alt Hacker NewsI 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?
Replies
madaxe_again • yesterday at 11:25 PM
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