Note that they’ve sold so much that even 1k neutral ratings are barely registering - they have “100% positive feedback”
I bought a cheap tool from this seller on ebay. Tracking number was provided showing my town as the destination. About four days later, I get an unprompted ebay message from the seller:
“I monitor all my shipments and sometimes there are problems so I’m proactively sending you a new one, here’s a new tracking number.”
The original tracking number showed a message I’d never seen before “Item seized - counterfeit postage”. The new tracking number showed postage that had been bought back in January, but never entered the mailstream. Huh. I suspect that buys them time while they re-ship.
I did eventually get the item after another tracking number was provided.
My suspicion is that the seller uses counterfit USPS postage on 'x' number of packages to juice their margins. If you look at the neutral reviews, you can see a pattern — slow postage, lost package, had to replace, blah blah. Look at the positives — rave reviews at how fast things are arriving. Probably because the seller is “paying” for higher end postage via scamming the USPS.
And only when they get caught by USPS do they need to re-ship an item. They must get away with it enough to make it worthwhile
Thanks for the links. I'm confused how this works and the USPS report seems to be heavily redacted around details.
I would assume that the tracking number has the address details tied to it (I mean, based on support claims with USPS it definitely does), but maybe there's some obscure package type where destination is not distinct and they abuse that in a pool with other sellers, then at the last mile it gets sorted appropriately?
Seems wild that this market even exists considering how USPS flat rate postage exists.
Was your package something heavy or extremely light which makes weight-based shipping more economical?
The redaction is frustrating, but I suspect the approach is still at least partially viable, so they aren't interested in giving a playbook for scammers to exploit.
The tool I bought wasn't what you'd think of as a small, inconsequential item. I'd wager it was ~2lbs and was a automotive brake bleeder in a blowmolded case. Probably the size of an old-timey encyclopedia. Cheaply made of course (almost certainly an aliexpress item). The seller I bought from has what appears to be an aliexpress dropshipping supply chain -- they buy the tool for $, ship from a US warehouse in Florida for $$.
They aren't hard to generate. They give you how to generate them via their own documentation. It's just made up of an app ID, service type code, mailer ID, serial number, and check digit.
No. That won't work. Every carrier has it own way to generate tracking number. And that number must have registered in the carrier's database before it becomes "valid/sanctioned".
If you generate a random number even fitting the pattern and looks like a real one, the scan will fail with an error and fail to register tracking information every single step of the way that package gets scanned from dropoff at the retail postal office (this was the case) as bulk inbound pickup from USPS are only allowed for USPS verified partners.
Label creation (which generates the tracking number) is a billable action in their API. Some volume partners have pre-arranged/allocated tracking number segments assigned to the bulk volume partner/shipper (similar like how IP address v4 is assignment from IANA). And that pre-allocation tracking number range requires $$$$ contract in place. Billing that is post paid like cellphone bill.
Most retail shipping software (like shipengine, pirateship etc.) bills using the prepaid method, meaning you will have to pay for the label at the time label is generated.
Disclaimer: I used to work for a carrier that integrated a few dozens of global shipping carriers.
Yes, I’m deep in e-commerce and fraudulent labels are all over the place. Even Amazon, 3rd party sellers are using these fake labels to sell items for cheaper and win the buy box. Even UPS has this issue.
I get that they have reverse engineered how the numbers are created, but how are they showing up in USPS and UPS databases?
Are shipping platforms like shipengine getting these labels pre-made and this fake label seller has reverse engineered how these tracking numbers are created programmatically and are essentially using the ones allocated to these big shipping platforms?
And the only plausible way they got around is likely recycle previously used real tracking numbers because USPS is inept (the thing USPS has been constant and consistent is raising prices).
We would never know how since that's the part USPS redacted heavily.
I wish Anthropic/OpenAI FDE take over USPS IT altogether.
> how are they showing up in USPS and UPS databases?
Are you overestimating their validation capabilities? Maybe the validation just isn't that accurate or isn't always done, for efficiency.
I once desperately needed a (FedEx or UPS) package that was delayed. Tracking showed it in a facility about an hour away so I asked if I could pick it up there. I was told: 'It's not really there; our (customer-facing) tracking shows where packages should be.'
Their image of super-efficiency is for selling themselves. (If you are deep in e-commerce, you probably already know.)
Yeah USPS definitely reuses tracking numbers, but how were these guys able to overwrite the delivery address? I feel like this shouldn’t be possible unless they are inside the system.
My guess is that the validation just validates the numbers which are old and valid and some automated system notices the label and routes it. I bet their system is a disjointed system and not set up in a way where every step checks every thing. It's very plausible it was home grown in such a way where its like this
Correct, I was just pointing out how trivial it was to generate/counterfeit a USPS barcode. I also worked in shipping/logistics with heavy USPS integration, but it was dealing with bulk/volume labels, where we'd only get charged if the label was actually used (returns, etc).
Related: Not US postage labels, but suspicious US postage stamps, seemed to also be used as a crude currency.
A third-party seller on Amazon or eBay was including sheets of suspicious US postage stamps in product shipments, unsolicited, with full-color glossy notes offering more stamps in exchange for positive reviews.
(I took the stamps and note I received to a post office, where a manager agreed they looked suspicious, and I asked them forward it up the chain. I like the USPS as a trustworthy service and institution, and I hate counterfeiting.)
It might have to do with the fact that the First Class stamps exploded in price recently. It was $0.55 right before covid, but now it's $0.82. It's like printing counterfeit money, except easier. A 4x5 sheet the size of a postcard becomes worth $16. The stamps themselves have relatively little in the way of counterfeiting measures, especially if you consider that "Forever" stamps exist. So even if they introduce anti-counterfeiting measures into new stamps, a pirate could print old-style Forever stamps, circumventing the new measures.
The USPS is also, ahem, rather incompetent, and their own report [1] shows that "mitigation efforts are limited, with no substantive approach to identify counterfeit stamps in the Postal Service network. While the Postal Service and the Postal Inspection Service have increased prevention-related efforts, the quantity of counterfeit stamps in the network remains unknown."
So the increased value of the stamps, the inability to change old Forever stamps, and the lack of enforcement have created a perfect storm for the counterfeiters.
USPS still sells denominated stamps from $0.01 to $10.00, in addition to "First Class Forever" stamps - see near the bottom of the filters sidebar on https://store.usps.com/store/stamps
These are problematic as well - they don’t have a way to tally the stamps, they just look for the marker and process it. A postal employee at the delivery point may flag it.
Also if you mail stuff this way you’ll have mail inspected for bombs or anthrax.
It's common in the UK to sell them both with a £ denominated value on them or the class of service. My brother bought loads of the latter a few years ago, which was a great idea, because as mentioned postal rates have increased significantly. The UK post office will also exchange your old unused stamps for new versions (now with QR codes or with sticky backs) for free. So even if they go out of date they alcan be upgraded at no cost.
Forever stamps guarantee delivery forever (subject to terms and conditions on weight/size). Regular stamps denote value, e.g. 50 cents. They will always be usable but you will need to match the inflation of prices (e.g., mailing a letter might be 50 cents in the past but 100 cents in the future)
There are still some "Forever" stamps (those with pictures on or Christmas Stamps) but the old non-QR code non-forever stamps stopped being legal a while back (but you can always swap them for the new ones for free).
I've had people try and reuse a QR-coded stamp, you just get a postcard saying there's an item of mail with invalid postage for you to collect (and pay for). You get to look at it before you decide whether to pay the fine or not and then your argument is with the sender to reimburse you or not.
This was almost my thought for mitigating USA stamp fraud. Exchange Forever stamps for $currentValue stamps, but show your ID so you’ll be subject to extra scrutiny if you try to trade in a million of them. (QR code’s better and more fair.)
I think they’re saying there is more evidence of fraud in stamps because of the direct monetary value, where there is no evidence that our current registration-time voting controls need to be supplemented with additional friction at voting time, because what little evidence there is of voter fraud is mostly just lies: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/us/politics/nevada-voters...
Rhetorical question aside, federal elections use voter rolls that identify each potentially eligible voter and actively monitor for issues like double voting. There's no "forever stamp-holder" roll for the USPS to check.
“Forever” stamps in US terms are what 1st class / 2nd class stamps have always been in the UK since they appeared in the ‘80s, where they remain valid for a level of service forever. The US went through a weird phase where they had 1st class stamps, but they would only actually be for the monetary value of whatever the 1st class rate was when issued, so if the rate went up you’d have to add extra postage.
The basic split between what has barcodes and what doesn’t it that the everyday “definitive” stamps (both 1st/2nd etc. and those with a direct monetary value) were withdrawn and reissued with barcodes, but commemorative and special stamps weren’t. Basically, stuff sold to stamp collectors to be put in a box and never used on postage doesn’t have them.
> but they would only actually be for the monetary value of whatever the 1st class rate was when issued, so if the rate went up you’d have to add extra postage.
Reminds me of our monetary stamps. They were the old fashioned monetary value stamps which had a fixed value on it, so when the price hiked you could get 5ct/1ct stamps to add to get to the new rate, fixed value of the stamps stayed the same. People added real money to it since they were not going to buy a full sheet of 5ct stamps for one older one to compensate. And since the mail usually didn't care you sometimes got a free 5ct coin as recipient! (As a kid this was always fun to receive).
Fun thing is that those coins are way heavier than the paper so adding them might get you onto the next cost bracket making the whole excersize pointless.
Stamp value still matters in the US for normal letters because of the janky way extra weight is priced. In particular, the current price of a max-weight letter is two stamps plus 5 cents.
> The USPS is also, ahem, rather incompetent, and their own report [1] shows that "mitigation efforts are limited, with no substantive approach to identify counterfeit stamps in the Postal Service network.
They've been underfunded for a long time. Meanwhile they still have the legal requirement to deliver everywhere in the US. So the big guys like Amazon will happily deliver their own packages in densely populated areas where it's easily profitable. The areas where it's not can be done by USPS...
So basically the taxpayer is paying for Amazon to not have to deliver where it would be costly for them.
Fun fact: Charles Ponzi (yes, THAT Ponzi) got started buying and selling postage stamps via arbitrage. It was legal until he started doing some shenanigans regarding over-promised ROIs and needed to use new investor money to pay older investors.
He would buy a stamp in Spain for 30 centavos, then exchange it for a 5 cent stamp in the US. Spain’s currency was depreciating against the dollar, so you could make some surprising returns. Really, his numbers weren’t straight-up lies, it’s just that it would’ve been impractical at the time to transport enough stamps to make that payout occur.
Correction: his idea was that he could buy international reply coupons (which were different than regular stamps) and arbitrage the rates against whatever currency value was greater. As an academic exercise, it was interesting (if utterly unpractical, especially for 1920).
But he NEVER did anything legal. In fact, he didn’t even receive his first attempt at successfully buying a small number of international reply coupons from a friend in Italy until his scam unraveled. And he’d never figured out how he could turn those coupons into cash.
And the reason his arbitrage excuse was caught so quickly (it was basically one summer that he was able to run his scam before his money ran out), was because the global supply of all the international reply coupons in the world were valued at significantly less than his revenues from his schemes, a fact experts pointed out to the local papers as the scam was happening. In fact, he even stopped telling new investors about the postal reply coupons scheme and had moved on to other lies about how people could double their money so quickly.
They usually have someone on the inside they can contact to remove negative reviews, eBay doesn’t care because the high positive ratings means more sales which means more commissions.
Clicking the Information icon on the end of the line "Positive Feedback (last 12 months): 100%" shows that this is correct. Never forget it's a marketing line, to encourage you to buy, not to help you. Percentages ideally shouldn't be rounded to 100% at any time, but generally are; but ignoring all neutral feedback makes it even more meaningless.
We calculated this positive feedback percentage using the total number of positive and negative ratings...
Positive feedback: 189647
Negative feedback: 9...
189647 / ( 189647 + 9 ) = 100%
Funnily enough, I've run into long time eBay sellers that don't seem to realize this, either (assuming they're not just lying). I've given neutral feedback to people that complained about how I was jeopardizing their shop by ruining their 100% positive feedback rating, and I have to explicitly point out that their rating was unchanged.
Turns out you're correct, but this store also has a fair number of negative reviews, too. Fortunately for them (or unfortunately for us) they end up a rounding error in their favor.
I saw a bunch of denim jackets (with size options on the listings, usually indicating significant stock on hand, not just someone selling a couple used items) in four or five styles from a manufacturer I'm interested in show up on eBay at a bit under half retail price a couple months back. Big discount, but not suspiciously low for overstock or maybe someone selling seconds and lying about them not having defects. From what I can tell, some of these brands that rarely have sales at all and never steep ones either sell would-be steep-sale material directly on ebay (without publicizing it) or wholesale it in lots to people who turn around and put it on ebay, so a bunch of new stock for one brand showing up from a single seller all at once isn't that weird.
So I bought one.
About a week and a half passes, and no update on ebay regarding the shipping. I've had this happen once or twice before and the thing just eventually shows up, so I'm not too worried, but I am approaching the point of being worried.
Around that time, the seller sends me a message that their... warehouse burned down. So I should cancel the order because they can't fulfill it.
WTF.
I am like 95% sure this was some kind of scam or hustle from the beginning, but I haven't been able to figure out how. I got my money back. What gives? Maybe... some kind of drop-shipping thing that fell through, or they got a line on some counterfeits or "fell off a truck" stock but with limited info on what was actually in the batch, and weren't able to fulfill all the orders they took? I remain puzzled.
The USPIS (mentioned in the article) once came to the federal prison I was at to tell inmates that using stamps as currency was illegal.
There are flats and there are books. Flats are a sheet of 20 Forever stamps that you would get at a drug store. A book is 20 stamps, used or not used.
Generally there are different values associated with flats because you can get cash for them on the streets. You can get them to the streets via an officer if you're ballsy. Or you can just find discreet ways to mail them.
The value of a flat where I was at was about $13-$14 depending on your vendor. A book was generally worth $10. If you were buying bulk (and depending on who exactly you were buying from), that number could go down to $12 and $7 respectively.
If you were buying from someone that was running a ticket (sports gambling) they had more incentive to get rid of their stamps. Some people had tens of thousands of dollars of stamps in their property and they wanted to convert them.
If you were buying from someone running a store (think "buy and resell commissary"), their business model was dependent on flipping books of stamps in exchange for more commissary. They could sell a ramen for 3 stamps ($1.50) when it was worth just 50 cents.
Flats were easier to hide because they are, well, flat.
As someone who mails a bunch of letters (as a hobby) I'm surprised to hear stamps being used this much nowadays! Just out of curiosity, how often did inmates actually use them to mail letters, or was it predominantly used as a form of currency?
Great question: I would guess about 15% of the inmate population sends mail home on any given day. That number certainly jumps up if a facility is locked down, probably by at least double.
I have a friend who did some time a decade or so ago (I'm uncertain if it was a federal or state prison) and one thing I've noted about him is how much he values books, even stuff like manuals and outdated reference material (we're in a volunteer group and we were cleaning up a room with a bunch of trash). His explanation to me was that in prison there wasn't much to do and so he spent his time reading as much stuff as he could get his hands on.
From your experience, would you say that the average rate of reading amongst inmates is higher than the general population? In person I've hardly met anyone who reads books other than for school assignments.
> In person I've hardly met anyone who reads books other than for school assignments.
I know a ton of people in person who read a lot for pleasure, but I'm sure it's kind of self selecting. Are you in college? College was the time in my life I read the least.
Also, while I haven't been to prison, I've been to jail for a short cannabis related stay in the early 2010s. There is just so much less to do there that I ended up reading a whole book (2-300p) every day I was there. Many others had a book, but I'm not sure they were actually reading them. A lot of people in there were reading the Bible or some religious literature. Anyway, just my anecdote.
Nah, I'm in my 20s but already graduated. That said, most of my friends are guys from a church group and are 40+. I take back what I said a bit though. I know two of them who like to read spiritual stuff, but the rest don't read books and do social media or TikTok only.
I'm surprised to hear it's illegal to use stamps as currency, I wonder if that's just a prison thing.
One piece of trivia that's stuck with me is that stamps were used as a substitute for coins when the latter were in short supply during the Civil War because of metal-hoarding. A 1-cent stamp was basically a paper penny, backed by the value of just being able to stick it on a letter.
> I'm surprised to hear it's illegal to use stamps as currency
It makes sense with forever stamps, because inflation doesn't hurt their value. If everyone used stamps instead of dollars, the government wouldn't be able to just print money to fund things. It's what the dollar should be (and was, before we went off the gold standard).
Printing of money, coinage of silver, suspension of redemption and a dozen other schemes were used to control the money supply during the gold standard eras.
There was plenty of volatility and inflation during those periods as well. The 16th century saw massive inflation in Europe, and the colonization and destruction of imperial China was driven by currency imbalances in trade.
> It makes sense with forever stamps, because inflation doesn't hurt their value.
Inflation doesn't hurt their value, but the government can make the cost of postage lower at any time. This would be expensive and they would likely lose a lot of money, but it would still be a lot cheaper than quantitative easing.
> If everyone used stamps instead of dollars, the government wouldn't be able to just print money to fund things.
I realize that this isn't what you meant, but the government can literally just print more stamps whenever they want. In fact, stamps and dollars are both printed by the same company in Canada [0].
The stamps are backed (redeemable) by something real and fixed: shipping a first class letter. So they are more legitimate money (and not just currency) than dollars.
Just going by track record. The dollar has been reliable debased every year. Naturally if you have a time frame of decades, stamps would be ill-advised.
Have you written more about this kind of stuff? I would love to read more! I find it absolutely fascinating. Prison economics and such. Thanks for sharing.
Edit: just checked your profile and found your blog. Excited to read it! I think I've actually stumbled across your story before now that I see the website. Again thanks for sharing!
To anyone not knowing this dude - I really recommend reading josh.mn - the posts are interesting and well written, personally I love the philosophy of it. To Josh - you're such an inspiring person, thank you
You should check out Extreme Economies by Richard Davies. It's a book describing economic systems in extreme situations. I do not remember if it has a specific chapter on prisons though.
I think I have most of a roll of Forever stamps I bought almost 10 years ago (which shows how often I mail a physical letter)*. I'm guessing that was a wise investment due to inflation.
* Which is also probably the last time I was in an actual Post Office.
Here in Germany, you can just print your own codes or even just write those on the envelope. You can buy these via a website.
I tend to just use one of the many late night shops doubling as a post office these days in the rare case I need to send something. Thankfully, the amount of paper arriving in my mailbox has been declining steadily. It's next to nothing at this point. Dedicated post offices are very rare now. But there are many of these late night shops doing post and packages on the side. They take your envelope, they print a label with some kind of scanable code, slap it on there, and take care of delivery.
The codes are basically short hashes that correspond to a database record confirming the correct amount was paid. Very hard to forge those.
No need to handle stamps anymore. Only for international postage.
30 years ago a teacher told me of an art student applying to a school. The student included two art pieces for the submission but was meant to provide three. A note suggested that they look at the stamp for the third submission. It was a hand drawn counterfeit that was good enough to get it delivered.
My wife ships with endicia and shopify. I've often wondered if the barcodes that are printed are actually tracked, as you can void them. With that void comes a "i'm not going to ship this anymore' self-certification.
I suspect that the postage is actually generic and can be reused, but for obvious reasons don't want to try.
You can also take postage paid envelopes and stick them on anything. People used to stick them to bricks back in the day just for fun.
It says that the perp is Pakistani, and that he's been charged, but not that he's been arrested -- so he's presumably still free in Pakistan.
I hear that normally what the FBI would try in such cases is to lure people onto US or extraditable territory. IIRC there were some rogue Chinese chemists, who owned companies that sold fentanyl intermediates and were under secret indictment in the US, who were "invited to a VIP academic conference in Hawaii" and then arrested as soon as their flight landed.
Seems clear that this Pakistani is a bit more circumspect.
Most countries when presented with evidence that someone who lives there did something criminal will arrest and turn the criminal over to the country the crime was committed in. Sometimes they will put some stipulation in (Europe commonly won't turn a murderer over until the country promises not to seek the death penalty for example), but in general criminals are turned over all the time. In general a country doesn't want criminals living there even if the crime was done elsewhere and so they won't protect their own who commit a crime.
I don't know Pakistan's polices, but I would expect they would turn the criminal over to the US.
China won't, Russia won't, and there are many others who also don't extradite as a matter of policy. It appears that Pakistan doesn't usually extradite, or at the very least it makes the process very lengthy and difficult.
Unless you or your "crime" is covered by an existing shield law you could end up in a lot of trouble. Even if the shield law protects you, if you ever enter the state you could be thrown in prison or executed
France doesn't extradite its citizens. A notorious child rapist has lived freely there for decades. His crime is public knowledge yet he moves among the highest echelons of French society.
> I would expect they would turn the criminal over to the US.
This expectation seems...poorly calibrated.
Pakistan didn't arrest Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind behind an attack that killed thousands of innocent people and significantly altered the trajectory of world history. In what universe do you think they would deport a humble counterfeiter of stamps?
Osama bin Laden had friends in high places. I doubt this is true for our stamp counterfeiter, although if he earned even a fraction of the US$126M loss USPS allegedly suffered, I'm sure he can buy some.
You're insinuating a lot here. Pakistan helped tremendously with the wars we were in in the Middle East. The govt did not partake in hiding Bin Laden, he was in an air gapped room in a secure compound and never ever went outside. It's pretty hard to find someone hiding like that. The US govt also did their own investigations and found the govt there did not take part in hiding him. He was hidden by sympathizers in the country
> Bin Laden...was in an air gapped room in a secure compound
...which was located less than a mile (1300m for the non-Americans) from Pakistani West Point[1]. That points to either mind-boggling incompetence or a deep and well-hidden conspiracy.
Yes it was located there. But it's not like they can raid every house in the city. So much of our nations power is located in DC which has a huge amount of criminal activity and ghettos right next to it. None of this is proof of conspiracy and the US (who found Bin Laden in that compound and needed to do fake vaccine drives to do so) never found any proof of a conspiracy either and they did an investigation into this
> So much of our nations power is located in DC which has a huge amount of criminal activity
Most of that isn't a national security priority. If Ted Kaczynski had been found hiding in DC or near West Point, instead of his cabin in the woods in Montana, they'd only be wrapping up the Congressional hearings by about now.
Possibly. Sometimes delivery companies find it easier to just deliver them attempting to return to sender and dealing with headache of customer complaints since while it should have been clear to people buying the labels that they were not legit, a lot of people would be like "HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW? I WANT MY MONEY BACK!"
Yes there is verification. Sometimes the label WAS valid but it was purchased with stolen credit card OR purchased then refunded after delivery to the client but before it entered the postal stream.
EDIT: Remember, boxes can be dropped off before someone processes them. Just hand them random postal carrier OR put them in postal pickup box.
You can only ship packages from post offices now or by scheduling pickup. Too much darknet drugs I guess. You can drop them in a bin at the post office, but you still have to go in and get on camera.
Surely most drugs could be sold in small enough envelopes that you don't need parcel postage. I know when I was using DNMs most packages were a simple large letter stamp stamp which covers 35.3cm x 25cm x 2.5cm and a maximum weight of 750g. So I doubt dark net drug orders would have been the trigger for this sort of change.
As a consumer of black market peptides (formerly gray, thanks RFK) there doesn’t seem much of an attempt to hide it nor does it appear that anyone is intercepting them. The only package I lost was due to the LA Railroad heists.
This article has some inconsistencies with what I experienced. For example, my label absolutely had tracking before being intercepted. In fact, it made it all the way to my city's distribution center.
They can still be real tracking numbers, but faked labels. USPS used to let a lot slide but they've definitely gotten more aggressive with catching packages even slightly out of spec of what the label was for.
I'm not in front of my computer so I can't query our fraud documents right now (I work in that business), but I recall quite some different schemes, a bit of everything:
Really forged labels, reusing old tracking numbers and that kind of things... Hijacking Mailer IDs and/or USPS API keys... And of course, hijacking accounts of USPS resellers. An e-commerce/retailer/whatever that uses an USPS reseller API for getting all kind of labels get hacked, and its API keys are used for generating a hundred thousand labels to be resold in eBay.
There is not. And any ecommerce site providing usps labels on their own usps account is constantly dealing with a flow of fraudulently printed labels which "borrowed" their account indicator, leading to usps invoicing the account holder for labels they didn't issue.
USPS "forever stamps" are (still?) being openly sold on Aliexpress and would be even harder to track.
I would love to know how this worked. Is there a hacked credential somewhere allowing for legit, but otherwise unpaid labels? Are they stolen CCs? Something else?
I suspect the (real) stamps are printed in the usa from all-us supplies. I cannot imagine it is worth the risk of stealing them out of the US (where the US can jail you) vs printing them from the relative safety of China.
I recently ordered something on eBay, which when looking up tracking on usps said that it used counterfeit postage. The seller didn't want to give my money back right away, saying it happens all the time and they think it actually was still going to arrive. Then they gave my money back. eBay is full of scammy sellers and seems not to care
Missing from the story as usual is any notion of how this will ever be prevented again or even if there are a thousand other people doing the same thing on a smaller or similar scale.
I'm assuming, but im pretty sure sites like this operate by getting stolen credentials to third party shipping sites. think of all the sites like pirateship, shippo etc. if a companies account is hacked, they could create api credentials and just distribute a ton of requests across all the accounts. more accounts / larger orgs that get compromised = less chance of killing the beast
> im pretty sure sites like this operate by getting stolen credentials to third party shipping sites
If that were the case the charges would be fraud and the victims would be the companies that paid for the postage. The charge of counterfeiting is pretty specific - if I steal a $100 bill from you and spend it I don’t get charged with using counterfeit money, I get charged with theft.
There are lots of ways to send packages. Stamps are used for letters, but a package tends to have various restrictions and so they get a shipping label which is supposed to be proof that you paid the correct postage without having to find the correct stamps which would be really annoying.
Business that ship a lot (which is probably most packages) don't go to the post office for each shipment. Instead they buy machines/printers/software/labels which allows them to print off the correct label, and also combines all the money into something they handle the money in one larger transaction. There are lots of options in the above for different needs, if you a shipping a package even once a week you should look into them - often you get a discount for something that is easy for you to do (sorting outgoing mail by zip code saves them a lot of money and so they will pass that on to you)
Because there are so many options you can find one option and duplicate it easily enough and it will take them a while to catch it.
I understand all of that but how are USPS even accepting a package with a counterfeit label? Wouldn't that show up immediately when the item is scanned?
They’re possibly taking advantage of the international postage remuneration system.
You ship something from, say, Pakistan. You pay them the postage, they put a label on your parcel, send it to the U.S.
The USPS receive it, label it, deliver it, and note that the original collecting agency was overseas.
Periodically, usually based on the inbound volume, they settle the net value with the other international postal union member.
So - you ship from somewhere porous, with poor systems, it gets delivered, originating agency says “not ours, not paying”, and the USPS is left holding the bill.
I don't know what the modern rules are. I first encountered these machines in the mid-1990s when the obvious expectation is they are not connected to any form of network and you wouldn't be able to reconcile it now with the USPS as required a network connection then it should be trivial to require a unique barcode for everything and they can verify the barcode really exists but I suspect they haven't obviously did all the old machines that aren't network connected and so there's no way to verify
>Akram is charged with one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and to make and sell counterfeit postage stamps, five counts of making and selling counterfeit postage stamp labels, and four counts of wire fraud.
i would love more insight into how they come up with the number of charges. why five counts of making/selling counterfeit postage stamp labels instead of 1 charge that covers all 5 million, or 5 million charges, etc.
Isn't it one count per distinct criminal act? I think they do it to keep things simple and sane. In some cases they'll drop some, or add more depending on how evidence grows and the case proceeds.
I just looked it up, it has something to do with the ones they're most likely to prove, so maybe they deeply documented at least one or more purchases through the website to document as much as possible about the case? It's possible they could uncover more as they continue investigating. You do raise a good point though, it also depends on how many stamps customers bought.
They probably distinguish between what they think and what they know. It could very well be they ran a “sting” and made a few transactions through the site and are only charging against those transactions to get extradition started while they assemble the larger case.
Prosecutors call these "sample charges". Probably charged based on the five counts with the strongest evidence with dates far enough apart that they constitute separate crimes and the sentences can be run consecutively, rather than concurrently.
The primary aim is to put the defendant in as large a hole as possible, with the minimum of work at the start, such that the case can be disposed of via a plea deal.
UPS is also full of holes. No verifications whatsoever.
You can purchase a label from a reseller and then ship using that label to a different place at a different weight several times. Battled with this at a previous job.
>UPS is also full of holes. No verifications whatsoever.
I've had one of my UPS account numbers used to purchase some labels for someone else (I have no idea who). No way to report this to UPS since I can no longer get in touch with my account rep (who was great, until he disappeared).
Same. One of my UPS accounts would up with about $300 of shipping charges for things that were very clearly not to or from me. Impossible to get ahold of anyone at UPS to discuss/dispute this. Just wound up creating a new account.
> Court records show Faheem Akram, 33, of Khanewal, Pakistan, operated LabelsBank.com, a website that allegedly sold counterfeit USPS postage at a fixed rate, typically charging $2 per label
Wow! How did these pass through the USPS system so easily?
I am pretty sure I bought from a seller using this (or something similar) on eBay. It sent me down a rabbit hole of reading about this type of scam that exploded earlier this year: https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2026-04/...
Here's how it went down:
https://www.ebay.com/fdbk/feedback_profile/theperfectpart
Note that they’ve sold so much that even 1k neutral ratings are barely registering - they have “100% positive feedback”
I bought a cheap tool from this seller on ebay. Tracking number was provided showing my town as the destination. About four days later, I get an unprompted ebay message from the seller: “I monitor all my shipments and sometimes there are problems so I’m proactively sending you a new one, here’s a new tracking number.”
The original tracking number showed a message I’d never seen before “Item seized - counterfeit postage”. The new tracking number showed postage that had been bought back in January, but never entered the mailstream. Huh. I suspect that buys them time while they re-ship.
I did eventually get the item after another tracking number was provided.
My suspicion is that the seller uses counterfit USPS postage on 'x' number of packages to juice their margins. If you look at the neutral reviews, you can see a pattern — slow postage, lost package, had to replace, blah blah. Look at the positives — rave reviews at how fast things are arriving. Probably because the seller is “paying” for higher end postage via scamming the USPS.
And only when they get caught by USPS do they need to re-ship an item. They must get away with it enough to make it worthwhile
Thanks for the links. I'm confused how this works and the USPS report seems to be heavily redacted around details.
I would assume that the tracking number has the address details tied to it (I mean, based on support claims with USPS it definitely does), but maybe there's some obscure package type where destination is not distinct and they abuse that in a pool with other sellers, then at the last mile it gets sorted appropriately?
Seems wild that this market even exists considering how USPS flat rate postage exists.
Was your package something heavy or extremely light which makes weight-based shipping more economical?
The redaction is frustrating, but I suspect the approach is still at least partially viable, so they aren't interested in giving a playbook for scammers to exploit.
The tool I bought wasn't what you'd think of as a small, inconsequential item. I'd wager it was ~2lbs and was a automotive brake bleeder in a blowmolded case. Probably the size of an old-timey encyclopedia. Cheaply made of course (almost certainly an aliexpress item). The seller I bought from has what appears to be an aliexpress dropshipping supply chain -- they buy the tool for $, ship from a US warehouse in Florida for $$.
I’ve read about this. They basically reverse engineered how USPS creates the unique tracking number.
They aren't hard to generate. They give you how to generate them via their own documentation. It's just made up of an app ID, service type code, mailer ID, serial number, and check digit.
No. That won't work. Every carrier has it own way to generate tracking number. And that number must have registered in the carrier's database before it becomes "valid/sanctioned".
If you generate a random number even fitting the pattern and looks like a real one, the scan will fail with an error and fail to register tracking information every single step of the way that package gets scanned from dropoff at the retail postal office (this was the case) as bulk inbound pickup from USPS are only allowed for USPS verified partners.
Label creation (which generates the tracking number) is a billable action in their API. Some volume partners have pre-arranged/allocated tracking number segments assigned to the bulk volume partner/shipper (similar like how IP address v4 is assignment from IANA). And that pre-allocation tracking number range requires $$$$ contract in place. Billing that is post paid like cellphone bill.
Most retail shipping software (like shipengine, pirateship etc.) bills using the prepaid method, meaning you will have to pay for the label at the time label is generated.
Disclaimer: I used to work for a carrier that integrated a few dozens of global shipping carriers.
Yes, I’m deep in e-commerce and fraudulent labels are all over the place. Even Amazon, 3rd party sellers are using these fake labels to sell items for cheaper and win the buy box. Even UPS has this issue.
I get that they have reverse engineered how the numbers are created, but how are they showing up in USPS and UPS databases?
Are shipping platforms like shipengine getting these labels pre-made and this fake label seller has reverse engineered how these tracking numbers are created programmatically and are essentially using the ones allocated to these big shipping platforms?
And the only plausible way they got around is likely recycle previously used real tracking numbers because USPS is inept (the thing USPS has been constant and consistent is raising prices).
We would never know how since that's the part USPS redacted heavily.
I wish Anthropic/OpenAI FDE take over USPS IT altogether.
> how are they showing up in USPS and UPS databases?
Are you overestimating their validation capabilities? Maybe the validation just isn't that accurate or isn't always done, for efficiency.
I once desperately needed a (FedEx or UPS) package that was delayed. Tracking showed it in a facility about an hour away so I asked if I could pick it up there. I was told: 'It's not really there; our (customer-facing) tracking shows where packages should be.'
Their image of super-efficiency is for selling themselves. (If you are deep in e-commerce, you probably already know.)
Yeah USPS definitely reuses tracking numbers, but how were these guys able to overwrite the delivery address? I feel like this shouldn’t be possible unless they are inside the system.
Having a connection/s inside who are in on the game would make sense.
My guess is that the validation just validates the numbers which are old and valid and some automated system notices the label and routes it. I bet their system is a disjointed system and not set up in a way where every step checks every thing. It's very plausible it was home grown in such a way where its like this
Correct, I was just pointing out how trivial it was to generate/counterfeit a USPS barcode. I also worked in shipping/logistics with heavy USPS integration, but it was dealing with bulk/volume labels, where we'd only get charged if the label was actually used (returns, etc).
Why is that report so heavily redacted?
Because the redacted bits tell you what the crooks are doing wrong.
There was recently an update report published that gives a little bit more information but is still heavily redacted. I presume some of these vectors are still viable for exploit. https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2026-09/...
Related: Not US postage labels, but suspicious US postage stamps, seemed to also be used as a crude currency.
A third-party seller on Amazon or eBay was including sheets of suspicious US postage stamps in product shipments, unsolicited, with full-color glossy notes offering more stamps in exchange for positive reviews.
(I took the stamps and note I received to a post office, where a manager agreed they looked suspicious, and I asked them forward it up the chain. I like the USPS as a trustworthy service and institution, and I hate counterfeiting.)
What was the end result of this?
It might have to do with the fact that the First Class stamps exploded in price recently. It was $0.55 right before covid, but now it's $0.82. It's like printing counterfeit money, except easier. A 4x5 sheet the size of a postcard becomes worth $16. The stamps themselves have relatively little in the way of counterfeiting measures, especially if you consider that "Forever" stamps exist. So even if they introduce anti-counterfeiting measures into new stamps, a pirate could print old-style Forever stamps, circumventing the new measures.
The USPS is also, ahem, rather incompetent, and their own report [1] shows that "mitigation efforts are limited, with no substantive approach to identify counterfeit stamps in the Postal Service network. While the Postal Service and the Postal Inspection Service have increased prevention-related efforts, the quantity of counterfeit stamps in the network remains unknown."
So the increased value of the stamps, the inability to change old Forever stamps, and the lack of enforcement have created a perfect storm for the counterfeiters.
[1] https://www.uspsoig.gov/reports/audit-reports/counterfeit-st...
I thought that for a while now all stamps are "forever" rather than it being s separate type.
USPS still sells denominated stamps from $0.01 to $10.00, in addition to "First Class Forever" stamps - see near the bottom of the filters sidebar on https://store.usps.com/store/stamps
There's also other types of forever stamps, such as the domestic Postcard and Global Forever stamp!
These are problematic as well - they don’t have a way to tally the stamps, they just look for the marker and process it. A postal employee at the delivery point may flag it.
Also if you mail stuff this way you’ll have mail inspected for bombs or anthrax.
It's common in the UK to sell them both with a £ denominated value on them or the class of service. My brother bought loads of the latter a few years ago, which was a great idea, because as mentioned postal rates have increased significantly. The UK post office will also exchange your old unused stamps for new versions (now with QR codes or with sticky backs) for free. So even if they go out of date they alcan be upgraded at no cost.
I miss the taste of the glue.
Forever stamps guarantee delivery forever (subject to terms and conditions on weight/size). Regular stamps denote value, e.g. 50 cents. They will always be usable but you will need to match the inflation of prices (e.g., mailing a letter might be 50 cents in the past but 100 cents in the future)
Numbers for demonstration only
The UK moved to stamps with unique QR codes back in 2023 for the bulk of its stock.
https://www.royalmail.com/sending/barcoded-stamps
There are still some "Forever" stamps (those with pictures on or Christmas Stamps) but the old non-QR code non-forever stamps stopped being legal a while back (but you can always swap them for the new ones for free).
I've had people try and reuse a QR-coded stamp, you just get a postcard saying there's an item of mail with invalid postage for you to collect (and pay for). You get to look at it before you decide whether to pay the fine or not and then your argument is with the sender to reimburse you or not.
I thought "forever" referenced the Royal Mail's typical transit time.
Typical transit time seems pretty good for me
> swap them for the new ones for free
This was almost my thought for mitigating USA stamp fraud. Exchange Forever stamps for $currentValue stamps, but show your ID so you’ll be subject to extra scrutiny if you try to trade in a million of them. (QR code’s better and more fair.)
> show your ID.
What about the marginalized communities who don't have IDs, or are you saying USPS needs more security than federal elections?
I think they’re saying there is more evidence of fraud in stamps because of the direct monetary value, where there is no evidence that our current registration-time voting controls need to be supplemented with additional friction at voting time, because what little evidence there is of voter fraud is mostly just lies: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/us/politics/nevada-voters...
Rhetorical question aside, federal elections use voter rolls that identify each potentially eligible voter and actively monitor for issues like double voting. There's no "forever stamp-holder" roll for the USPS to check.
How do you know it's actually John Smith who came to vote?
maybe federal elections needs more security than usps?
“Forever” stamps in US terms are what 1st class / 2nd class stamps have always been in the UK since they appeared in the ‘80s, where they remain valid for a level of service forever. The US went through a weird phase where they had 1st class stamps, but they would only actually be for the monetary value of whatever the 1st class rate was when issued, so if the rate went up you’d have to add extra postage.
The basic split between what has barcodes and what doesn’t it that the everyday “definitive” stamps (both 1st/2nd etc. and those with a direct monetary value) were withdrawn and reissued with barcodes, but commemorative and special stamps weren’t. Basically, stuff sold to stamp collectors to be put in a box and never used on postage doesn’t have them.
> but they would only actually be for the monetary value of whatever the 1st class rate was when issued, so if the rate went up you’d have to add extra postage.
Reminds me of our monetary stamps. They were the old fashioned monetary value stamps which had a fixed value on it, so when the price hiked you could get 5ct/1ct stamps to add to get to the new rate, fixed value of the stamps stayed the same. People added real money to it since they were not going to buy a full sheet of 5ct stamps for one older one to compensate. And since the mail usually didn't care you sometimes got a free 5ct coin as recipient! (As a kid this was always fun to receive).
Fun thing is that those coins are way heavier than the paper so adding them might get you onto the next cost bracket making the whole excersize pointless.
Stamp value still matters in the US for normal letters because of the janky way extra weight is priced. In particular, the current price of a max-weight letter is two stamps plus 5 cents.
But one can get non-denominated extra-ounce stamps (for two ounce, three ounce, or "extra ounce" to use with another stamp) for letters over an ounce https://store.usps.com/store/stamps/additional-ounces/_/N-d7...
> The USPS is also, ahem, rather incompetent, and their own report [1] shows that "mitigation efforts are limited, with no substantive approach to identify counterfeit stamps in the Postal Service network.
They've been underfunded for a long time. Meanwhile they still have the legal requirement to deliver everywhere in the US. So the big guys like Amazon will happily deliver their own packages in densely populated areas where it's easily profitable. The areas where it's not can be done by USPS...
So basically the taxpayer is paying for Amazon to not have to deliver where it would be costly for them.
>The USPS is also, ahem, rather incompetent,...
Just as a datapoint, the USPIS has a >= 98% conviction rate for cases that go to trial
Incompetence can result in cases that don't go to trial, though.
Fun fact: Charles Ponzi (yes, THAT Ponzi) got started buying and selling postage stamps via arbitrage. It was legal until he started doing some shenanigans regarding over-promised ROIs and needed to use new investor money to pay older investors.
He would buy a stamp in Spain for 30 centavos, then exchange it for a 5 cent stamp in the US. Spain’s currency was depreciating against the dollar, so you could make some surprising returns. Really, his numbers weren’t straight-up lies, it’s just that it would’ve been impractical at the time to transport enough stamps to make that payout occur.
Correction: his idea was that he could buy international reply coupons (which were different than regular stamps) and arbitrage the rates against whatever currency value was greater. As an academic exercise, it was interesting (if utterly unpractical, especially for 1920).
But he NEVER did anything legal. In fact, he didn’t even receive his first attempt at successfully buying a small number of international reply coupons from a friend in Italy until his scam unraveled. And he’d never figured out how he could turn those coupons into cash.
And the reason his arbitrage excuse was caught so quickly (it was basically one summer that he was able to run his scam before his money ran out), was because the global supply of all the international reply coupons in the world were valued at significantly less than his revenues from his schemes, a fact experts pointed out to the local papers as the scam was happening. In fact, he even stopped telling new investors about the postal reply coupons scheme and had moved on to other lies about how people could double their money so quickly.
Thanks for the corrections! I only heard the story once quite a while ago :)
> I hate counterfeiting
There is a good book about Konrad Kujau who forged heaps of stuff before faking Hitler diaries and the getting caught. It’s worth a read.
A line that’s stuck with me (and is hopefully remembered correctly) ‘there are efficient documents and inefficient documents.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Diaries
Kujau became famous as a counterfeiter, so some people counterfeited his counterfeits.
They get away with it long enough until the day they go to federal prison involving fraud across state lines. Definitely would not want to try it.
Yeah, it's greed that does that to people.
They usually have someone on the inside they can contact to remove negative reviews, eBay doesn’t care because the high positive ratings means more sales which means more commissions.
> Note that they’ve sold so much that even 1k neutral ratings are barely registering - they have “100% positive feedback”
I'm pretty sure eBay's neutral ratings never impact the positive feedback rate regardless of how many you get.
Clicking the Information icon on the end of the line "Positive Feedback (last 12 months): 100%" shows that this is correct. Never forget it's a marketing line, to encourage you to buy, not to help you. Percentages ideally shouldn't be rounded to 100% at any time, but generally are; but ignoring all neutral feedback makes it even more meaningless.
Funnily enough, I've run into long time eBay sellers that don't seem to realize this, either (assuming they're not just lying). I've given neutral feedback to people that complained about how I was jeopardizing their shop by ruining their 100% positive feedback rating, and I have to explicitly point out that their rating was unchanged.
Turns out you're correct, but this store also has a fair number of negative reviews, too. Fortunately for them (or unfortunately for us) they end up a rounding error in their favor.
What does does buying back postage mean in this context?
Remember this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPC3mLNL3B0
It seems like all the people bought his book ended up just creating fraud enterprises and it just probably expanded from there.
I saw a bunch of denim jackets (with size options on the listings, usually indicating significant stock on hand, not just someone selling a couple used items) in four or five styles from a manufacturer I'm interested in show up on eBay at a bit under half retail price a couple months back. Big discount, but not suspiciously low for overstock or maybe someone selling seconds and lying about them not having defects. From what I can tell, some of these brands that rarely have sales at all and never steep ones either sell would-be steep-sale material directly on ebay (without publicizing it) or wholesale it in lots to people who turn around and put it on ebay, so a bunch of new stock for one brand showing up from a single seller all at once isn't that weird.
So I bought one.
About a week and a half passes, and no update on ebay regarding the shipping. I've had this happen once or twice before and the thing just eventually shows up, so I'm not too worried, but I am approaching the point of being worried.
Around that time, the seller sends me a message that their... warehouse burned down. So I should cancel the order because they can't fulfill it.
WTF.
I am like 95% sure this was some kind of scam or hustle from the beginning, but I haven't been able to figure out how. I got my money back. What gives? Maybe... some kind of drop-shipping thing that fell through, or they got a line on some counterfeits or "fell off a truck" stock but with limited info on what was actually in the batch, and weren't able to fulfill all the orders they took? I remain puzzled.
The USPIS (mentioned in the article) once came to the federal prison I was at to tell inmates that using stamps as currency was illegal.
There are flats and there are books. Flats are a sheet of 20 Forever stamps that you would get at a drug store. A book is 20 stamps, used or not used.
Generally there are different values associated with flats because you can get cash for them on the streets. You can get them to the streets via an officer if you're ballsy. Or you can just find discreet ways to mail them.
The value of a flat where I was at was about $13-$14 depending on your vendor. A book was generally worth $10. If you were buying bulk (and depending on who exactly you were buying from), that number could go down to $12 and $7 respectively.
If you were buying from someone that was running a ticket (sports gambling) they had more incentive to get rid of their stamps. Some people had tens of thousands of dollars of stamps in their property and they wanted to convert them.
If you were buying from someone running a store (think "buy and resell commissary"), their business model was dependent on flipping books of stamps in exchange for more commissary. They could sell a ramen for 3 stamps ($1.50) when it was worth just 50 cents.
Flats were easier to hide because they are, well, flat.
As someone who mails a bunch of letters (as a hobby) I'm surprised to hear stamps being used this much nowadays! Just out of curiosity, how often did inmates actually use them to mail letters, or was it predominantly used as a form of currency?
Great question: I would guess about 15% of the inmate population sends mail home on any given day. That number certainly jumps up if a facility is locked down, probably by at least double.
A follow-up if you don't mind.
I have a friend who did some time a decade or so ago (I'm uncertain if it was a federal or state prison) and one thing I've noted about him is how much he values books, even stuff like manuals and outdated reference material (we're in a volunteer group and we were cleaning up a room with a bunch of trash). His explanation to me was that in prison there wasn't much to do and so he spent his time reading as much stuff as he could get his hands on.
From your experience, would you say that the average rate of reading amongst inmates is higher than the general population? In person I've hardly met anyone who reads books other than for school assignments.
> In person I've hardly met anyone who reads books other than for school assignments.
I know a ton of people in person who read a lot for pleasure, but I'm sure it's kind of self selecting. Are you in college? College was the time in my life I read the least.
Also, while I haven't been to prison, I've been to jail for a short cannabis related stay in the early 2010s. There is just so much less to do there that I ended up reading a whole book (2-300p) every day I was there. Many others had a book, but I'm not sure they were actually reading them. A lot of people in there were reading the Bible or some religious literature. Anyway, just my anecdote.
> Are you in college?
Nah, I'm in my 20s but already graduated. That said, most of my friends are guys from a church group and are 40+. I take back what I said a bit though. I know two of them who like to read spiritual stuff, but the rest don't read books and do social media or TikTok only.
I'm surprised to hear it's illegal to use stamps as currency, I wonder if that's just a prison thing.
One piece of trivia that's stuck with me is that stamps were used as a substitute for coins when the latter were in short supply during the Civil War because of metal-hoarding. A 1-cent stamp was basically a paper penny, backed by the value of just being able to stick it on a letter.
> I'm surprised to hear it's illegal to use stamps as currency
It makes sense with forever stamps, because inflation doesn't hurt their value. If everyone used stamps instead of dollars, the government wouldn't be able to just print money to fund things. It's what the dollar should be (and was, before we went off the gold standard).
Printing of money, coinage of silver, suspension of redemption and a dozen other schemes were used to control the money supply during the gold standard eras.
There was plenty of volatility and inflation during those periods as well. The 16th century saw massive inflation in Europe, and the colonization and destruction of imperial China was driven by currency imbalances in trade.
> It makes sense with forever stamps, because inflation doesn't hurt their value.
Inflation doesn't hurt their value, but the government can make the cost of postage lower at any time. This would be expensive and they would likely lose a lot of money, but it would still be a lot cheaper than quantitative easing.
> If everyone used stamps instead of dollars, the government wouldn't be able to just print money to fund things.
I realize that this isn't what you meant, but the government can literally just print more stamps whenever they want. In fact, stamps and dollars are both printed by the same company in Canada [0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Bank_Note_Company
The stamps are backed (redeemable) by something real and fixed: shipping a first class letter. So they are more legitimate money (and not just currency) than dollars.
This implies you have more trust in the U.S. Post Office continuity of existence and function than the "full faith and credit of the United States."
Just going by track record. The dollar has been reliable debased every year. Naturally if you have a time frame of decades, stamps would be ill-advised.
There’s no law against it. Stamps are not legal tender, so you cannot compel someone to accept - it’s a private arrangement.
Have you written more about this kind of stuff? I would love to read more! I find it absolutely fascinating. Prison economics and such. Thanks for sharing.
Edit: just checked your profile and found your blog. Excited to read it! I think I've actually stumbled across your story before now that I see the website. Again thanks for sharing!
To anyone not knowing this dude - I really recommend reading josh.mn - the posts are interesting and well written, personally I love the philosophy of it. To Josh - you're such an inspiring person, thank you
You should check out Extreme Economies by Richard Davies. It's a book describing economic systems in extreme situations. I do not remember if it has a specific chapter on prisons though.
I think I have most of a roll of Forever stamps I bought almost 10 years ago (which shows how often I mail a physical letter)*. I'm guessing that was a wise investment due to inflation.
* Which is also probably the last time I was in an actual Post Office.
Here in Germany, you can just print your own codes or even just write those on the envelope. You can buy these via a website.
I tend to just use one of the many late night shops doubling as a post office these days in the rare case I need to send something. Thankfully, the amount of paper arriving in my mailbox has been declining steadily. It's next to nothing at this point. Dedicated post offices are very rare now. But there are many of these late night shops doing post and packages on the side. They take your envelope, they print a label with some kind of scanable code, slap it on there, and take care of delivery.
The codes are basically short hashes that correspond to a database record confirming the correct amount was paid. Very hard to forge those.
No need to handle stamps anymore. Only for international postage.
30 years ago a teacher told me of an art student applying to a school. The student included two art pieces for the submission but was meant to provide three. A note suggested that they look at the stamp for the third submission. It was a hand drawn counterfeit that was good enough to get it delivered.
Or so the story goes.
Russ Swain. Art Director role.
Later became a currency counterfeiter.
Go figure.
And people say art doesnt pay!
My wife ships with endicia and shopify. I've often wondered if the barcodes that are printed are actually tracked, as you can void them. With that void comes a "i'm not going to ship this anymore' self-certification.
I suspect that the postage is actually generic and can be reused, but for obvious reasons don't want to try.
You can also take postage paid envelopes and stick them on anything. People used to stick them to bricks back in the day just for fun.
It says that the perp is Pakistani, and that he's been charged, but not that he's been arrested -- so he's presumably still free in Pakistan.
I hear that normally what the FBI would try in such cases is to lure people onto US or extraditable territory. IIRC there were some rogue Chinese chemists, who owned companies that sold fentanyl intermediates and were under secret indictment in the US, who were "invited to a VIP academic conference in Hawaii" and then arrested as soon as their flight landed.
Seems clear that this Pakistani is a bit more circumspect.
Most countries when presented with evidence that someone who lives there did something criminal will arrest and turn the criminal over to the country the crime was committed in. Sometimes they will put some stipulation in (Europe commonly won't turn a murderer over until the country promises not to seek the death penalty for example), but in general criminals are turned over all the time. In general a country doesn't want criminals living there even if the crime was done elsewhere and so they won't protect their own who commit a crime.
I don't know Pakistan's polices, but I would expect they would turn the criminal over to the US.
China won't, Russia won't, and there are many others who also don't extradite as a matter of policy. It appears that Pakistan doesn't usually extradite, or at the very least it makes the process very lengthy and difficult.
Could I be arrested and sent to Texas for running a site with porn that doesn't demand ID?
Texas has convicted residents of other states for violating their abortion laws. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/new-york-attorney...
Unless you or your "crime" is covered by an existing shield law you could end up in a lot of trouble. Even if the shield law protects you, if you ever enter the state you could be thrown in prison or executed
There was no crime, prosecution, or conviction. It was a civil lawsuit, with a default judgement because defendant never responded.
Dual criminality is a requirement
France doesn't extradite its citizens. A notorious child rapist has lived freely there for decades. His crime is public knowledge yet he moves among the highest echelons of French society.
Presumably referencing https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Polanski for anyone wondering
> I would expect they would turn the criminal over to the US.
This expectation seems...poorly calibrated.
Pakistan didn't arrest Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind behind an attack that killed thousands of innocent people and significantly altered the trajectory of world history. In what universe do you think they would deport a humble counterfeiter of stamps?
Osama bin Laden had friends in high places. I doubt this is true for our stamp counterfeiter, although if he earned even a fraction of the US$126M loss USPS allegedly suffered, I'm sure he can buy some.
You're insinuating a lot here. Pakistan helped tremendously with the wars we were in in the Middle East. The govt did not partake in hiding Bin Laden, he was in an air gapped room in a secure compound and never ever went outside. It's pretty hard to find someone hiding like that. The US govt also did their own investigations and found the govt there did not take part in hiding him. He was hidden by sympathizers in the country
> Bin Laden...was in an air gapped room in a secure compound
...which was located less than a mile (1300m for the non-Americans) from Pakistani West Point[1]. That points to either mind-boggling incompetence or a deep and well-hidden conspiracy.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden%27s_compound_i...
Robert Hanssen was a leader in US counterintelligence, who was a prolific spy for the Soviets and Russians.
Motivated people can accomplish things.
Yes it was located there. But it's not like they can raid every house in the city. So much of our nations power is located in DC which has a huge amount of criminal activity and ghettos right next to it. None of this is proof of conspiracy and the US (who found Bin Laden in that compound and needed to do fake vaccine drives to do so) never found any proof of a conspiracy either and they did an investigation into this
> So much of our nations power is located in DC which has a huge amount of criminal activity
Most of that isn't a national security priority. If Ted Kaczynski had been found hiding in DC or near West Point, instead of his cabin in the woods in Montana, they'd only be wrapping up the Congressional hearings by about now.
> That points to either mind-boggling incompetence or a deep and well-hidden conspiracy.
Why? I don't think military schools have a habit of invading nearby mansions and not much less was going to find him.
Here in the UK, they've started putting QR codes on them and gave everyone a deadline to use the old ones. Has effectively got rid of this problem.
So the USPS delivered these packages?
There's no verification built into a USPS label?
Possibly. Sometimes delivery companies find it easier to just deliver them attempting to return to sender and dealing with headache of customer complaints since while it should have been clear to people buying the labels that they were not legit, a lot of people would be like "HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW? I WANT MY MONEY BACK!"
Yes there is verification. Sometimes the label WAS valid but it was purchased with stolen credit card OR purchased then refunded after delivery to the client but before it entered the postal stream.
EDIT: Remember, boxes can be dropped off before someone processes them. Just hand them random postal carrier OR put them in postal pickup box.
You can only ship packages from post offices now or by scheduling pickup. Too much darknet drugs I guess. You can drop them in a bin at the post office, but you still have to go in and get on camera.
Surely most drugs could be sold in small enough envelopes that you don't need parcel postage. I know when I was using DNMs most packages were a simple large letter stamp stamp which covers 35.3cm x 25cm x 2.5cm and a maximum weight of 750g. So I doubt dark net drug orders would have been the trigger for this sort of change.
As long as Congress thinks drugs are shipped in giant parcels, it doesn't matter how drugs are actually shipped.
As long as increasing the friction of shipping through USPS raises the stock prices of delivery companies Congressmen hold stock in--
As a consumer of black market peptides (formerly gray, thanks RFK) there doesn’t seem much of an attempt to hide it nor does it appear that anyone is intercepting them. The only package I lost was due to the LA Railroad heists.
Bombs or anthrax are probably a bigger security concern than illegal drugs.
Most priority mail boxes can be dropped in a blue bin depending on how heavy they are.
they are real labels, im fairly sure. but they are generated fraudulently, likely via stolen credentials on various shipping providers with USPS api
They're completely counterfeit, not real but generated fraudulently. This article has an example: https://www.freightwaves.com/news/nullship-selling-counterfe...
This article has some inconsistencies with what I experienced. For example, my label absolutely had tracking before being intercepted. In fact, it made it all the way to my city's distribution center.
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/nullship-selling-counterfe...
Here's the trajectory. Note that the final status has updated to no longer say "counterfeit" it's now just "postage assessment".
----- Delayed for postage assessment, Item in transit to destination
August 13, 2026 5:44 AM
Departed USPS Facility
JERSEY CITY NJ DISTRIBUTION CENTER
August 11, 2026 2:08 PM
Delayed for postage assessment, held awaiting payment
August 10, 2026 9:21 PM
Arrived at USPS Facility
JERSEY CITY NJ DISTRIBUTION CENTER
August 10, 2026 4:53 PM
In Transit to Next Facility
August 10, 2026 6:24 AM
In Transit to Next Facility
August 9, 2026 7:13 PM
Departed USPS Facility
MYTOWN DISTRIBUTION CENTER
August 9, 2026 8:18 AM
Arrived at USPS Facility
MYTOWN DISTRIBUTION CENTER
August 9, 2026 1:28 AM
Departed USPS Facility
MYTOWN DISTRIBUTION CENTER
August 8, 2026 10:30 AM
Delayed for postage assessment, held awaiting payment
August 7, 2026 6:29 PM
In Transit to Next Facility
August 7, 2026 9:14 AM
Arrived at USPS Facility
MYTOWN DISTRIBUTION CENTER
August 7, 2026 7:17 AM
In Transit to Next Facility
August 6, 2026 7:04 AM
In Transit to Next Facility
August 5, 2026 5:53 PM
Departed USPS Facility
OPA LOCKA FL DISTRIBUTION CENTER
August 5, 2026 4:46 AM
Arrived at USPS Facility
OPA LOCKA FL DISTRIBUTION CENTER
August 4, 2026 2:33 PM
I'm not sure how it works with USPS, but with AusPost here, there is generally an entry at the very start saying 'Label created'.
If they were real labels the charge wouldn’t be Counterfeiting.
They can still be real tracking numbers, but faked labels. USPS used to let a lot slide but they've definitely gotten more aggressive with catching packages even slightly out of spec of what the label was for.
This report alludes to (but IIRC stop short) of confirming that there is only validation at the designated ports of entry scans. https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2026-04/...
My suspicion is that these labels are entering the mailstream somehow circumventing the "first" scan.
I'm not in front of my computer so I can't query our fraud documents right now (I work in that business), but I recall quite some different schemes, a bit of everything:
Really forged labels, reusing old tracking numbers and that kind of things... Hijacking Mailer IDs and/or USPS API keys... And of course, hijacking accounts of USPS resellers. An e-commerce/retailer/whatever that uses an USPS reseller API for getting all kind of labels get hacked, and its API keys are used for generating a hundred thousand labels to be resold in eBay.
There is not. And any ecommerce site providing usps labels on their own usps account is constantly dealing with a flow of fraudulently printed labels which "borrowed" their account indicator, leading to usps invoicing the account holder for labels they didn't issue.
USPS "forever stamps" are (still?) being openly sold on Aliexpress and would be even harder to track.
I would love to know how this worked. Is there a hacked credential somewhere allowing for legit, but otherwise unpaid labels? Are they stolen CCs? Something else?
What are the odds that it's just straight up stamp theft? (I don't know what Occam's razor would prefer; your guess is as good as mine.)
I suspect the (real) stamps are printed in the usa from all-us supplies. I cannot imagine it is worth the risk of stealing them out of the US (where the US can jail you) vs printing them from the relative safety of China.
I recently ordered something on eBay, which when looking up tracking on usps said that it used counterfeit postage. The seller didn't want to give my money back right away, saying it happens all the time and they think it actually was still going to arrive. Then they gave my money back. eBay is full of scammy sellers and seems not to care
Missing from the story as usual is any notion of how this will ever be prevented again or even if there are a thousand other people doing the same thing on a smaller or similar scale.
This is labels not stamps correct? How is that even possible?
These are full shipping labels
-
wrong
I'm assuming, but im pretty sure sites like this operate by getting stolen credentials to third party shipping sites. think of all the sites like pirateship, shippo etc. if a companies account is hacked, they could create api credentials and just distribute a ton of requests across all the accounts. more accounts / larger orgs that get compromised = less chance of killing the beast
> im pretty sure sites like this operate by getting stolen credentials to third party shipping sites
If that were the case the charges would be fraud and the victims would be the companies that paid for the postage. The charge of counterfeiting is pretty specific - if I steal a $100 bill from you and spend it I don’t get charged with using counterfeit money, I get charged with theft.
There are lots of ways to send packages. Stamps are used for letters, but a package tends to have various restrictions and so they get a shipping label which is supposed to be proof that you paid the correct postage without having to find the correct stamps which would be really annoying.
Business that ship a lot (which is probably most packages) don't go to the post office for each shipment. Instead they buy machines/printers/software/labels which allows them to print off the correct label, and also combines all the money into something they handle the money in one larger transaction. There are lots of options in the above for different needs, if you a shipping a package even once a week you should look into them - often you get a discount for something that is easy for you to do (sorting outgoing mail by zip code saves them a lot of money and so they will pass that on to you)
Because there are so many options you can find one option and duplicate it easily enough and it will take them a while to catch it.
I understand all of that but how are USPS even accepting a package with a counterfeit label? Wouldn't that show up immediately when the item is scanned?
They’re possibly taking advantage of the international postage remuneration system.
You ship something from, say, Pakistan. You pay them the postage, they put a label on your parcel, send it to the U.S.
The USPS receive it, label it, deliver it, and note that the original collecting agency was overseas.
Periodically, usually based on the inbound volume, they settle the net value with the other international postal union member.
So - you ship from somewhere porous, with poor systems, it gets delivered, originating agency says “not ours, not paying”, and the USPS is left holding the bill.
I don't know what the modern rules are. I first encountered these machines in the mid-1990s when the obvious expectation is they are not connected to any form of network and you wouldn't be able to reconcile it now with the USPS as required a network connection then it should be trivial to require a unique barcode for everything and they can verify the barcode really exists but I suspect they haven't obviously did all the old machines that aren't network connected and so there's no way to verify
Always wondered how long it'd take to catch this. The fraud detection algorithms for postage must be pretty robust these days.
Oldest trick in the book: https://www.linns.com/news/fakery-and-counterfeiting-dates-b...
Curious about their tech stack. Pretty sure "evade postal inspectors" wasn't in the original requirements doc.
>Akram is charged with one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and to make and sell counterfeit postage stamps, five counts of making and selling counterfeit postage stamp labels, and four counts of wire fraud.
i would love more insight into how they come up with the number of charges. why five counts of making/selling counterfeit postage stamp labels instead of 1 charge that covers all 5 million, or 5 million charges, etc.
Isn't it one count per distinct criminal act? I think they do it to keep things simple and sane. In some cases they'll drop some, or add more depending on how evidence grows and the case proceeds.
that was my understanding. i guess maybe they have evidence pointing to 5 distinct counterfeiting runs (of ~1MM stamps each) or something.
i know they like to throw more at the start for a better plea negotiation position, but 5 just seemed rather random here.
I just looked it up, it has something to do with the ones they're most likely to prove, so maybe they deeply documented at least one or more purchases through the website to document as much as possible about the case? It's possible they could uncover more as they continue investigating. You do raise a good point though, it also depends on how many stamps customers bought.
As I understand, the feds don't bring charges until their evidence is really really solid. Federal prosecutors have more than a 95% conviction rate.
They probably distinguish between what they think and what they know. It could very well be they ran a “sting” and made a few transactions through the site and are only charging against those transactions to get extradition started while they assemble the larger case.
Prosecutors call these "sample charges". Probably charged based on the five counts with the strongest evidence with dates far enough apart that they constitute separate crimes and the sentences can be run consecutively, rather than concurrently.
The primary aim is to put the defendant in as large a hole as possible, with the minimum of work at the start, such that the case can be disposed of via a plea deal.
Not sure if I should be horrified or impressed. That's an insane amount of postage labels sold.
I wonder how many were returned to sender.
After this victory by USPIS, I hope Maury went postal and brought in muffins for everyone.
Come to think of it, who knows how many counterfeit postage stamps are in circulation? https://mailtheft.uspis.gov/
UPS is also full of holes. No verifications whatsoever.
You can purchase a label from a reseller and then ship using that label to a different place at a different weight several times. Battled with this at a previous job.
>UPS is also full of holes. No verifications whatsoever.
I've had one of my UPS account numbers used to purchase some labels for someone else (I have no idea who). No way to report this to UPS since I can no longer get in touch with my account rep (who was great, until he disappeared).
Same. One of my UPS accounts would up with about $300 of shipping charges for things that were very clearly not to or from me. Impossible to get ahold of anyone at UPS to discuss/dispute this. Just wound up creating a new account.
This article is about USPS.
That's why they said "also"
Have an optional crypto stamp and prioritize it, generating extra income for postal services
That's great news stopping counterfeit postage.
I wonder who benefits from the postal service going under from scams like this
Easy. Drop a letter from USPS.
What is it with Pakistanis and crime? Honest question, wherever there is crime there culture seems way overrepresented..
How is this even possible, I thought it was tracked via barcode? do they literally just sort everything by hand?
> Court records show Faheem Akram, 33, of Khanewal, Pakistan, operated LabelsBank.com, a website that allegedly sold counterfeit USPS postage at a fixed rate, typically charging $2 per label
Wow! How did these pass through the USPS system so easily?
the lesson here is you do not fuck with the us postal inspector's service because they do not lose
i'm reading the opposite interpretation. how did they miss this? how much fraud is still active? you have to assume it's 100x what they've identified
If you look at page 12 here (https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2026-09/...) the USPS estimates 30,000,000 fraudulent labels are/were used per month. The accused sold 5 million labels via Labelsbank.com over a ~2 year period (https://web.archive.org/web/20240326164928/https://labelsban...). That's ~208,000/m so his scam would represent 0.7% of fraudulent labels.
These numbers are rough but there you go. Your intuition is correct. Roughly 100X.
general rule of them with anomaly detection. great work and thanks for the research here!
moreover, their topline 30e6 estimate is likely underestimating the amount of fraud. most likely there is 2-3 x.
One reason why, is that no civil person would consider it ( hence a lot of the pushback ). It's a prime target!