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Southern California woman pleads guilty in $150-million counterfeit postage scheme
(www.latimes.com)
Millions of packages???
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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I assume she sold stamps. It's not clear if she printed them herself. Or if they were printed somewhere else. China? North Korea? Russia?
Or figured out a way to print postage labels that work
This was my take. They figured out the algorithm or something.
According to Chen’s plea agreement, she and Hu owned and operated a City of Industry-based package shipping company that offered shipping by U.S. Mail for China-based logistics businesses. Hu then began to print duplicate and counterfeit NetStamps in an effort to cut the cost of postage, authorities allege.
From the Article.
Ah, I'm not American, I didn't know what a "NetStamp" is.
Think of it as electronic postage.
The usps will allow most businesses to buy a postage scale that then goes out over the internet to buy exact postage, and prints labels (or the funny barcode along the bottom; you get a break for pre-printing it saves them a bit so they charge less. It contains address information.)
In any case, those labels are what’s being duplicated.
Reminds me of a method for making three bills out of two by cleverly cutting those and glueing together incomplete but big enough to be accepted bills (the serial numbers on them will be different though)
DH Gate has a bunch of rolls for like 20 cents a stamp or cheaper... wonder if they finally found the person lol
Maybe she worked in the shipping department or a larger company, and took the money for sending everything for herself and just made her own stamps/labels instead?
Or she just sold them openly, like others suggested.
I assume this would have been caught sooner if the USPS would actually update things to the modern age. The postal service is so inefficient. Why do I frequently have packages travel to my state, then back out of my state and then back again?
Republicans gutted the postal service.
Simple as.
Because that's how logistical networks work. Sometimes it will show it go back halfway accross the country, but that's just flaws in their awful tracking system.
Ooh I didn't know they were filming a second Trial and Error!