Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/11/us-customs-agents-have-already.html
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Please, let’s take that word “announce” and move it into the headline. Otherwise it seems that you take what CBP says for the truth, and I certainly wouldn’t.
Thanks.
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Those Customs agents have been incredibly fortunate, guessing correctly which packages to search so many times. Or they’re searching every single package. Of the features that make an ID pass for real announce themselves through the packaging.
Or they’ve broken the encryption that protects a big fake-ID site. Or they’ve broken encryption generally and they’re reading everybody’s HTTPS messages.
Or they’re lying.
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You really can get anything on Aliexpress!
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This. Also, great timing for some election propaganda.
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Any bets that these are actually sample identification cards and blanks being shipped to a motor vehicle bureau? It would make the package easy to identify and seize.
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Mmm - I doubt it.
Seconded on the doubt.
If it was “sample” data, I don’t they would have taken the care to blur the details on these presented IDs. (We could be both fooled on this one, but I highly doubt.)
I wonder if one could legally change their name to match the “sample ID” eg Ima Cardholder.
I found it interesting they were all from ILLINOIS in the photo.
Several years ago one of my grandsons had a fake ID to get into bars and buy alcohol.
shocking!
I had a look at it when he discarded it in some bushes after being arrested.
It was a real guy and all the info was real, his address (next town over), everything. But it listed him as “female”.
So at the time I surmised they screwed this up at the DMV and then re-did the DL when the real guy was there. The “mistake” ID got filed away someplace, how they account for these is not known to me, but obviously someone had access to them and rather than discard them, they sold them.
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I heard about a case from about 20 years ago where a guy was selling really, really realistic fake licenses at a high school for kids to get drunk with. They passed every security test… including verification with the DMV. Dude was connected with some cops, and they made them up and registered them in the database for him, based on photos.
Insider threats are always the hardest to control…
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There goes my I. P. Dailey alias.
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Or either the sender or the recipient was already known to be involved in producing fake IDs.
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I work for a company that makes plastic shells for keycards, IDs, membership cards in the US, but a few specific RFID items we need to import from China. Our shipments are often checked by CBP. So it’s safe to say that they may have stumbled on these in the course of doing their job.
(It’s super easy to know which items have been checked because they don’t bother to put the cards back correctly and re-shrinkwrap the boxes.)
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I’m not altogether surprised. Illinois was one of the last states to acquiesce to the Real-ID requirement. Now you can get one but as an opt-in.
If you have a Real-ID, cops in other states have access to your records from your home state. So since Illinois has a low rate of Real-ID a cop may not bother to even look it up for confirmation.
Just a thought.
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Have y’all considered that you yourselves might be in need of a fake ID in the near future, given the way things are going in the USA?
Is this really a time in which you want to be celebrating the cops?
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Catapult the Propaganda!
I’ll bet all the repeated photos have a “Shutterstock” watermark.
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I salute US Customs for protecting the right of Americans to make fake IDs. Buy American, folks.
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Or they x-ray all the mail.
Or they missed millions of fake IDs and their success rate is 0.1%
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