Pedantic point: electric typewriters (which have existed since the 1960s) do type in a way that looks exactly like this.

(In fact, note that the text on the real employee ID card, shown later in the article, doesn't look any less clean! It's just set in a different, narrower font.)

The smudginess of mechanical typewriters comes from 1. them striking (and especially, releasing) at the same speed you're depressing the key, and 2. having many of the keys necessarily approach the ribbon from an angle.

The keys being swung weakly by your fingers, also has the additional implication that the ink ribbons used in mechanical typewriters have to be soft and squishy (so: made of cloth), and use thin inks. These properties ensure a transfer from even a low-velocity impact. But the trade-off is that cloth ink ribbons transfer only a rough outline of what's struck; and thin inks are high-bleed inks.

An electric typewriter, playing out a pre-buffered line with a crisp, predictable report, using linear actuators and a rotating-ball type-head to bang a tape ribbon loaded with high-viscosity ink onto the page, can create text indistinguishable from books/newspapers of the same period, or from modern laser-printer reproductions of the same font faces. They're essentially character-at-a-time letterpresses!

(Also, ignoring electric typewriters for a sec: inks bleed more on thin, cheap paper. But this is [a forgery of] an employee ID card — where, for durability, a nice heavyweight paper or cardstock would have been used. You're always going to get a better-looking result inking such paper.)

The machine you just described is an IBM Composer, except the ribbon was not "high viscosity". Rather it was essentially solid, being a carbon ribbon with a mylar back.

Most electric typewriters were not Composers, so they did not pre-buffer lines. In fact most electric typewriters were not Selectrics so they didn't even use a ball. The IBM Executive for example used swinging type bars just like a manual typewriter, and it produced excellent copy that was frequently used as a master for offset lithography. (Source: Me. I used to own a print shop.)

The presence or absence of swinging type bars, pre-buffering, or balls makes no difference. Carbon ribbons and the repeatability of impression that electric provides are what matter.

And produced the most crisp type imaginable. I'm not sure any laser printer can compete.

[0] https://youtu.be/PdYPZr1Flog

Isolating oneself from outside distractions to help concentration is nothing new - libraries have provided quiet places for studying for aeons.

How is typewriter any different than fullscreen text editor? You can have a quiet room with a computer no?

What I'm saying is, if they don't work on themselves, a physical device won't help long term imo. Eventually they will land back on distractions.

By way of analogy, learning to swim in calm waters helps you learn to swim in rough waters by giving you the experience of what swimming is even like.

Again - for personal use, go crazy. Nostalgic stuff is fun! This is not a solution for 90% of the workforce though and I would argue that relying on a typewriter for isolation is harming your professional prospects. Apply to any job and compare the reactions you get bringing your typewriter to the first interview with the reactions you get from bringing your laptop.

If you don't care about the way people perceive you, how productive you are, how accessible your work is or how error-proof your product is, maybe a typewriter is for you. I cannot imagine a practical application (even casually) where you would benefit from a typewriter over a word processor and inkjet printer. I say this as someone with a typewriter not 20 feet away from where I'm standing now; they suck.

Is that a personal problem, or a computer one though? Many people (myself included) have zero issue ignoring Twitter and Instagram while we work. In fact, typing on a computer is much easier than using a typewriter for a number of reasons:

- Don't need to buy ink ribbons or paper to continue typing

- Don't need to stop and switch out stamps to change your typeset

- Can infinitely reproduce a single document as many times as you want

- No white-out or paper strips required when you make a mistake

I don't know if you've ever used a typewriter before, but it should simply be common knowledge that it's the slower and more distracting way to type. Every second you spend using a typewriter instead of getting comfortable with a computer is wasted effort. Every time you take your typewriter apart to make a simple change, that's time you could be spending writing uninterrupted on a digital medium.

Then it's not for you, continue using a computer. It's a personal problem solved by the use of a single purpose technology rather than a multipurpose one, as I've initially stated.

I have used a typewriter and while it can be slower than a computer, some wasted time is better than wasting all one's time because one can't focus and distracts themselves instead. Sounds like you still simply don't get it, and I'm not sure how I can explain it further as I've restated my points several times now that those who use it can't focus when writing on computers.

Also, having a physical copy of your work >feels< safer.

People need all sorts of excuses to just calm their mind and say it’s some disorder.

But I’ve literally never met someone who genuinely tried meditation and it didn’t help them.

I used to run a meditation group at work and the dozen or so people who consistently showed up reported that it changed their life. And I’m no expert I just do breathwork and concentration on a single object like a red dot sticker.

They rather use medication or spend money buying gadgets and toys.

Oh well. Not my problem when the solution is literally built in.

Get off your high horse. My brain is literally, physically, developed wrong. It's broken. I need treatment, medication, therapy, not a fucking meditation tape. Not that meditation is bad or wrong or worthless, because I used to like it, but it's not medicine.

Do you also insist people with bad vision just try looking harder? Maybe squint a little bit more? Who needs glasses, the fix is built right in!

I am in my 20s and I use a typewriter somewhat regularly to journal. I was raised on computers, getting the jumble from my brain onto paper is faster with a keyboard than a pen/pencil and paper. And a typewriter is nice and analog - no screen, no lights, no battery. I'm disconnected, focused, and performant.

I was just looking at some today but the biggest downside right now is that they're pretty expensive for what you get.

BUT on a keyboard I can type almost as fast as I can think - and I can also spell 90% better - I don't know how it happens but it is like the words 'flow' out of my fingers when i type - and I can easily spell words that if you asked me how to spell I wouldn't have a clue. Also if you asked me to find you a key on a keyboard I'd have to look - but when I'm typing my fingers just know where they are.

I'm a 44 yo successful man, but I still don't know my alphabet well (for example I couldn't start in the middle or recite it backwards) - but put me in front of a keyboard and I can type all day long (note - I am VERY thankful for spellcheck though!)

I always had similar problems in school growing up. A few things that I've found helpful:

- Try a larger pen. It helps you maintain your grip on the pen without as much effort.

- Try a pen with less viscous ink. If you're used to ballpoints, this can mean e.g. a rollerball. This lets you write without putting much pressure on the page, which at least for me significantly helps to avoid hand cramps. (I use fountain pens these days myself which write with even less pressure, but rollerballs are a more familiar starting point.)

but as soon as I could type my essays I loved English and writing.

Nevertheless carrying a nice pen and a good notebook always beats having a heavy typewriter with you.

(i don't have a typewriter, but i prefer to type anything because of this).

At least from typewritten documents that you did not torch or shred etc.

It was taking seconds back then, too.

I have too, for that matter, but I haven't touched one in over 25 years.

Of course for certain forms, better legibility in many cases may make it worth it.

If you have really neat block printing it might be a wash.

1977 was a long time ago, even in typewriter years.

Notably, the Red Cross invoice is much worse: additionally to what has been noted in the article already, why would you have a hyphen in "Verkäufername"? Also mind the reoccurring use of "#" for "Nummer", which would have been rather unacceptable in a formal German document.

Magnify it to full screen and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Now go back and look at the samples I linked to, where you can clearly see vertical misalignment.

I remember everyone in my school system had selectrics when I was a kid, and I assure you, they could produce text that was all over the place. Probably because the ones in a public school saw heavy use / were not properly maintained and serviced to the degree required.

1) A German date is always written DD.MM.YYYY

2) PLZ not ZIP 3) „Wir danken für ihr Unternehmen“ is a bad translation for „Thank you for your business“ … but it means a complete different thing -> „Thank you for your company“

But I‘m still impressed how much effort this guy put into all this. And I‘m sure my friends would have bought me this badge, because they had no idea it‘s fake.

- As stated in one of the linked mastodon posts, the abbreviation for the Deutsche Mark was DM, not DEM

Also, I have no idea how the seller thought the German Red Cross would emboss their paper with a circle of stars. If anything, embossing the cross itself would make the most sense. Probably they had the tool on hand from another forgery where it may have made more sense.

Without the aim of trying to insult anyone, frills like that are more common in the US when trying to emphasize the official nature of documents (e.g., notary public embossing).

Even so, on top of all that, it would make exactly zero sense for the embossing to be the EU stars.

“Ah, 16 stars, because Germany has 16 federal states”, you'd say at first thought. But while the German Red Cross organization has sub-organizations, the Landesverbände, those only partially mirror the modern 16 federal states. Some Landesverbände predate the modern federal states and are instead for more traditional German regions. Instead of a single Landesverband for the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen [1] there are two Landesverbände, one for Nordrhein, one for Westfalia-Lippe. In Lower Saxony there is an extra Landesverband for Oldenburg, in Baden-Württemberg there is an extra Badischer Landesverband. That makes 19 regional sub-organizations, but there aren’t 19 stars.

And all of these 19 regional subs predate 2001. I can’t really see a reason for the DRK in 2001 to use 16 stars.

[1] Nordrhein-Westfalen (North Rhine Westfalia) was created forcefully by the British Military Administration in 1946 out of the former prussian provinces of the Rhine and parts of Westfalia (and small Lippe!) in the creatively named "Operation Marriage". Nobody thought a union between the lively Rhinelanders and the laconic Westfalians (and the Lippians!) could work given the differences – but it seems to work mostly great. Nobody thinks of seceding. Must be the first time in history.

Future defrauders will love both Cabel's post and this discussion :)

That it’s collected in this one post might be somewhat useful to someone specifically seeking to produce a counterfeit ID badge made to appear as if it had been created circa mid-1970s, but only to a limited extent as the processes used at the time for such things varied much more widely than they would today.

There’s also the fact that the person who performed this fraud was successful, despite this being reported to eBay by multiple sources before the auction concluded. So there’s not much motivation to expend the additional time and energy drilling down farther on tiny details, if their inaccuracy hasn’t caused them to fail thus far.

If anything, I’d imagine this will be useful to prop designers and miniatures hobbyists, who will exert substantial effort to achieve maximal accuracy just for its own sake.

For close to $1000, a little bit of effort is not unexpected.

(Also, why assume this was a guy?)

So if you type 459 on a keyboard, a natural jump to something in the middle would be 68. 4-5-9, then 6-8 quickly. Right hand finds another letter "L" and then jumps back into the usual 59.

This is not definite but adds slightly to the suspicion.

But then there are multiple things which are obviously and subtile off, the most glaring is the obviously AI-translated phrase at the bottom. I'd love to know the mind of the forger. They did put some serious work into the invoice but then AI-translated an idiomatic American phrase (wrongly!) which wouldn’t by used on a German invoice.

It’s accepted that the US movies and television industry can’t get contemporary Germany right [1], often for economic limitations of the productions, but something that still get’s me is when the badly pronounced dialogue was obviously written in idiomatic English and only then translated mindlessly word for word, as if other countries cultures and languages are semantically the same, only the words are different. Maybe that’s what happened with the forger - you can’t know there would be differences if you don’t have a sensibility for difference.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAGerman/comments/1ct1k73/what_is...

The US movies and television industry can rarely get any language right. This reminds me of the Dutch-speaking scene in Oppenheimer which no Dutch speaker can understand [1]. It's like a sped-up pronunciation of a nonsense Dutch sentence by an English-speaker trying to speak a horrible German accent.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFORgWaYrBU

To be fair, they do this with a lot of location in the US as well. "New York" is often Atlanta or Toronto in many American movies.

I will admit that they nailed the German-Dutch accent.

However, the weird choice to use “translatie” which, while technically is a Dutch word, wasn’t common even back in the period this is supposed to take place and feels more like a lazy translation of… well the English word “translation”, combined with, what I can only describe as “just blurt it out as fast as you can” direction, makes this very comical.

However a novice in a foreign language will speak more slowly than natives, not more quickly, even if reading a prepared speech (as was likely the case in that setting, and especially given the advanced language used that no beginner would have mastered), so not sure what the thinking was there.

This is especially stupid because LLMs like ChatGPT CAN output phrases that wouldn't be out of tune. I assume the forger got that phrase by literally asking the LLM to translate an english phrase to german, rather than asking the LLM what would be a good german phrase to use.

I tried it a few times on arena.lmsys.org and given the prompt "Please translate "We thank you for your business" into German", the most common result was "Wir danken Ihnen für Ihr Geschäft", I got one bad result from some random tiny model and some more extensive responses from Gemini with suggestions for more idiomatic expressions. Modern LLMs are typically smart enough to understand this nuance when translating to German.

That’s my point: You can make a semantically and possible idiomatic translation but it would be still _culturally_ wrong to use it in this context.

We joked our documents were high quality than the original, which they were.

Used them for years.

Do it. It all makes sense after actually doing it yourself. People think forgers copy pixel by pixel but it's remaking assets.

We guessed the iso standard on the barcodes. We were no experts. We probably got it right, but you have to do this on every asset.

The photo and card inside the plastic lamination show signs of wear. Parts of the photo are rubbed off around the edge, and the paper is stained. At the same time, the lamination is relatively clean. How does that make any sense? That's suspicious, even without seeing Espinosa's badge.

[edit: the photo of Espinosa's badge shows a worn lamination and clean, unworn paper and photo]

On top of that, the lamination has a cutout so it can be attached to a lanyard or retractor. The cutout shows no sign of wear.

It's as if the forger imagined company badges work like library cards: You keep them in your wallet, and only remove them to check out a book. In the forger's head canon, the company must have later decided to laminate the badges (without replacing them!) and require everyone had to wear them visibly (hence the cutout).

It makes no sense.

That was just a month after the release of the original iPod, that eventually brought back Apple to relevancy. Apple was still the small competitor that Microsoft kept alive to avoid more problems in their anti-trust lawsuit.

It's kinda like asking a painter to paint.

Doesn't mean they'll be good, but they probably like doing it

[1] And by 2001 was not that far from there being reasonable discussion whether you should not instead get an Atari ST if you wanted to do electronic music. (there was sorta ecosystem for ST as midi controller that was still surviving, at least in Poland, partially thanks to disco scene)

A few month later Apple released Mac OS X 10.3 „Panther“, to be sold still on DVDs in shrink-wrapped boxes. There was only one, small, store in my city which sold Apple stuff. Not an Apple Store, those are still very rare in Germany, but a chain local to Germany (which went out of business this year). For the release of Panther they made an evening party, for enthusiasts.

My city has a population of 0.5 million but it is part of a metropolitan region of 5 million people. That local shop would have been the shop for at least half of the region.

Including me there were less than 20 enthusiasts there that evening. You felt like a part of an obscure BDSM cult or something.

Apple in public opinion then was mostly inexistent in Germany. Partly because of the marketing incompetence of the Apple D-A-CH local organization, but also because Apple then had the image of a computer only for graphic designers with no practical usage for other computing and seen as hugely overpriced. Germany was and still is rather cheap in regard to computers. A big tech store chain at the time was using the slogan “Geiz ist geil” (“Parsimony is sexy”).

If you were into computers in 2001 you'd have heard of Apple, for the general population I'd bet a reasonable percentage would have had little knowledge of them then, and key to the argument here - far far less knowledge or interest than people would today.

Regardless of their significance at the time, there's no way a bit of Apple memorabilia would have commanded the same price or interest then as it would now. Be like selling an autographed John Oliver photo in 2005. He was hardly insignificant on the UK comedy scene at that time, he had a radio show, was on TV shows. But he was _far less significant_ than he is now

An old startup I worked at used customer IDs in communications that started from an arbitrary 5 digit number to give a false impression of our customer base.

It's definitely not how people act these days, at least with indie/solo game developers.

Can you guess what I did in the early days to eventually grow the server to over 2000 real active players?

Employee IDs pretty much start happening when you end up getting actual space that isn't your garage or repurposed residential buildings, especially if you're doing manufacturing of any kind.

Then you might want to have employee IDs if only for minimal security (contractors! Visitors!) or workplace safety reasons (tracking who was left in the building, for example).

It is, also, a sign of "making it somewhere", yes - along with some of the above parts also making up the "corporate social capital".

Similarly using customized paperwork, having logos, branding style etc. all helps to build up a company image that might help in landing sales or investors or whatever.

"I honestly hate to sell it but since Covid19 I'm unemployed and need to support my family."

No, you make the money by offering to sell real certificates of authenticity to authenticate the fake certificates of authenticity to people who those who calls and asks.

Most fiat currencies impose a degree of solidity by being required for payment for certain services (read: taxes)

Or, by less casual name, "intersubjectivity". And yes, it's a very important idea that directly applies here.

And yes they would want you to say "yes/no, it is/isn't authentic" to anyone who calls and asks.

But if you screw up your records and say "yes" to fake certificates of authenticity that imitate yours then people will stop paying you very quickly. (Also you may end up in jail)

But yeah; until somebody gets a different trusted party to look at the item.

Fraud generally pays pretty well until you get caught.

On August 9, 2010, Symantec completed its approximately $1.28 billion acquisition of Verisign's authentication business, including the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate Services, the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Services, the Verisign Trust Services, the Verisign Identity Protection (VIP) Authentication Service, and the majority stake in Verisign Japan.

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

I casually collect coins and on Ebay there are known high volume scammers selling fakes or coins with heavily doctored images, Ebay doesn't care.

It's to the point that I only by cheap stuff when it comes to thinks I collect that is less likely to be faked or I just don't collect at all. Sad situation.

Your friend pulls out the fake badge, proud of himself for having the winning bid on eBay... "check it out! badge #10!"

Do you tell them that it's fake? Or let them live happily in their joy-filled bubble?

I participate in a community that has some historical literature, where early editions of our literature fetch fairly significant premiums. It’s a relatively obscure community, so there’s a pretty limited market.

There are some extremely well-done forgeries. I am told they come from China, but I suspect the means to make them, are available in many venues.

I heard a story about a guy that purchased a Winchester rifle from an estate auction. It was one of those old western-style guns, with the repeater action. As an original, it was worth a great deal.

He took it to an expert, who almost immediately declared it a forgery. He said it was mainly because it was in too good a shape. It was supposed to be over 150 years old, and looked like it was only ten years old.

I have also heard, from a watchmaker I knew, that Rolex forgeries are so good, that even seasoned watchmakers are fooled, and the only way to tell, is to open the watch.

That [picture of employee] wasn’t taken with a Polaroid with a flash.

Not worthwhile for a forger (unless from a Hollywood movie) to go extra mile for. There is some lesson there for a budding forensic investigator.

Source: me, during that time I oversaw security at a Fortune 500, issuing thousands (literally) of IDs for "limited access" areas (DataCenters, SOC, etc) in multiple facilities.

To varying degrees, the answer is yes, the tools exist.

They also host a server allowing trusted third parties to verify that a given passport is still valid (ie. Not withdrawn).

The combination of those mean you will never edit details on a passport, but you might be able to copy a passport 1:1, because the security is only mifare classic.

You can actually read the photo from your passport with an Android phone. Some of the info in the machine readable area is required as a salt, so you can't do a remote scan of a closed passport.

I never got around to modifying the data on mag stripe. I just dragged a hard-drive magnet over it until it didn’t scan at all.

My takeaway from all that? The hologram that was used to strengthen the official IDs had an unintended side effect of making the fakes easier to believe.

My friends daughter bought a fake ID stating that she was over 21 but only 16 - it would scan as authentic at stores but would not pass with police.

I asked him if he ever got people trying to get him to "enhance" the value of their guns and he laughed and said, "Ayup, all the time."

Art and antique forgery has always been kind of fascinating to me for that reason.

EDIT: I reported it myself including the original article.

I've basically given up on the auction format entirely because of the number of people that try to "pull out" not realising that their offer is binding.