Comment by Symbiote | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Symbiote | Hacker News Reader

At the top:

  > The barcodes will enable exciting new services by connecting physical stamps to the digital world through the Royal Mail app

Then in the FAQ

  > Why are you adding barcodes to stamps?
  >
  > The move is part of the Company’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.

I wish companies would be honest in the plain language, and avoid phrases like "facilitate operational efficiencies".

"The barcodes will prevent fraud" would be fine.

(People sell counterfeit or used stamps on eBay. The first result is [2], on sale for £9.99 with a face value of £80. Royal Mail's own site even says "Counterfeit stamps are often sold in quantities of 55..." [3]. Obviously eBay have a "policy" against this, and obviously they don't enforce it [4].)

[2] https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/284986420186

[3] https://personal.help.royalmail.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/...

[4] https://www.ebay.co.uk/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-i...

My guess is that one of the biggest motivations is to enable one-time address digitization. I'm only really familiar with USPS but my understanding is that the Royal Mail Mailmark system is largely similar to the USPS IMB system.

Bulk mailers have long been required to barcode mail with destination information to reduce the need to OCR addresses, which is a particularly complex and expensive part of the operation. Non-bulk mail actually gets barcoded by an inline printer in the sorting machine after the first time it is OCRd, to avoid the need to OCR it again later in handling. Well, that's the case in the US. From what I can tell Royal Mail doesn't currently do this, and so they're going to have to OCR the address repeatedly on all non-bulk items. At this point, putting a unique barcode on the stamp and then associating it with the destination in an online database is probably much cheaper for them to roll out than adding barcode printing to their sorting equipment.

And it provides counterfeiting and fraud resistance, along with the ability to add detailed tracking to letters very cheaply.

>And it provides counterfeiting and fraud resistance, along with the ability to add detailed tracking to letters very cheaply.

Yes, this is what I was curious about.

(For non-Americans' benefit: All USPS shipping is tracked with barcodes, except for stamped mail. USPS offering this would benefit merchants who would be able to ship very small/thin items in envelopes with tracking, and people in general who want to be able to follow their stamped letters' progress.)

> Well, that's the case in the US. From what I can tell Royal Mail doesn't currently do this, and so they're going to have to OCR the address repeatedly on all non-bulk items.

Take a closer look at the bottom right hand edge of some non-bulk mail. Huh, those are some faint orange lines. What's going on? That's RM4SCC encoded data from the sorting machinery.

It's not "really" faint orange, that's a fluorescent ink, inside the machine under appropriate lighting rather than the faint orange these lines show up very nicely. They're encoding (2 bits per line) a unique identifier so the system can track every individual piece of mail for a few weeks, plus its Delivery Point destination.

[I would guess "faint orange" was chosen because it's unobtrusive, yet you can't honestly claim it's hiding]

After the initial OCR run, later machines just see "Oh, #238205724145, still headed for 18 Long Drive, AB12 34XZ" without needing OCR and then people at a higher level can ask e.g. why the fuck is there so much mail handled by this Glasgow sorting office and find that aha, some bozo has directed all the mail for Swansea via this office, what a buffoon, we'll fix that.

Probably if you're murder police, you could get Royal Mail to scan it and tell you this crucial envelope entered their system at about 12:30 on September 24th in Liverpool central office, and it was eventually given to a human to deliver at 08:47 last Tuesday, but I'd guess this is rarely useful and it's not something they will tell random members of the public. The Delivery Point is redundant if you're a human since the address is printed in human readable letters.

> [I would guess "faint orange" was chosen because it's unobtrusive, yet you can't honestly claim it's hiding]

I imagine the fluorescent ink was chosen so it's easily readable on all background colors - well except orange fluorescent envelopes.

> except orange fluorescent envelopes

i said fluorescent orange was my favourite colour, they said i was 'anti social'

Above the FAQ:

> Our new barcoded stamps also enable you to watch and share exclusive Shaun the Sheep videos via the barcode itself, using the Royal Mail App.

Initially I thought operational efficiencies and fraud prevention were the likely reasons, but oh hey look there's a marketing angle too.

"Counterfeit stamps are often sold in quantities of 55..."

I wonder why this is? Surely it would be relatively easy for a counterfeiter to sell them in quantities of 50 instead.

It shows how useless eBay is in policing their own site.

Assuming (as reported) the stamps are produced in China and Turkey, it would be very easy for the counterfeit sellers in the UK to simply cut off 5 stamps from each sheet, removing this obvious signal to eBay.

If they're unique, and they better be, maybe that'll allow for tracking by default.

"Any person importing, distributing, selling or otherwise assisting in the sale of counterfeit stamps is committing offences of fraud and/or counterfeiting" [1]

I am surprised there are so many listed on eBay.

Just the two "sponsored" listings on eBay for the search "first class stamps" have already sold over £1000 of counterfeit stamps, and about £20 in fees for eBay.

[1] https://personal.help.royalmail.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/...

> I am surprised there are so many listed on eBay.

I'm not. They make money from it, just like Amazon makes money from the counterfeiters, scammers, and fraudulent sellers. Google has plenty of ads for fake stamps if you search for stamps - they're about the only ones you'll find ads for.

Someone will write an article that gets traction talking about the vibrant market for fake stamps on eBay and Google, and they'll issue the Standard Tech Apology, "We are so, so sorry you caught us doing this and we will try harder to avoid you catching us doing it in the future," they'll clamp down for a few months, and then will quietly ignore the rise in the profitable listings again after the attention dies down.

People selling fake products are great ad buyers. They have to bid high enough to be placed ahead of "organic" results and legitimate stuff, and if they get caught, you can keep their money per the terms and agreements and such.

The surprising part is that people go to such effort for such a low value commodity. Who is sending 1k worth of Christmas cards etc? Maybe small biz, but again the value added doesn’t seem to match the risk of getting your model train outfit raised by the postal inspector.

Maybe anarchists use these exclusively to avoid paying the man?

Just a random example: I’m involved a bit in the Magic: The Gathering resale market and I know plenty of unscrupulous sellers who would gladly buy fake stamps to send their merchandise if it would save them even a few cents on every sale. Postage adds up when you’re shipping hundreds or thousands of envelopes in a low margin, competitive market. And I imagine there are lots of other collectable and re-sale markets with similarly principled people.

I hear you and that is why I added the hypothetical small biz shipping model train parts. A visit by the postal inspector would really ruin a low margin biz.

Likewise, I suppose a postal service must weigh the cost/benefit of pursuing counterfeit stamps--it might not be costly enough compared to other forms of problems.

Many small eBay sales are shipped as letters. Fake stamps would save you a fortune.

In the US you can use stamps for Priority Mail packages; they're not just for letters! My dad does this when he sends packages because he can get (legitimate) bulk postage at odd denominations for less than face value. You can use more postage than will physically fit on the box; more postage can go into a shipping label pouch. I imagine the stamps get used up a lot faster when you're shipping packages with it.

A tip to anyone wanting to get into this: legitimate bulk postage is sold by the pound!

Did the recession chase away the crypto folks and blockchain evangelists? They usually would have crawled out of the woodwork by now promoting their favorite product.

Is it to stop counterfeiting? It could literally just be so that stamps can be scanned automatically to check whether they are the right denomination, which squares up with "facilitate operational efficiencies". Is "added security features" really less clear than "prevent fraud"?

The barcode would only be useful to prevent counterfeiting if each stamp had a unique barcode that could be invalidated once used, but the linked page doesn't say whether or not that is the case.

> to check whether they are the right denomination

This is a trivial problem compared to handwriting OCR going on in some post offices in the world, and does not require barcodes.

It is possible that the lower CPU time scanning barcodes vs scanning color images and detecting the stamp is a big enough optimization to be worth it at scale.

The old stamps already had machine readable UV markers to mark their money value.

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