This happened to me. My employer sent me a card and it was marked counterfeit.
I raised a complaint and was basically told to go fuck myself.
Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
141–150 of 213 posts
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#142Earlier 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
The Royal Mail and the Post Office are not the same thing! They are completely separate businesses. The Fujitsu/sub-post master scandal has nothing to do with the Royal Mail.
While they aren't the same thing now, they were up until 2011. The Horizon Post Office scandal began before in about 1999.
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> if the law only forbid counterfeiting 100 stamps a counterfeiter would do 99 at a time. And by the second batch they'd have counterfeited 198, so I fail to see the problem...
They hire someone to take each batch from them. So at best, you can only ever prosecute a fall guy, not the skilled counterfeiter.
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.
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tran…
I dare say, I wasn't sure how the QC | KC accolade was treated, but that does pass the sensible test.
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).
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
next level operation:
put your enemies' address as sender (not legal advice)
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You just don’t accept the letter, nothing to pay then
Aren't public institution obligated to accept letters from the public?
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#147I'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.
It links to identity of whoever purchased them with credit card. Or whoever stood in front of the camera when transaction for these stamps was registered.
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#148Several years ago I bought a box of small toy Easter chicks and sent them in lots of envelopes over a period of a few weeks to my mother, as if they were 'migrating', getting workmates to write the labels and send them so they would have different postmark towns. The idea was for them to be anonymous. Some had several chicks in the envelopes.
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.
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Where did "at a time" come from?
As in "I counterfeit 99 stamps at a time then sell them. That esy I never break the law."
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
The barcode does not link to your identity.
It links to identity of whoever purchased them with credit card. Or whoever stood in front of the camera when transaction for these stamps was registered.
> It links to identity of whoever purchased them with credit card.
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?