>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.
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.
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
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. It appears that Pakistan doesn't usually extradite, or at the very least it makes the process very lengthy and difficult.
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
Not really. He could have very easily been hiding out anywhere, even DC. But I'd also add that Kaczynski was actively committing crimes while unable to be found. Bin Laden had not only not left his compound for years, he also wasn't really doing anything all that time either.
If the labels were honored by USPS (presuming they were coded, etc.) then everything I assume about how "well" government-related systems are coded is 100% true.
Obviously this doesn't excuse criminal behavior, but there should be some blushing faces at USPS.
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.
You're going to murder people over a $126MM fraud? I know you're trolling and will eventually be flagged and downvoted into oblivion, but come on; that's just absurd.
If one were to use a fairly standard number for the statistical value of a human life, $10MM, then $126MM is about the same amount of harm as the deaths of 12.6 people.
(You have to choose some number as the value of a human life, and the power of the "statistical value" measure is that it is self-determined, derived from the choices people make for themselves of how much money to pay to reduce the risk of dying, aggregated and averaged. You are free to advocate for a different measure, but if so, you need to actually make the argument, ground your measure in something, something that you then need to claim is a better measure than people's own revealed preferences.)
That's not totally absurd if you think about it. Police regularly initiate high speed chases for bank robbers and the like, often for values far less than $1M. Of course, not every chase leads to a death, but I suspect if you do the math, the risk of a high speed chase is probably in the neighborhood of "JDAM for $126MM fraud".
Exactly, the moral option is obviously to allow them to get away with it scott free, or with a slap on the wrist so they can get back to re-committing. Better make it 252MM!
The US does routinely murder much larger numbers of people over much smaller crimes, like those fishing boats their AI thought might be carrying drugs.
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 dollar bills, except easier. 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
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.
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.
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.
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, flats.
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?
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).
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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[ 0.14 ms ] story [ 12.7 ms ] threadI wonder how many were returned to sender.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I don't know Pakistan's polices, but I would expect they would turn the criminal over to the US.
Unless you or your "crime" is covered by an existing shield law you could end up in a lot of trouble.
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?
...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...
Motivated people can accomplish things.
Most of that isn't a national security priority. If Ted Kaczynski had been found hiding in DC or near West Point there would be some questions asked.
Why? I don't think military schools have a habit of invading nearby mansions and not much less was going to find him.
Obviously this doesn't excuse criminal behavior, but there should be some blushing faces at USPS.
There's no verification built into a USPS label?
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
My suspicion is that these labels are entering the mailstream somehow circumventing the "first" scan.
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.
(You have to choose some number as the value of a human life, and the power of the "statistical value" measure is that it is self-determined, derived from the choices people make for themselves of how much money to pay to reduce the risk of dying, aggregated and averaged. You are free to advocate for a different measure, but if so, you need to actually make the argument, ground your measure in something, something that you then need to claim is a better measure than people's own revealed preferences.)
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
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 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 $$.
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.
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?
We would never know how since that's the part USPS redacted heavily.
I wish Anthropic/OpenAI FDE take over USPS IT altogether.
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.)
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.)
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...
Numbers for demonstration only
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.
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.)
What about the marginalized communities who don't have IDs, or are you saying USPS needs more security than federal elections?
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.
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.
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.
Just as a datapoint, the USPIS has a >= 98% conviction rate for cases that go to trial
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.
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.
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
I'm pretty sure eBay's neutral ratings never impact the positive feedback rate regardless of how many you get.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
These numbers are rough but there you go. Your intuition is correct. Roughly 100X.
One reason why, is that no civil person would consider it ( hence a lot of the pushback ). It's a prime target!
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, flats.
USPIS once came to my facility and "warned" us.
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.
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).
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
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!
* Which is also probably the last time I was in an actual Post Office.
Or so the story goes.
Later became a currency counterfeiter.
Go figure.
Wow! How did these pass through the USPS system so easily?