments that are nice and thoughtful, which isn't uncommon or anything but surprising to me. I guess forgery is pretty cool, but an old apple badge for some plain Jane apple person?
I have to be missing something.
To varying degrees, the answer is yes, the tools exist.
They also host a server allowing trusted third parties to verify that a given passport is still valid (ie. Not withdrawn).
The combination of those mean you will never edit details on a passport, but you might be able to copy a passport 1:1, because the security is only mifare classic.
You can actually read the photo from your passport with an Android phone. Some of the info in the machine readable area is required as a salt, so you can't do a remote scan of a closed passport.
I've used this app in the past; https://f-droid.org/packages/com.tananaev.passportreader/
I think anyone needing "fake passports" usually gets them from stolen identities (or stealing a passport from someone similar looking) and getting a new one issued. Probably easier in countries that don't require the passport to be sent back for another one to be issued.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/04/biometric_pas...
I never got around to modifying the data on mag stripe. I just dragged a hard-drive magnet over it until it didn’t scan at all.
My takeaway from all that? The hologram that was used to strengthen the official IDs had an unintended side effect of making the fakes easier to believe.
My friends daughter bought a fake ID stating that she was over 21 but only 16 - it would scan as authentic at stores but would not pass with police.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emblems_of_the_International_R...
I asked him if he ever got people trying to get him to "enhance" the value of their guns and he laughed and said, "Ayup, all the time."
Art and antique forgery has always been kind of fascinating to me for that reason.
My Dad never did anything that would make someone looking at the gun think it was some other version, the most common 'ask' there was that Colt Single Action Army (SAA) revolvers, which are famously "The gun that won the west", original generation (i.e. produced from the original Colt dies and tooling by Colt) are more valuable than second, or third generation guns. An expert in Colt firearms can look at an SAA revolver and tell you from which generation it was made with some level of certainty.
But lots of guns were abused and stored poorly and developed rust or other imperfections. My Dad was able to cure those imperfections and restore the gun to a condition it would have, had it been stored properly its entire life. And yes, that did increase its value, mostly because the gun just looked better.
Source: me, during that time I oversaw security at a Fortune 500, issuing thousands (literally) of IDs for "limited access" areas (DataCenters, SOC, etc) in multiple facilities.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/285775420457
(same seller.)
P.S. The seller is located in Spain. :)
No, the plastic is very clearly scuffed with something abrasive like sandpaper. You'd never see wear patterns like that from age/use - it would be a very matte look, not clear scratches.
Is in the very next paragraph.
When I first read the article, my knee-jerk reaction was that this is a victimless crime. If you pay $700 for a laminated square that has an Apple employee on it, you probably shouldn't get upset when your due-diligence fails you and it's a fake.
Yes the victim is trusting because he probably won't think to authenticate the fake.
The victim is not powerless, actually. the victim has all the power to get money back. many stories how very easy to get a transaction reversed with paypal/ebay and leave the seller holding the bag, even if the seller is legit.
Ebay's policies have substantially reversed from where they were in the past and the scammer's know it. Make sure to always pay for ebay with a credit card to be confident that you can reverse fraudulent transactions.
There are tons of pirated games and software being sold as original "electronic downloads".
And where else would stolen items be sold, including carrier- and Apple-blacklisted iPhones that cannot be activated?
So he lowered the starting bit in-between
Even now, I suspect if that badge fell into the hands of most Germans, they would either try to return it to it's owner or shred it on the basis that it's someone else's private data.
So the lesson here is: Don't go investing on art/historical stuff unless you know really well what you're doing.
I've always wanted to either create or purchase intricate set props like the journal from Supernatural [0]. Fantastically fake, but just interesting to have.
[0] https://waywardjournal.tumblr.com/post/187259600588/reapers
Though it's weird that Chris's typewriter part looks more fake than the faked card (it's supposed to be an IBM printer rather than a typewriter it seems)
That aside, if he hasn't already he should've reported to eBay immediately so the buyer isn't conned.
1) historical document/artifact that was created later by a liar
2) A written signature on a document trying to impersonate someone who didn’t actually read and approve of said document
3) An ID card a teenager uses to gain entrance to a bar/club
4) a verbal statement that the speaker knows is false when said, for example “of course that dress does not make you look fat” (does this word change if the receiver also knows the statement is false? In English I would call this a “white lie”)
5) A body part that has been altered with surgery (silicone implants, saline injections)
As you can probably tell, from my understanding (possibly wrong connection) I think of the word 'to forge' in the context of actually trying to get access to somewhere or something with fake documents. When the intention or the consequence of using such document is more for monetary or material gain, I tend to think of it as fake.
I suppose dictionary definition does allow for both usage, i.e. to forge is to make a fake resemblance of something.. etc. I didn't think not knowing accurate definition of a word warranted downvotes but oh well.
I think the downvotes comes from then accusing the person writing it of clickbait. So while it's fine to not know the accurate definition of a word, it's not so fine to accuse the author of something because you don't know the accurate definition.
> A textbook definition of forgery is the making of a false document with the intent that it should be used or acted upon as if it's genuine.
Notice the "with the intent that it should be ACTED upon", and given no one would be using a historic fake ID to use it for access, I think I have a point. Anyway..
Example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Diaries
Forged all over the place
3 : an act of forging especially : the crime of falsely and fraudulently making or altering a document (such as a check)
Fraudulently making a document. That's this to a tee.
For example:
> But, again again, I had a weird feeling — this series of photos was trying too hard. That binder labelled “BILLS 200[0]—2010”, conveniently flipped upside down for casual authenticity? Why would you put that in these photos unless you were trying a bit too hard to make your case?
That's just ridiculous.
Bonus trivia I didn't mention: if you look at the invoice preceding the one in the binder, it has the logo for the 1992 (!) Barcelona Olympics at the top. A real weird thing to put in your 'Bills 2000 — 2010' binder! I do think this binder is totally real, but should actually be labelled 'My Forged Invoices' ;)
As opposed to just being something he grabbed to use as a quick kind of table? I mean out of the two possibilities of just quickly throwing something on the couch to use as a platform to take a photo or purposely trying to set up a staged scene to look 'casual', I think Occam would say the first is significantly more likely.
Nothing wrong with having suspicions or gut feelings, but this just seemed a stretch too far to me personally. Nice article though!
Source: I'm a German who has donated to the red cross. That ain't it.
(Also: There needs to be a a specific key phrase without which the German equivalent of the IRS will come down on you like a ton of bricks. It is missing)
Chris also has a follow-up post not shown in Cabel's blog where he says there aren't any photos of Sherry online: https://mastodon.social/@Cdespinosa/112391173495267599
I might say the same for several of my friends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge_(Lake_Havasu_Cit...
Yeah, I don’t think so.
* A few times skimming this, I didn't understand some of the assertions and logic. For example, I couldn't say just by glancing at the photos that the card wasn't filled out on an IBM Selectric II (introduced in 1971, before Apple was founded). For another example, I see people commenting on VAT tax missing on the receipt from the German Red Cross, and also the confusion over whether it was bought on eBay or from the German Red Cross, but no mention of whether that invoice might be something that the German Red Cross adapted to work with early eBay doing the payments (at least in the US, sales tax for online purchases was very murky, and eBay punted). Also, the author seems to be ignoring cross-cultural differences, in their psychoanalytic speculation about subtleties of seller's behavior, such as seller's perceived earnestness in composing a photo.
* This article is going out of its way to publicly defame someone. If they have strong evidence of the counterfeiting and fraud that they allege, they should be going to a legal authority. Given that they decided to get Internet Points out of it, they'd better hope that their allegations are correct, and also that they can prove it sufficiently if sued in some jurisdiction. I would guess that glomming onto mob behavior ("We did it, Reddit!") won't be a good defense.
* The issue date of the badge for employee number 10 predates that of employee number 8
* The German invoice uses American comma separator
* The German invoice is also missing the invoicing entitiy's legally required information, is missing VAT and uses American terms.
Really?!
I'd really hope legal authorities have better things to do than act as arbitrators of provenance of niche-interest historic artifacts. Without being the person who "won" the auction, I doubt you'd even get your foot in the door.
For "lots of holes", I think that's not a great one to single out as an example.
This is a tiny company, in California, in the 1970s..., and we're assuming, ahem, German precision, around when they can get a nerd to sit for a photo to laminate an ID card?
Again, like I said upfront, I'm not commenting on the truth of the allegations -- just commenting on the weak Internet detective work.
The article says:
> When in doubt, Engage The Internet®
The Internet can be dumb as snot. Have doubt.
Yeah, that’s sort of the point of the original post. Have doubt.
One of the central rules of the internet (and outside the internet. But especially on the internet.) is that people are often fucking liars. This is especially true when it comes to memorabilia.
This seller’s history is littered selling so-called authentic things like business cards and concert tickets and based on this incident, I personally think every single one of them is fraudulent.
You might like playing contrarian to defend the honor of an obvious forger, and that’s your right. But it isn’t defamation to call a liar a liar. Truth is an affirmative defense.
Someone with an actual Apple badge from that era said the badge is fake. The text doesn’t match that person’s badge. The photo use for Sherry is obviously both a stock photo and too high resolution to be used on an employee badge from a tiny company in California in the 1970s. The badge is too well-preserved, even for a relic that the seller claims to have purchased in 2001 (or was it 2003 or 2004, seeing as their own story kept changing). There are so many red flags when looking at this thing that it doesn’t matter if one of the proof points doesn’t live up to your standards. This is a fake item.
You’re the one trying to score internet points, not the author who was sharing an interesting exchange he had with a seller who was not only selling a fake item, but probably also forged receipt documents related to the fake item.
The article, and now these comments, are littered with recreational half-butted thinking.
That's what I was commenting on.
Glory to Arstotzka!