Royal Mail, the British postal and courier service began switching all snail mail stamps to barcoded stamps last year. The purpose of the barcode was to enhance security, deter stamp reuse, and possibly prevent forgeries—which it has failed to do.
If a stamp have a barcode, why not just let people who have printers at home to print it on the envelope directly? This eliminates the need to buy physical stamp, thus the probability of buying counterfeit stamps.
Isn't Post Office just a convenience store? I thought the Horizon scandal is to the Royal Mail, which is responsible for stamp printing and mail processing.
On checking: You're correct that the royal mail and the post office are separate organisations. They split in 2012. At the time of the majority of the active development of the horizon scandal, they were the same organisation however.
I would still want to apply the same test - not just demonstrating a notional or paper loss, but that something has actually been stolen and acquired by some other party. This was one of the signal failures with the horizon scandal: that it was simply a bookkeeping error and they were unable to show beyond that any theft or loss on their part or gain by another party.
Yes, but the stamps have mostly been bought from the post office, who get it from royal mail. Given how few people even bother with stamps these days, what's more likely? An organised gang infiltrating supply chains with undetectable forgeries, or an IT malfunction that means the codes are not being registered properly in the first place? I know where my money is!
You might be right. I spent a little time to gone through a few online shops, including Chinese, and couldn't find one that I can tell it's clearly counterfeit. Unless I bought it and Royal Mail have something for me to verify its authenticity.
Are the bar codes really to prevent forgery? Or some other purpose? I'd never heard of counterfeit stamps before. It would be like counterfeiting one dollar bills.
I believe counterfeit stamps is always a problem but never been discussed publicly, though I can't deny the barcode could be used for other purposes like tracking internally.
And you're right at counterfeiting 1 dollar bills analogy. People can just print and mail it at a lower than what real stamp cost, sell it to unsuspicious people and earn the difference.
This is wqhat Royal Mail does.annd Indeed it's slightly cheaper to login to their website, purchase and print postage and then drop it at the Post Office than it is to buy thhe Stamps at the Post Office.
Yeah i think so. Ive done that plenty of times. I find it weird that Royal Mail will offer to collect my single second class letter by default. How does that work without a letterbox? Do i have to stay in all day waiting for the Postman?