That seems weird, from what I see in Europe, ID forgery is quite rare; making a convincing fake ID is about as difficult (or more difficult) as making convincing fake money, as pretty much the same anti-counterfeiting measures are used; and carries about the same consequences as counterfeiting money. It's possible, but not cheap or widespread - there are a bunch of ways how you could get money or stuff with a fake ID, but it's very rare in crime statistics; it's more common to see real IDs (of e.g. homeless people) used in such fraud cases, or having an accomplice employee making fake contracts without IDs.
Perhaps it's the issue with the lack of a good centralized ID in USA so you have all kinds of different "ID-like" documents, and some of them are insecure?
There's also less motivation for teenagers getting fake IDs - I assume in USA the 21-year alcohol limit is a big driver; but here it's not that big of an issue, plus it's easier and cheaper for a teenager to buy e.g. heroin than a fake ID, and being caught using a counterfeit ID is a crime that risks geeting jail time while buying/possession of small amounts of drugs won't; so using a fake ID is difficult and risky, and so it happens not that often.
The cost of the id itself is only part of the real cost. There's transportation expenses, taking time off work to go, in some cases it is expensive to get the documents necessary to even get an ID like a birth certificate
Fake student IDs can be purchased online for not much money, and I bet it's much less risky to use one to get into a student section than using a fake driver's license to buy alcohol.
I mean, sure, but one is also your drivers license and costs $5/yr more than a standard license or ID.
That’s really the price we should be comparing, because realistically people will have a drivers license or state ID that they would have had to renew. That’s also true for passports, but far more people have and use drivers licenses day to day.
It's kind of a big flub when you think about the real ID in practice. People do make fake real IDs. You can have every security feature you can think of implemented remarkably well in a fake ID, except for it to scan and turn up your correct information from a database. Real ID doesn't change that. The old fake IDs couldn't scan, the new ones can't either, but in either case when the task is buying a case of beer at a gas station or getting into a bar this hardly matters.
I probably get asked for ID less than 1% of the time. In general it tends to be in odd locations too. In my experience a less than $20 dollar purchase is more likely to have the employee ask for my ID than a $200 purchase.
There’s no excuse to ask for an ID scan to “verify identity” when you can buy a really really good quality automatically generated fake id scan for $5.
Would maybe be defensible if they asked for actually verifiable information, like a dump of the cryptographically signed contents of your chipped passport (haha).
Which is crazy, because those would be trivially easy to fake.
And then REAL ID is considered as reliable as a passport (except to fly internationally, of course), so you've bumped up the level of trust a huge amount with one simple edited printout of a bill.
The costs are different in the internet. At a bar, a human looks at your ID, then gives it back to you. On the internet, there's no way your ID doesn't get recorded in a log somewhere, in a central store where all ID checks you ever do get recorded.
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