Royal Mail, the British postal and courier service started switching all snail mail stamps to barcoded stamps final yr.
The aim of the barcode was to boost safety, deter stamp reuse, and probably forestall forgeries—which it has did not do.
Quick ahead to this yr, a number of senders had been left appalled to see their mail returned and being slapped with a £5 superb to be used of “counterfeit stamps,” regardless of the senders insisting that they’d purchased legit stamps.
China accused of flooding UK with 1 million stamps
As Royal Mail transitioned in direction of barcoded stamps final yr, the general public had till the tip of July 2023 to swap out their outdated paper stamps with ones carrying a 2D knowledge matrix barcode for free of charge.
(Royal Mail)
“The move is part of [Royal Mail’s] extensive and ongoing modernisation drive and will allow the unique barcodes to facilitate operational efficiencies, enable the introduction of added security features and pave the way for innovative services for customers,” earlier defined an FAQ on the mail supplier’s web site.
Mockingly, “security features,” resembling these distinctive barcodes believed to stop stamp re-use and forgeries sooner or later failed at simply that.
Tons of of senders noticed their mail objects returned by Royal Mail final month, and every had a “£5 penalty” discover slapped on them for using “counterfeit stamps.”
This left senders stunned who didn’t perceive why they had been being penalized regardless of correctly buying what they thought had been legit stamps.
In accordance with The Telegraph, the group has been investigating to establish the “source of the problem.”
“When a customer reports to us that they bought a stamp from a retailer that is subsequently found to be counterfeit, we will always look into the circumstances of that case,” mentioned a Royal Mail spokesperson.
“We also work closely with retailers and law enforcement agencies, and actively seek the prosecution of those who produce counterfeit stamps. We reaffirmed that policy to the minister today.”
On Wednesday, nonetheless, an investigation led by the newspaper revealed that 4 main Chinese language suppliers had been providing to print as much as a million solid Royal Mail stamps each week “for as little as 4p each – and deliver them to Britain within days.”
Safety specialists and British MPs likened the large-scale forgeries to an “act of economic warfare” that’s nearly like “printing counterfeit money.”
Predictably, a diplomatic row erupted with the Chinese language authorities dismissing these claims as “baseless.” Chinese language officers steered that Royal Mail ought to as a substitute examine its provide chains.
The blame recreation begins
Royal Mail has blamed the UK Border Pressure for failing to cease the counterfeit product from coming into the UK—which is an fascinating accusation given the simplistic nature of the product. Stamps are in the end shipped as sheets of paper, making them tougher to tell apart from letters or packing containers of paperwork by way of typical screening means.
A Royal Mail government does admit that its “overly sensitive” machines can generally wrongly flag real stamps as pretend, and has human specialists totally inspecting flagged mail objects.
Much more apparently, the penalized clients state that these stamps had been bought at Publish Workplace branches and never Royal Mail.
Publish Workplace typically companions with Royal Mail to offer a number of mail and assortment companies however stays a separate business entity.
The Publish Workplace additional claims that it receives these stamps immediately from Royal Mail’s safe printers.
Publish-printing these stamps are stored in a warehouse and transported to Publish Workplace branches by way of specialist supply vans that additionally carry money.
“Any allegation that fake stamps have been purchased at a Post Office are extremely serious,” a Publish Workplace spokesperson informed The Telegraph in the identical report.
“The implication of such an allegation is that one of our postmasters, or a member of their staff, has obtained fake stamps and has chosen to sell them to customers rather than selling legitimate stamps that have come from Royal Mail’s secure printers. This is why we insist that any customer who thinks they may have purchased a fake stamp from a Post Office must produce an itemised receipt so that this can be looked into further.”
It has been a tricky yr for Publish Workplace as is with the corporate embroiled within the infamous Horizon IT scandal that concerned tons of of postmasters being wrongfully convicted and sentenced—all due to accounting flaws in Horizon, an IT system designed by Japanese firm Fujitsu and used at Publish Workplace branches.
Now, claims of counterfeit stamps circulating within the UK may danger relentlessly placing the highlight on postal employees members and retailers as soon as once more.
Privateness teams remained silent on stamp roll out
Surprisingly, the fast transition to barcoded stamps escaped the scrutiny of nearly everybody—together with main privateness teams.
Together with tightened “security,” these digitalised stamps arrived with a ‘characteristic’ for senders to connect movies utilizing their smartphone {that a} recipient may then watch by scanning the stamp with their smartphone.
Nobody questioned whether or not this may very well be invasive for privateness causes and be the loss of life of nameless mail.
BleepingComputer understands there are a number of eventualities through which each barcoded stamp may, in principle at the least, be related to its purchaser (the sender) and make nameless snail mail a factor of the previous.
On the time of the rollout, we examined a number of such new stamps. We seen every such stamp had a singular string identifier saved within the knowledge matrix barcode which appears to be like like this:
JGB S1115XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX2503
XXXX F0XXXXXXXXXXXXXX01
(That is three units of textual content strings separated by areas—56 characters in complete. The ‘X’ represents totally different digits)
Final yr, BleepingComputer additionally contacted main UK and worldwide privateness teams to get their understanding on the matter—none responded.
Royal Mail informed us on the time that barcoded stamps don’t present end-to-end public dealing with monitoring, resembling by way of the web site, however didn’t rule out these being internally traceable, e.g. for legislation enforcement functions.
“The barcodes will not provide end-to-end public facing tracking. It is not possible to track items using these stamps as current regulation does not permit this on services offered under the Universal Service Obligation (USO),” a Royal Mail spokesperson had earlier informed BleepingComputer in an e-mail interview.
“Tracked services are already available, details of which are on our website.”
The Royal Mail spokesperson additional defined that though the barcode made every stamp distinctive, “no personal data is held on the stamp,” which was additionally apparent in our assessments.
That also doesn’t indicate whether or not the distinctive identifier contained in these barcodes couldn’t be related to a sender’s id in different methods, resembling once they buy these utilizing digital cost strategies or use their smartphones to “attach” movies to them.
With the cast stamps now infiltrating the nation, the advantages these new stamps had been designed to offer have largely been rendered void.
