Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ugh. It's kind of blackmail then. :( "Pay us $ (even though legally you don't have to), otherwise we'll be keeping and/or destroying your stuff".
Technically not blackmail. Extortion :)
Ahhh, good point. :)
Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
131–140 of 213 posts
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#132The 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?
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.
That scandal was the Post Office, which is a completely separate organisation from the Royal Mail.
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#133I'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.
from my own experience, yes it did (never before the change and twice since)
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#134I'm amazed how they managed to bring in barcoded stamps without a peep from anyone about privacy. Sending a letter anonymously is now impossible.
The barcode does not link to your identity.
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#135What 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.
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.
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 entire…
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).
In fairness, though, mail volume must have plummeted as email and electronic invoicing became a thing.
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)
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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 cr…
There is a good argument against 2. - it means people the CPS do not want to prosecute become above the law. Private prosecutions are a mechanism for prosecuting people the establishment does not want to prosecute.
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).
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#138I'm amazed how they managed to bring in barcoded stamps without a peep from anyone about privacy. Sending a letter anonymously is now impossible.
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.
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.
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#139Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
For today's lucky 10,000: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._S._G._Boggs
Good article, worth the read. 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. as the cases of Geoffrey Robertson are worth the rabbit hole, and the maintaining of transient accolades poses an update issue. I'll leave the QC -> KC edit for others and wonder how many dated QC…
Surely it's correct to call him QC when writing about an event in 1986, but if it were in the present "Geoffrey Robertson KC wrote a recent memoir about his defence of Boggs...". This isn't mentioned in the Wikipedia style guide, as far as I can see, but for example the article on Princess Diana lists "spouse: Charles, Prince of Wales (later Charles III)".
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.