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

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

#71

Post by boomboomsubban »

coldtea wrote: post #62
delichon wrote: post #15

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...

> 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...

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.

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

#72

Post by michaelmrose »

andrewaylett wrote: post #39

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?

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.

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

#73

Post by michaelmrose »

martinald wrote: post #67

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

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.

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

#74

Post by devnullbrain »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #3
nextos wrote: post #2

"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…

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

>that occasionally delivers mail

Roughly once every two weeks, here.

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

#75

Post by siva7 »

xnyan wrote: post #64
coldtea wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

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.

Yes, there are plenty. A serious crime requires serious damage in some countries so a single counterfeit won't tick that bar.

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

#76

Post by DaSHacka »

jimnotgym wrote: post #52
adamm255 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

You kid, but I imagine this will quickly be abused by bad actors to harass victims of online doxxing as ordering pizzas and (in more serious cases) swatting is.

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

#77

Post by jokethrowaway »

Loughla wrote: post #30
lostlogin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the mail service isn’t protecting paedophiles as far as I know.

[flagged]

More money goes to corrupt politicians than to the royals. It's less than 100M per year with 67M people.

I don't like supporting the royals but it's a small portion of taxes.

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

#78

Post by pacaro »

toast0 wrote: post #13
Ajay-p wrote: post #7

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.

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?

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?

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

#79

Post by PontifexMinimus »

michaelmrose wrote: post #66
adamm255 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 insisti…

> They are marking some of their own lawfully obtained stamps as counterfeit and by dint of doing so stealing from their citizenry

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.

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

#80

Post by dhosek »

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.
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