visible. The passport has become a hard document to successfully counterfeit, which is why a fraudulent American passport commands ten thousand dollars on the streets.
Unfortunately, the other loopholes haven't been closed. Nearly anyone can acquire a fake Social Security card and birth certificate that are good enough to get a genuine passport. Until these other documents are made more secure, the passport remains at risk. Right now, the U.S. Social Security card is about as vulnerable as it gets. Border Patrol Agents routinely intercept thousands of fake Social Security cards every year at traffic checkpoints. In 1999, they collected something like a hundred and twenty thousand of them, more than one every five minutes. This is frightening, because the Social Security card has become our ad hoc identity card, enabling the holder to collect government benefits and to certify that he's eligible for employment. When you flash a Social Security card, people know you're for real.
At the moment, there are more than twenty different versions of the Social Security card, and they vary a great deal in their security features. Earlier cards, meaning those issued prior to October of 1983, have no security features whatsoever. Those issued since then contain various things like intaglio engraving and microprinting. But criminals know that it's possible to get a genuine Social Security card if you have one of two other documents: a birth certificate or a resident alien card.
In recent years, the INS has been steadily tightening its own documents. Just a few years ago, the INS had twenty different types of Permanent Resident and Employment Authorization cards that were valid, too many for comfort. Now there are just five. No longer are the cards good for a lifetime, the way Social Security cards are, but expiration dates have been added, which enables the agency to update photos and implant new security features when a card is replaced. One new feature is a personalized engraving of the person's photo, signature and biographical data right on the optical stripe. These are important steps in the right direction, for they make it just about impossible for counterfeit cards to be mass produced.
BALL PARK PRANKS
Large public events of any type - sporting, political, religious - invariably draw a great many uninvited participants: crooks. Con artists go where the money is. Wherever there are crowds, there are opportunities for scams. You'd be amazed at how common it is for criminals to make counterfeit tickets and passes. It routinely happens at the World Series, the Super Bowl, and big golf tournaments. Two disasters at soccer matches where scores of fans were injured, some seriously, were attributed to stadium overcrowding. Why were the stadiums so crammed? Because thousands of people had gotten in after buying counterfeit tickets from scalpers.
I've worked on a lot of golf passes and the Disney World pass. Generally, I put an invisible dot on them. Then the guard at the entrance gate has a reader that reveals it. Disney also has cruise ships. Most of the employees are foreigners who need a special pass that allows them to get on and off the ship, and so I designed a secure version of that, too, which is printed by the Standard Register Company. With these documents, it makes no sense to incorporate the level of security features that you would put into a check, because you have to consider the value of what you're securing. If a pass is worth $30, it only pays to put maybe one security feature on it. But a check can cost you millions of dollars.
I served as a consultant to the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, which, from my perspective, I envisioned as a possible gala fraud festival. Before I even got on a plane to go there, I realized that there were bound to be millions of dollars in losses from various cons at the games. At the Atlanta games, traveler's check fraud alone totaled more than $4 million, and there had been enough improvements in technology during the four ensuing years to make life easier for criminals.
I knew Australia was receptive to fraud. I had heard that there were something like three million more federal tax ID numbers issued in the country than there were actual Australians, which is not a promising sign. Plenty of counterfeit money was bound to be put into circulation - not the Australian currency, but American bills. Forgers don't do the local currency, because people are familiar with it. American bills were ideal,