The Easier it is, The Harder They Fail

[Argabarga]

Sometimes, I really wish there was a checkbox on the tow slip for “Faulty Workmanship”, “Lazy Scofflaw” or “Assumed the Truck Driver Can’t Walk and Chew Gum at Same Time” instead of just “Illegal Parking” , ya know, just to give em’ that extra bit of back-bite on the way out the door when they forge permits.

You’d think, what with the 21st Century making image editing software available to the public at little to no cost, that near-perfect duplication of various forms of printed media would be easy. Especially ones with little to NO counterfeiting safeguards built into them, aside from just having to match color and font size. That’s it. Most parking passes are 2, maybe 3 colors, with no watermarks, no holograms, nothing! Your average person who just took some time and care SHOULD be able to make a convincing phony in no time. Alas, time and time again, people who try their hands at forging something as lacking in security as a school hall pass only end up validating the Dunning-Kreuger effect in a big way AND end up $105 lighter in the wallet ta’ boot.

How bad did they fail?

“Permit” 1

- Obvious scissor marks around the round circle part that wraps around the mirror
- Obvious “wavy line” scissor marks down the sides
- Dates on the permit were separated by dots (9.29.10). The office does not write them this way, the secretary who writes always separates her numbers by dashes (9-29-10)
- Dates were impossible, it was written as valid from “Mon 8-29” to “Mon 9-29” The 29th of September will be a Wednesday, not a Monday. Pretty stupid stunt to pull considering this coming Monday will be the 20th, and even a liberal arts major like myself knows that 20 + 7 = 27 not 29.
- Failure to consider that I walk all of these lots at least twice a shift 5 days a week. And, until this night, I’ve never seen this car before. So, either I missed seeing it for 22 days in a row, or they paid for a bunch of days they decided not to use, or, taken in totality of the above clues, they’re just not master criminals. Yeah, I think that’s it.

“Permit” 2


- Obvious scissor marks around the round circle part that wraps around the mirror
- Obvious “wavy line” scissor marks down the sides
- Wrong overall permit size
- Wrong ink color on dates (green not black)
- Wrong kind of pen used (ballpoint instead of felt tip)
- Wrong handwriting style (Permit 1 actually forged this pretty good)
- Obvious printer lines
- Permit too thin, obviously printed on paper not cardstock
- Permit glued to something to give it thickness, poor quality glue job meant the edges were curling up

“Permit” 3

- Wrong font size, looked to be about 10% too big
- Obvious printer lines
- Glued to an old, expired permit from last year to give it the right thickness, you could see the wrinkles from the glue job and the fold-over around the edges.
- One corner had peeled up, showing the expired permit clearly (and it was a different COLOR even! When the pink peels back and you see yellow, well, there’s no way to talk your way out of that mistake, Mein Herr…hey, it was a VW!)

Couldn't you at least have someone check your work for you? Aside from me? Because if I decide it's not good enough, YOUR FRIGGIN CAR DISAPPEARS!

Oh well, c'est la vie

[roothorick]

I really gotta wonder... how much would it cost to get the right cardstock, and would a standard home inkjet or laserjet actually print to said cardstock? Inkjet ink tends to fade in the sun, how well does the ink the official permits use hold up to sunlight? And how would you reproduce the shape? I don't know if a scissors would be up to snuff. And at what point does all of this exceed the cost of a legit permit?

Basically, you may be looking at a perversion of the concept of warrantable effort. The goal is to spend less time and money than it takes to get a legit permit, so people do an appropriately sloppy job. Their brain just doesn't follow through on the "will this actually work" part.

[Mango]

Funny story about that. I needed a parking pass to park in my friend's apartment lot. We went to her manager. The manager told us there was no fee since she was allowed two passes and only had one. But, they had run out of passes so the manager actually told us to make our own!

We're both graphic designers and I think we did a pretty good job. We scanned the original pass and cleaned it up in Illustrator. Then we measured various points on the original pass and in the software to be sure it was as close as possible to the original size. We set the colour to "rich black", that is, black made up of 40% each cyan, magenta, and yellow, and 100% black, to make the black as dark as possible and eliminate printer lines.

It looked like the original pass was printed on PVC or somesuch, and neither of us own a PVC printer. The closest we could get was a 100lb semigloss stock, which seemed to match the weight, colour, and general look and feel of the plastic. Since the stock was glossy, we set the printer up to run slowly so that the toner would spend as much time in the fuser as possible, in order to bond properly with the stock. I can't remember what we used to cut it out but we took a great deal of time making sure there weren't any scissor marks.

So far I've been safe but I'm glad I live in a different city from Argabarga.

m.

[Magpie]

For all you know your city is full of people who can make exact replicas of the parking permits . I'm really going with the "think tow truck driver can't walk and chew gum at the same time" explanation. Every place I know that actually enforces the permit parking has someone go out and examine the permits closely. These forgers seem to be working on "if it looks similar it will be fine, because it'll only be seen from a distance". Maybe they're expecting someone new, who doesn't realise that people forge permits?

[Megg]

I had to pick up my oldest stepdaughter's permit from her college. It would actually be pretty hard to forge, it has a hologram thing. It cost $40, which seemed expensive to me, but $40 < getting your car back or a ticket, for sure! People are dumb.

[Magpie]

I had to pick up my oldest stepdaughter's permit from her college. It would actually be pretty hard to forge, it has a hologram thing. It cost $40, which seemed expensive to me, but $40 < getting your car back or a ticket, for sure! People are dumb.

The university just does permits here on a termly basis, so they don't have to worry about weekly parking permits. They also just use stickers/static clings (I don't know which it is), so they're hard to forge without costing an insane amount (I'm assuming the bulk discount would take care of that). They can also afford to hire several students to full time check for permit violations. Parking your car for five minutes where you're not supposed to isn't worth it. (Probably how they can afford to keep the permits so cheap ).

[Mr Hero]

Assuming the days of the week were exactly as the SC posted for the first permit, 8/29 isn't a Monday either. It was a Sunday.

[chainedbarista]

i think ours would be hard to duplicate (at least for me, since i'm not of that mindset); they are reversible stickers for the inside of the windshield and i think they also have a hologram dot or something like that.

funny how these third rate permit forgers think they have those 'mad skillz' that will fool you.

[Wenchie]

I have a parking spot in a garage at my complex. If someone is parking in a garage that they shouldn't be, all hell would break loose. ^_^

At my old complex, we were assigned numbered carports. Mine was 36. When they repainted the carports, some idiot labeled it 39. Which meant that some guy tried to have me towed one day because he thought I was parked in his carport... ummm... I'm parked in the spot next to 35. The carports are in order. Last I checked, there were a few numbers between 35 and 39, so common sense (which is non-existent) would lead someone to believe that something may be mismarked. Maybe you should park in the carport between 38 & 40? :P

Luckily I caught them in time and my apartment complex got that corrected quickly!

The most amusing part was that this wasn't a new resident. He had lived there for 3 or 4 months so he KNEW where his carport was... but decided that it must have somehow changed locations overnight or something....

[fireheart]

Smart parking permit forgers would use either an X-acto knife or a hobby knife of some description.

But then they have to be smart.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Betcha if a legit parking permit was "I can park here", or even "I kin purk hear" written in any color crayon on any color construction paper, people would still find a way to fuck that up.

[Emmeileia]

Sometimes, I really wish there was a checkbox on the tow slip for “Faulty Workmanship”, “Lazy Scofflaw” or “Assumed the Truck Driver Can’t Walk and Chew Gum at Same Time” instead of just “Illegal Parking” ,

Back in university a friend of mine worked for the school doing parking enforcement. If a person had unpaid tickets, when you entered their liscence plate into the little handheld computer he had, it would say 'Parking Status: Scofflaw'. My school had a great sense of humor.

[Megg]

If a person had unpaid tickets, when you entered their liscence plate into the little handheld computer he had, it would say 'Parking Status: Scofflaw'. My school had a great sense of humor.

That is just downright awesome sauce!

[Kristev]

Supremely wicked.

[Shalom]

The most amusing part was that this wasn't a new resident. He had lived there for 3 or 4 months so he KNEW where his carport was... but decided that it must have somehow changed locations overnight or something....

Or else thought that the management suddenly decided to give him a second carport at no charge.