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Charging the recipient for insufficient postage has always been the policy of the British postal service. These fraudulent stamps have thus been included in with that policy because as far as they're concerned a fraudulent stamp is as good as no stamp at all.
Anything with insufficient postage is held at the sorting office closest to the recipient and a note is posted (ironic, no?) to the recipient telling them to come and pay the postage if they want it.
The reasons they've backed down this time are 1) their newfangled bar code stamps have failed to stop the very forgery they were designed to prevent, and 2) public outcry causing them (the postal service, not the stamps) to reluctantly admit that this whole thing might, maybe, uh, perhaps just a little bit, be their fault.
I am confused how the QR code was supposed to stop forgery. I have never seen anyone scan the code at any point in the process so I don't understand how it was supposed to help.
I've scanned the code myself and it's just a number sequence. Unless you're checking that against some sort of database, which I assume is the idea, then the existence of the number sequence itself proves nothing. But as I have said I've never seen anyone actually scan the damn things. I don't even understand who's supposed to do it.
They're scanned by the sorting equipment. When a stamp is issued with a particular number that number can then be used exactly once, at least in theory.
They already had a perfectly good method for preventing stamps from being used more than once which was to stamp them. But sometimes they fail to do that too.
"British postal service has always been this stupid"
What a reason to maintain status quo
The only people who like the RM the way it is is the government. Everyone else would be quite happy for it to go back into public ownership. But for once they're not actually at fault here. Charging the recipient is just how it works.
Yeah the Australian Post is fucked here too.
Lose shit can't do anything and is a bloated government service that can't do its job.
Privatisation would fix so much right up until they're the only carrier and we pay through the nose for post.
Better yet post as a subscription service would he the way it would go if it went private.
What happened here is basically the private company that took over didn't care because they had no competition. They were also incredibly corrupt and evil which didn't help but they also didn't do basic maintenance and stuff on the infrastructure so everything fell apart.
It all works as long as the government actually puts money into public services but every now and then you get one that seems to think that the solution to a tiny bit of debt is to spend no money at all, on anything.
Yeah governments hate debt but don't realise the entire world runs in debt.
You just need to manage it correctly. Further on that though, governments shouldn't make a fucking dollar. They're not for profit businesses they should all run at exactly zero
My point is that such a policy is easily weaponized.
How?
The only thing someone could do is send me a lot of annoying mail. I just never pick it up and it never costs me any money.
If they're doing it the same as unpaid postage, paying them is still optional as a recipient. They'll just only give you the item of post if you pay what's owed.