They fined the recipient for the fraudulent stamp? What dipshittery was this?
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
38 points (97.5% liked)
United Kingdom
4081 readers
56 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Right?? You’re telling me I could have been sending JKR letters with fake stamps this whole time and SHE’D have been charged actual money for it? My new greatest regret in life is missing the timeframe where I could have done that.
They should still be charged if the wrong amount of postage has been paid.
So if you send what royal mail count as a large letter but with a normal stamp instead of a large letter stamp they will be fined and charged the difference in postage.
Only if they want the letter. If they don't want it, the postal service will gladly destroy it at no charge.
Thus, this isn't necessarily a good way to exact punishment on an unsuspecting recipient. Someone who gets a lot of fan (and hate) mail will gladly forego the small handful that don't have postage.
That's how it works or how it should work?
That's how it works. If mail isn't paid for it's made unavailable to the recipient.
I don't know how long they hold onto unpaid mail, but I assume they eventually destroy it, or open it, remove anything valuable for auction and get rid of anything else. Maybe if they're lazy, you might get something non-valuable for nothing if you know what landfill their waste goes to, but I expect they'd at least shred it.
Chances are they don't get valuables all that often because if the contents are valuable, someone's probably going to want to pay the price of postage to get it... and whoever sent it probably put the right postage on it in the first place, dodgy stamps notwithstanding, as well as a return address.
And that last part is why the policy is for the charge to go to the recipient. The postal service often has no idea who sent a letter, only where it's going.
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.
Especially since even the sender has no way to confirm they're genuine.
There may be nothing to indicate who the sender is, whereas there is always something to indicate who the recipient is. So they put a charge on the recipient if they wish to receive the letter. I don't believe you have to pay the fine if you don't want the letter.