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I don’t know whether I should post this as it may be an ongoing case, but not so long ago I sent off my old stamps to the official “swap out” service to have them replaced by the new barcoded ones. A few days later, I did indeed receive equivalent new stamps back — in an envelope that had clearly been tampered with, being roughly cut open all down one side and having the paperwork accompanying the stamps obviously bent and having been pushed back in awkwardly.

I immediately contacted Royal Mail via their online system and noted the problem and my concern that this could mean the stamps had been replaced with fakes before reaching me. I asked if there was any way I could verify that they were legitimate before I used them.

A few days later, I received a bizarre email back from someone at Royal Mail, saying they were sorry to hear that I wasn’t happy with their response (what response?!) and can certainly understand my frustration but we are not able to progress any further (than what?!), along with various other words that seemed designed to try to appease me while not actually saying anything of substance, and a recommendation to contact some other part of Royal Mail, which I may yet do.

It was a surreal experience, but having been prompted to do it by seeing several reports of people who’d sent their stamps in and either never received the replacements or had problems with them, and having received such an obviously tampered delivery, with the entire process from collecting the stamps from my local post box to delivering the replacements to my home being under the control of Royal Mail, I can’t say I was particularly reassured by the response so far.

I haven’t yet tried to send anything using the new stamps…

Some mail machines cut thick or oversized envelopes by accident sometimes. So this might not have been tampered with.

The right way to deal with anything you receive by mail is to return to sender, as long as it has a return address. Cross out your address, clearly write RTS on the front and in small write e.g. "item not sealed on arrival / tampering" or something, then stick in a post box. The sender has more recourse to deal with issues in transit anyway. Generally refuse anything sent that arrives like this.

Unfortunately, in this case the item was delivered by Royal Mail themselves and left in our mail box, so there was no opportunity to do anything like that.

I might have bought the idea of a mechanical issue causing the opening if it had been a clean cut and the contents had been otherwise undisturbed, but with a very rough tear and the contents having apparently been shoved back into the envelope, it seems rather less likely.

>I might have bought the idea of a mechanical issue causing the opening if it had been a clean cut and the contents had been otherwise undisturbed

When an envelope gets jammed in a sorting machine and some postal worker has to quickly clear the jam, stuff the contents back, and restart the machine, what you receive will look like a complete mess.

There are certainly other plausible explanations for what I received. If there were some way I could check those stamps were legitimate, the question would be academic anyway.

The whole process is pretty daft if you think about it, though. Many of us had perfectly good stamps before. Royal Mail decided not to honour them — itself an ethically dubious policy, given how those stamps had been marketed and sold — and effectively forced us to swap them out.

To enable that, they set up a system where you had to send them old stamps collectively worth up to (IIRC) £200 without any verifiable proof of what you’d actually sent, in an envelope clearly recognisable as containing that type of stamps. Then they’d send you back replacement stamps, also in a clearly recognisable envelope, which ironically should now be voidable in the event of a problem, but evidently without any willingness on their part to actually do so. For as long as I can remember, the public have been advised never to send cash by post, so the postal service forcing everyone to send a cash substitute in clearly identifiable packaging both ways was an… interesting… strategy.

In a surprise to seemingly no-one except Royal Mail, there are now widespread reports of the clearly identifiable, untraceable, fungible value tokens going missing on the way in or their replacements themselves being replaced by counterfeits on the way back. There also seems to be a not-at-all-dodgy secondary market now, where you can buy the aforementioned replacement tokens for less than their “face value”.

However, based on my experience, Royal Mail don’t seem to think there is any problem here. Based on reports such as the one we’re discussing today, a significant number of innocent people might already be out some extra money as a result, and that money seems to be ending up with Royal Mail. A cynic might think someone had set up a scheme openly inviting theft and counterfeiting, forced a country full of people to use that scheme or lose money, ignored the obvious problems even when they were explicitly reported, and then directly profited from the criminal activity.

So there's no return address?

There actually is a return address on the back of the envelope that was open. However, given the story so far, it seems remarkably generous to trust that anything sent back there would firstly arrive at all, secondly result in a valid replacement for the affected stamps being sent, and thirdly result in that valid replacement reaching us properly.

(For avoidance of doubt, in my previous comment, I meant that we had no opportunity to refuse the delivery.)

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Services_Act_2011

Wikipedia explicitly says:

Post Office Limited

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from Post Office Ltd)

Not to be confused with Royal Mail.

thanks, just wanted to add this.

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 criminal indictments.

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).

The article credits a docuseries I've never heard of for making this a widely known issue:

> A four-part television drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, was broadcast on ITV in January 2024, after which the scandal became a major news story and political issue.

I swear I read some long form journalism on this issue years ago. Anyone know what I might have found? For the Brits who have previously heard of this scandal, did you know about it prior to January of this year?

>For the Brits who have previously heard of this scandal, did you know about it prior to January of this year?

Yes, I've been aware of it for about 10+ years, it's been covered on-and-off in the mainstream media for years. I think the (excellent) ITV series was well-timed to coincide with the current investigations and has improved understanding of the industrial scale of the injustice.

Thinking about all the mistreated sub-postmasters and mistresses and how for some of them it ended, ruined, or dominated their lives is heartbreaking. To be honest, even just thinking about those shunned by their communities and neighbours because everyone was told they were criminals is awful, never mind the lives cut short.

I do hope that now there is such clear evidence of the injustices available that people can be compensated properly and have their reputations restored.

Computer Weekly, 11 May 2009, Bankruptcy, prosecution and disrupted livelihoods - Postmasters tell their story

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240089230/Bankruptcy-pr...

>A seventh postmaster, Alan Bates, refused to sign his weekly accounts, saying it would have made him liable for any losses. He has called for a public inquiry.

It was already a major news story and political issue before the ITV documentary. The documentary just made it bigger.

It's surprisingly easy to get fake ones on ebay for any criminals out there wanting to do a swap. Here for example https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/266403486260

Is england turning into a third world country similar to a far right African state. This sounds like some Mafia stuff.

What's interesting to me is that the meaning of 'counterfeit' is being shifted. Counterfeit does not mean actually counterfeit, it means 'we couldn't process this stamp', which is a different thing altogether.

I guess that either the Royal Mail's system is failing to read the bar code correctly, or it's encountering a bar code it's already seen before, and assuming it must be malicious. But in the latter case, there's no basis for saying the second use of the code is the counterfeit and not the first. That is, apart from doing actual forensic analysis on the stamp, which my guess is they are not doing—not in every case at least.

If someone called me a counterfeiter, or even just said I was benefiting from counterfeiting, I'd be pretty angry. Especially if I found out they were accusing me without any evidence, without doing any diligence beforehand, and possibly as a consequence of their own error.

I think you're nailing it--some black hat has figured out the encoding and is making fake stamps. Same as gift card draining.

Wouldn't surprise me if the "encoding" was just unencrypted UUIDs.

That would mean there's no encoding to crack, but it could still be going on if it's an inside job. Someone has access somewhere in the production process, notes valid codes. Could be a camera hidden somewhere.

Really sounds more like Mafia interdiction of good stamps and replacement

Here's an excellent blog post explaining the anti-forgery features of Royal Mail stamps:

http://www.jolschimke.de/briefmarken-und-ganzsachen/erste-ge...

What strikes me most is how crude the imitation stamps are - most aren't even trying to emulate the genuine printing techniques. It's all quantity over quality, trying to minimise the cost of producing counterfeit stamps whilst hoping to sell bulk loads of them to naive (or unscrupulous) customers.

It sounds like the biggest problem is the conflict of interest that the Royal Mail has, since they currently get to keep the fine payments as revenue. They have no direct incentive to stop the sale of counterfeit stamps, let alone deal with a tiny proportion of false-positives from their scanning machines.

Perhaps the answer is for the Royal Mail to be required to forfeit the revenue from fake postage fines, but be absolved of the responsibility to deliver these letters. Therefore, false positives in detection would simply be losses for their reputation, and they can decide, as a private company, whether or not this is an issue for their shareholders.

Personally, I would go the other way, requiring that the Royal Mail always deliver letters with fake stamps without issuing fines, but have proper independent investigations into both the origin of the alleged fakes and the reliability of the scanning machines. This isn't going to happen without an Act of Parliament, unfortunately.

> What strikes me most is how crude the imitation stamps are - most aren't even trying to emulate the genuine printing techniques.

Of course. Their goal isn't to fool the post office; it's to be just good enough to sell to buyers.

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?

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.

Only since 2011. That scandal started long before that

Where do these people go to pay these fines?

You get a link to the RM website, pay on line. If you don't pay, you don't get to receive the letter/packet involved.

The barcode in the article decodes to "JGB S11221017031011395940006622112101 BC046285E760466C01" if anyone fancies having a crack at making a stamp keygen.

Likely, they use some authenticated hash like HMAC SHA-256 with a schedule of randomly chosen keys added periodically. (Can't really rotate out keys once generated.) GFL reversing the algorithm AND any working key.

Also, an "is it used" database has to be kept to prevent an analog replay attack by reusing the same barcode. The most efficient way to keep track of used stamps would be a bloom filter. A poor implementation would lead to false positives, and mailers being accused of fraud. It also has should be highly reliable, highly available, and geographically disperse.

Would pure random + a central database not be more practical? Assuming the barcode is a 10-by-50 grid, that's 500 bits of entropy. With 100 bits of entropy, you need over 100 trillion codes to have a 0.4% chance of a collision. Every added bit makes it twice as unlikely.

There's no need to have crypto if you're the authority on both assigning and verifying the barcodes. That way, no attacker will be able to create a barcode and have any hope of it working.

They're not the only ones creating barcodes -- stamps come with non-specific data, but bulk mailers are allowed to create their own, with embedded routing and billing codes.

The spec is here: https://www.royalmail.com/sites/default/files/Royal-Mail-Mai...

More likely people (criminals) realized consumers can't protect themselves from near complete fakes and someone's out there making bank.

I didn't actually realize one could fit so much into such a small barcode.

I do wonder if this now means it is in theory possible to track items sent by letter post.

We forget just how automated sorting of mail now is. Only probable manual part is by the person doing delivery, and that is just for their own convenience. Everything else is automated, with few hard to read addresses going through manual sorting. Where they are tracked too.

It is. Other european mail services, e.g. DHL, have been offering tracking for every new stamp for a while now.

What's important is it doesn't prevent counterfeit to consumers, which is failed planning.

If that was true it wouldn’t be marked as counterfeit, the other checkbox would be marked for “already used”

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.

That would be dumb. Nothing prevents attempted reuse of a genuine stamp.

Sorry, what about that would be dumb? Attempted reuse is exactly what would be prevented by scanning the barcode and seeing it had already been used.

This is exactly why gift cards have scratch-off material covering their secret keys, otherwise folks would just take a picture of the next card in the stack, wait for it to be funded, and then use it before the recipient does.

edit: And would you look at that, you can buy stamp sheets on Amazon.co.uk, and users have helpfully submitted a bunch of photos with barcodes visible.

> Sorry, what about that would be dumb?

Reused barcode does not mean counterfeit.

> Attempted reuse is exactly what would be prevented by scanning the barcode and seeing it had already been used.

Sure, but the alleged crime here is not attempted reuse. It is counterfeiting - as shown in the pic of the Royal Mail fee request label.

Just to be clear, nothing from Royal Mail here suggests they suspect reuse.

And the fact it did not tick the reuse box suggests it does not.

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...

The term "fine" seems confusing here. If you look at the form sticker, it seems apparent that £5 is just the on-delivery postage rate for an unpaid item. Different postal services handle this differently, but it's not unusual that a mailpiece that's lacking sufficient postage will be delivered to the recipient if they pay the postage, and it's also not unusual to make that a higher rate to account for the extra work involved in notifying the recipient and collecting it. Under some postal systems you can do this totally intentionally by marking a mailpiece COD.

Maybe Royal Mail really does call this a fine, but it seems like it's just a typical higher "postage due" rate, thus the still rather nominal amount. Paying is optional for the recipient, they could just ignore the notification and it won't be delivered.

The use of this approach for counterfeit seems sort of unwise considering the accusation involved in counterfeit postage, the USPS returns the piece to the sender in that case. But the items on the sticker make me think that Royal Mail has a general bent towards offering delivery no matter what. USPS would also return to sender if there's no postage at all, assuming the piece doesn't indicate the postage should be paid by the recipient. But you can see that the £5 sticker here is the same one used in that case.

Sometimes the situation is complicated by postal policy, for example UPU policy for international mail tends to strongly prefer attempting to deliver a mailpiece over returning it, so "postage due" stickers seem more common on international mail (particularly since the international rates can be confusing and it's easier to accidentally underpay).

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 insisting their cops continue to use them and ticketing per normal because it would be very expensive to replace the guns.

> 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.

What, you don’t think the postal court run by the Post Office will rule against the Post Office? Come on, there’s only a small chance of being sent to Rwanda in a crate if you file a case against them, hardly worth worrying about.

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.

You just don’t accept the letter, nothing to pay then

Aren't public institution obligated to accept letters from the public?

It'd be a fair campaign for everyone to return their stamps by sending them affixed to complaint cards to their local councilperson or postmaster.

>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 think it's important to internalize that stamps are like a form of currency[0]. Like you stick it on the envelope to pay the shipping fee. There are tax stamps/revenue stamps which are used to pay for things in a way that is hard for the fee collector themselves to steal.

I applied for a visa-related thing a month or so ago. The fee was 6000 yen, so I stuck 2 3000 yen stamps on the application form. I had paid the application fee, the money can't be stolen by the public servant taking the application form (well, not easily, at least, I'm sure there are sleight of hands), and the purchasing of the stamp happens at a trusted third party that could commit fraud but is heavily incentivized not to (on account of me being able to directly cite where I bought it, and the agency knowing who I am).

[0]: Pedants who want to say it isn't or that it's _exactly_ a form of currency: please go away

>I think it's important to internalize that stamps are like a form of currency[0].

So much so that the original Ponzi scheme involved arbitraging the price of stamps via international reply coupons (and then promptly got way out of hand).

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.

And so they get prosecuted for incitement, conspiracy and organized crime.

Seriously, as a rule of thumb, none of those extremely simple loopholes you can come up in five seconds of thinking work: there people were before you, and they too could think (even though in case of lawmakers it can sometimes be hard to imagine that they can actually think).

If selling 99 stamps is legal, I'm not inciting them to crime, I'm selling them the maximum allowable amount that isn't a crime. Similar with conspiracy and organized crime.

And yeah, these loopholes don't work because people tried them and now counterfeiting one stamp is illegal. That's my point.

They're hiring a unique person per batch, who gets paid tens of dollars at most, and none of them are willing to say who hired them?

My other post makes my actual point, this is just for fun.

Imagine I own a setup that allows me to produce counterfeit stamps. Every fifteen minutes I make 99 and then place them for sale. I sell them, then make 99 new counterfeit stamps and repeat the process.

All the risk is offloaded to anyone that buys more than 99 stamps, while the person capable of making them is safe barring some sort of mistake. All their money comes from a legal sale, meaning they're under no obligation to make sure their customer isn't reselling the stamps. So if the middle men gets arrested, the operation can continue immediately.

Yes, I can think of issues too, like eventually they stake out your location (though they'd probably need warrants of some sort.) I still think it shows that allowing someone to counterfeit 99 stamps opens loopholes the current law stops.

Oh, and from your other post, there are $9 and $30 stamps, meaning this method could counterfeit over $10,000 an hour.

So ignoring that you're the only one that suggested smaller batches would be entirely legal:

All a prosecutor needs to do is show that you made two batches. If you make a batch every 15 minutes, how do you expect not to get caught?

If they catch the middleman delivering two batches, and the middleman snitches, you're done. Or even if they have one batch, but they get offered a reward to say where they got it. Then the authorities only need to get evidence you made 1 more stamp.

And don't tell me you're going to sell to a brand new middleman every 15 minutes.

No, my entire thing has always been based on possession being the crime. The current law is written to outlaw creation too, but I don't see how that could stay if creating 99 counterfeits is legal, as proving this was the 100th counterfeit you made would be a challenge.

Even if the middleman flipped, unless you made them in front of them you could say you got them from someone else.

Yes, they may eventually be able to pin it on you, but under the current system they can instantly charge anyone that is a serious counterfeiter and ignore someone who counterfeit one stamp. They don't need to bother making someone flip then somehow proving you've made at least 100 stamps.

I will say, this explains most of our disagreement, with a bit more coming from my opinion that making this a misdemeanor would still allow some abuse, depending on the punishments.

And I'm done, I no longer find this fun. I don't think the current law is being used to unjustly punish people, and that's good enough for me.

> No, my entire thing has always been based on possession being the crime.

Then why did you say "if the law only forbid counterfeiting 100 stamps"??

I'm done too, because my entire argument was based on what you actually said, not what you secretly meant and never clarified.

Also the "unless you made them in front of them" excuse about proof could be applied to making even 1. You're grasping at straws to make conviction sound more difficult than it is.

This may shock you, but I spent about twenty seconds on my original comment. I certainly didn't have an editor go over it to ensure my actual point of view was getting across. Hell, you can see the edit I made showing when I realized we may be talking past eachother with possess/create.

> I spent about twenty seconds on my original comment.

You then kept defending it.

> you can see the edit I made

Even after that, you were still insisting there were loopholes.

>Even after that, you were still insisting there were loopholes.

After clarifying my position, I figured you'd either reply with "yes, we were on different wavelengths" or you'd accept we were talking about possession. So when you continued, I assumed you were talking about possession too. My mistake.

That's why I referred back to "the original", but you misunderstood what I meant there.

That's how they nab you for structuring.

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."

Yes, the parents question is meant as "where did the idea that doing 99 'at a time' would somehow bypass a law about >= 100 being illegal comes from?".

How would having 99 counterfeit stamps violate that law?

I think you/the other person (assuming that's what their question meant) took it as "each page printed only has 99, but they're still printing multiple pages per run" while I meant "each run has 99 stamps, then they distribute them."

edit or you think the law could be based on how many counterfeit stamps they had made, not possession. Dunno, we're really spending too much time attacking my bullshit hypothetical that was meant to say "make it hard for the law to have a loophole."

> each run has 99 stamps, then they distribute them

In that case they're not making much money per batch and they have to only ever get caught once in their life, so it's not much difference to them, it only makes a significant difference to someone that isn't mass-producing stamps.

> Dunno, we're really spending too much time attacking my bullshit hypothetical that was meant to say "make it hard for the law to have a loophole."

Well I don't think the original had any loopholes, which is why I'm pushing back on your attempt to say that by pointing out a loophole.

The original or real law considers counterfeiting one stamp a crime, which I think is fine.

I took issue with somebody criticizing that law by saying only counterfeiting one stamp shouldn't be a crime. So I pointed out that if you made some arbitrary non-one number the breaking point you're opening up loopholes. I'm not trying to introduce loopholes, the law is what it is to prevent loopholes.

And the ridiculousness of counterfeiting one stamp being a felony is avoided by not prosecuting anyone who only counterfeits one stamp.

By "original" I mean coldtea's suggesting that counterfeiting "_a_ stamp" should not be a "serious federal felony".

You're suggesting a lot of loopholes that don't work.

esy=way.

... and it wouldn't be a crime, so what's the issue? :D

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.

'De minimis non curat lex', as those very practical Romans put it

I was going to reply, "Unum ex multis dica". It's always interesting when two people can see the same thing and come to opposite conclusions!

I knew a guy whose hobby was drawing fake stamps on envelopes and mailing them.

He said someone eventually tracked him down and he was just told to stop doing it.

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.

I'll leave the QC -> KC edit for others and wonder how many dated QC's are on wikipedia and whether a QC who died before the Queen remains a QC or becomes a post mortem KC ?

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.

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).

I feel like a stamp… little different than money.

Forging stamps is up to 10 years in the UK, it's considered the same as counterfeiting money.

But I think it has to be proven that it was intentional, so if the sender was simply scammed by someone selling fake stamps that wouldn't be prosecutable.

It's not really a fine for using the counterfeit stamp. After all, the recipient pays it and they had nothing to do with acquiring or placing the stamp whatsoever.

So it's not really a fine in the criminal sense. And I assume you don't admit any wrongdoing or avoid prosecution by paying it. It's more like a processing surcharge.

It is not. "Fine" is misreporting.

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?

next level operation:

put your enemies' address as sender (not legal advice)

It is not a fine. It is a fee for optional delivery.

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 :)

It may depend on what's in that envelope.

True, but no competant blackmailer would put the threat beind a paywall :)

Ahhh, good point. :)

You don't have to pay it. It's only payable if you want to receive the letter.

The problem is that there is no way of knowing what the letter is. All you get is a slip through your door saying an item of mail is waiting for you and has a £5 fee to pay. If you're like me, you pay the fee, fearful that it might be something important.

At my local depot they allow you to see what the item is before you decide to pay or not.

Yeah it could be a speeding fine caused by a faulty detector after all!

same goes for bad checks, the person cashing it pays a returned check fee!

You pay the fine if want the post. You don't legally have to pay. Presumably it works like this because they can't always identify who sent the letter.

> Presumably it works like this because they can't always identify who sent the letter.

Not to mention that this way targets the person that is far more likely to pay, and far less likely to challenge a false counterfeit charge.

Royal Mail needs to be slapped with a massive Freedom of Information request. We need to see how many fines have been paid.

We had one of these a year and a half ago, similar story. Seemed BS back then, so this could be a big problem.

Royal Mail, as a private (well… public) company, is not subject to FOIA requests.

They're a creature of the state, you can't practically opt out of Royal Mail. If they're not subject to FOIA then they need to be.

Also the legislation splitting the Post Office from Royal Mail and privatising it happening in 2011/12 just looks even more shady in light of all the Post Office stuff.

Well… that’s convenient. The more you know. Isn’t privatisation great!

I'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.

Using cash to buy them is not hard and the odds of anyone going through the CCTV is low unless you are going to post anthrax to the PM or something. I imagine the main reason to do it was to make it harder to use fake stamps, although there may be some tracking going on.

That is not the point. This is about mass surveillance so what matters is what most people do.

> I imagine the main reason to do it was to make it harder to use fake stamps

it was never put forward as a reason IIRC. How common are forged stamps in the first place, to make it worthwhile

It’s not like cash is deanonynising because of the serial numbers.

Aren’t there cases where bank robbers were caught after the fact using knowledge of the serial numbers of the stolen bills?

When you send a letter, it's usually stamped by the post office you are sending it from, so you already gotta do a bit of work to stay anonymous when sending things out. And in the CCTV-loving land of the brits, I gotta imagine there's cameras on every postbox in the country

You now have to be more careful about buying the stamps themselves though. You could make a stock of them and not use them for a year or so (not like CCTV footage lasts more than a week).

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?

I'd bet money in a forensic scenario they could look up the batch and then estimate the sequence and thus date of sale and pull the post office cctv footage.

Rather like how a person can lose their bitcoin stash by accidentally sharing a picture of a private key, can stamps now be 'destroyed' by printing out reproductions of the barcode onto bits of paper and depositing them in postboxes?

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.

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.

I think though, that the percentage of USPS first class mail delivered in 1 day (including Saturday) is probably pretty close to 93% since a significant fraction of mail will be within narrow regions (I would guess that the DC–Boston area itself accounts for at least half of first-class mail).

Back in the Netflix DVDs by mail days, it was rare that it took more than a day for the DVD to get to or from the Netflix warehouse (when they started shuttering warehouses in the last few years of service, that went up to two days each way for a DVD from Chicago to Columbus, Ohio).

I’d also point out that mailbox pickup in the U.S. varies by the mailbox, but many of the ones near me have late afternoon (3–4p) pickups and if I go to the mailbox by the local post office it’s 5.30p. I can even take it to the downtown Chicago post office for a 9p pickup.

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 entirely franchised and often operate as a small convenience store, etc.

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)

Royal Mail was also privatised in 2013, which goes a long way to explaining the price hike.

Postcrossing maintains a list of international postcard costs by country. Going by cheapest for food, the US is #20, UK is about #100. Bahamas is the cheapest.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1leBjOXKNneuPVZt2PRnI...

Especially considering the average distance between two addresses is several times longer.

I'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)

These guys can't get anything right. I'd assume by default that their software is broken.

The real breakage is further up the chain ...

Few things come to my mind:

1) There is a general batch of stamps and also a second batch, that is used to exchange "old" for "new" stamps. The second batch either contains duplicate numbers, or is not activated in the post system at all -> so those get marked as counterfeit

2) The barcode system has no error correction -> the scanners just read the codes "as is", without any sort of error correction / verification if they were read correctly. The incorrect numbers (wrong reading) are then marked as counterfeit

3) Incorrect readings vs some generic "list of stamps that were used" -> fake (?) duplicates marked by the system.

I'll defer to Occam's Razor and say that the Mail probably has a machine that's a bit buggy or imperfect.

The US Postal Service processed 116 billion parcels in 2023[1]. If they had counterfeit stamp detectors that gave false positives 0.0001% of the time, that's still 116,000 bogus fines per year. And the engineers might have no way to reproduce the glitch, because it's so improbable.

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/320234/mail-volume-of-th...

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.

While it would be completely unsurprising if this is yet another royal mail cockup, there's been loads of suspiciously cheap stamps all over places like ebay, so it's possible people are just getting scammed.

Several 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.

Well after the first time you just ignore the post cards wouldn't you? Easy way to handle returns too for sellers who can't cancel an order.

If this is really such a huge problem, the solution seems simple: simply let every mailbox scan the stamp before accepting the letter. For parcels this is being done already at the drop off point.

The mailbox could verify the stamp barcode and refuse it if it's invalid, or require a simple contactless payment when no stamp (or an invalid one) is present. Problem solved. It would also be handy because you don't need to keep stamps in stock for that once off time you need to post something.

Of course this tech hasn't existed for most of the life of the postal system but it does now. So why not do that?

Fining the recipient who had nothing to do with the alleged crime in question is a bit disingenious. It's something that was unavoidable in the past but not now.

It's impossible to say if this was detecting counterfeits, or incorrectly flagged counterfeits, without more information. I'd like to point to my recent experience trying to buy a mask from Amazon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39844229

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.

why do we need to track stamps. seriously.

> penalty for those who receive (and accept) mail posted using one

Insane!

Britain imitating Monty Python.

Monty Python imitated Britain first.

Well, yes, and art did life, more generally.

It's not a fine - you are not going to jail for not paying it.

What, another “computer says no; you is criminal” connected with Royal Mail?

Why let a pesky human get in the way of justice.

In Soviet Britain, the computer is always right, data is always perfect, and software bugs don't exist... and privately prosecute you.

knew an artist (Germany) who would paint beautiful fantasy stamps for letters. not a crime and it often went through.

I think most people are missing the point here.

Why, for Christ's sake, is the onus of verifying the stamps put on the customers?

The Royal Mail created the problem. Don't give them money.

Otherwise bureaucracy and Kafkaesque issues will increase in the private and public sector.

PS: not from UK

Putting sub-postmasters in prison for someone else's theft looks pretty played out at this point, so I suppose this must be the new grift.

"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.

In the past six months I've had four letters returned to me because they went through the sort/scanner upside down and used the sender address on the CN22 as the destination address. I'd put money on it being a failure of technology.

Try putting the CN22 on the back instead.

>My experience in the UK is that dysfunctional organizations try to hide issues by bullying their own customers.

I noticed this from Royal Mail. I reached out to them multiple times regarding a scam carried out using one of their tracked products from an eBay purchase and they said there was nothing they could do about it. But there was something they could do, and it was already going on completely silently in the background.

I later received a letter from Royal Mail stating that the delivery did in fact not take place, and with that I was able to claim a refund from eBay. However my interactions with Royal Mail were not reasonable:

1. They did not disclose that the matter would be looked into, instead they stated unequivocally that it would not and there was no way to escalate the matter. This meant that my plans were altered on account of assuming that the funds were lost.

2. They were unwilling to provide any official statement to eBay regarding the limited "tracking" available for their own product, and naturally eBay won't accept second-hand statements. If they were slightly flexible this would have resolved the dispute promptly - and I doubt I was the first person to fall victim to this scam, so some communication between eBay and Royal Mail would seem reasonable.

3. They gave no notice that they found in my favour and would be sending me a letter as evidence. I only received that mail by chance as I happened to book the same accomodation in a later visit, and this luckily coincided with that letter's arrival.

The unhelpfulness, stonewalling and opaque investigation seem entirely designed to cover for their own shortcomings. They would have had location data for the signed delivery, and they would have immediately had visibility that this didn't match my address.

Or it could be a bug in the printing, there have been cases before where things were accidentally duplicated that shouldn't have been.

https://www.mycurrencycollection.com/blog/1-2013-new-york-du...

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

Royal Mail and the Post Office are two separate organisations.

I am aware. It seems, regardless of institution, that no one at these levels of UK public good can take responsibility. It is as if the apathy has been institutionalized in a declining nation state. Where and how do find someone who cares and the authority to do something about it?

If you told me yet another UK institution had systemic issues (NHS?), I would not be surprised, and that is very sad. It should not be this hard to do better. Right? Or am I just an ignorant Yankee?

Royal mail has been a privately owned corporation for some years now.

Ignorant Yankee behind the times it is. Much shame. Appreciate being corrected.

>that occasionally delivers mail

Roughly once every two weeks, here.

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

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You can probably guess - older demographics lean towards supporting the monarchy, younger demographics skew towards not being fans. There's a loose consensus that the royal family is a net positive for the countries finances, but I believe that involves some creative accounting where all tourism to royal-adjacent properties and the surrounding areas is attributed entirely to those properties still being owned by a living monarch rather than the state, and also implicitly assumes that they are entitled to keep benefiting from the vast wealth and estates they have inherited from those who took them by force. There's no politically neutral answer to how much they cost, you'll get vastly different answers depending on where your lens is calibrated on the royalist-guillotine scale.

I’m only one voice but being in my mid-30s (so younger demographic I’d hope?) I don’t have a problem with the royals; I’m no royalist but nor do I seek their demise. I think most of my friends would fall into a similar category too.

> I believe that involves some creative accounting where all tourism to royal-adjacent properties and the surrounding areas is attributed entirely to those properties still being owned by a living monarch rather than the state

That argument is a tricky one (as you point out). The French palaces have a fair few visitors and there are no living royals to block access. The family don’t need to be in the castle.

It’s ludicrous as they are also my royal family - and I’m in New Zealand.

Well I (an American) agree with your sentiment, it appears that the British royalty don't actually rely on tax money, but instead they keep 25% of the money that the royaly estate /makes/ and the other 75% goes to the British treasury.

But I might be wrong. https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-57559653

The Crown Estate is where the sovereign grant comes from, and it's weird. It's "owned" by the current monarch, but only in their role as head of state (the Crown). Realistically it belongs to the country and to the public, and were we to abolish monarchy, would not become the private property of the Windsor family.

So while they don't rely on tax money (outside of the huge amount of tax money spent on their police protection, transport in military aircraft, etc. etc.), they do rely on money which rightfully belongs to the people of the nation.

> were we to abolish monarchy, would not become the private property of the Windsor family.

Today, I expect that's what would happen. But I bet the Windsor family could have kept a lot if they had given up monarchy a while back. Which puts the "rightfully belongs to the people" claim in question, if you believe a king can ever legitimately own anything.

Also an American and I like the British (and also Japanese) royals. Benevolent monarchs are a cornerstone of serenity and sanity.

And yes, I realize the irony as an American. I think on average Americans like the British royal family more than Britons do?

> Benevolent monarchs…

The British royal family has veto power over parliament. They use this power to rewrite laws. Lots of this is well documented, but poorly publicised.

Pity they didn't stop Brexit, which would have been an actual good use of their veto power.

> Benevolent monarchs are a cornerstone of serenity and sanity.

So they are great until they aren’t, and then there is no mechanism to remove them.

Dictatorships are also good if you get a great leader.

> The view that the monarchy is ‘very important’ has reached the lowest percentage since data collection began in 1983.

https://natcen.ac.uk/news/public-support-monarchy-falls-reco...

Anecdotally it's 50% "France had the right idea" and 50% "God save the king" with very few people in between.

Sibling comment confirms

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39858847

My experience is the opposite. Most people don’t really care, but if pushed they’d be “well of course I don’t think the royal family should have a constitutional role, but I wouldn’t kill them, and I don’t trust politicians to put a better system in place…”

I fall in the middle of the camps -- pretty sure we still get a good RoI on our marketing spend on the royals, unconvinced the family wouldn't actually be wealthier if they'd abandoned the throne and taken all their stuff with them instead of it "belonging to the country", feel rather sorry for those who get the most tabloid attention.

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.

That equation misses the value of their assets and the revenue they make for themselves.

> Pissed that my taxes were subsidizing their bullshit

Accurate

Step 1: Stop wasting money subsidising their bullshit.

Step 2: Take a slice of advice from the revolutionary French.

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