Thank you! So, to paraphrase a Cunningham's Law, "the best way to make a good fake on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong fake."

Future defrauders will love both Cabel's post and this discussion :)

I’ve seen this suggested elsewhere, and I’m not sure I buy into this logic. He’s using deductions based on a broad set of otherwise well known facts and conclusions that would be available to anyone who thought about it enough, and paid close attention to detail. Nothing in this article is arcane knowledge, or even especially esoteric. It isn’t even exhaustive, as additional imperfections have been identified by commenters on the article and in this very thread.

That it’s collected in this one post might be somewhat useful to someone specifically seeking to produce a counterfeit ID badge made to appear as if it had been created circa mid-1970s, but only to a limited extent as the processes used at the time for such things varied much more widely than they would today.

There’s also the fact that the person who performed this fraud was successful, despite this being reported to eBay by multiple sources before the auction concluded. So there’s not much motivation to expend the additional time and energy drilling down farther on tiny details, if their inaccuracy hasn’t caused them to fail thus far.

If anything, I’d imagine this will be useful to prop designers and miniatures hobbyists, who will exert substantial effort to achieve maximal accuracy just for its own sake.

And the locally used abbreviation for the currency at the time was DM, not DEM.

For close to $1000, a little bit of effort is not unexpected.

(Also, why assume this was a guy?)

'guy'/'guys' is used without a gender context in certain regions, more like synonyms of 'folks '. I hear "hey guys" routinely in SoCal said without intention of labeling people.

Only in the plural form though, right? I'm in the UK, where the usage you describe is common too, but reading "this guy" like in the comment above, I would assume they're talking about a man.

Your understanding is common in the US as well. Singular “guy” would read as “man” or “boy” while the plural “you guys” can read as gender neutral (though some argue that “you guys” should be avoided in mixed gender groups for being inadequately inclusive). I would expect there are some regional US differences in usage and reactions.

Even then it's highly context-dependent. Ask any heterosexual man "how many guys have you kissed in your life?" and not a single one of them is going to consider this instance of "guys" as encompassing women.

Another red flag: this invoice was issued just days before the EURO was introduced in Germany (1st of January 2022). Invoices issued in these times would have surely shown the amount in EUR as well.

Even funnier is that when googling I see some examples of actual invoices/receipts by the German Red Cross. But of course they would need to know what to actually google ;)

I mean I appreciate the effort put into it and to the untrained eye this looks good enough for e.g. movie props. I wonder if the creator is just a professional scammer or works in the movie / reproduction industry?

- Germans use commas as the decimal separator, while periods are only used to separate thousands.

- As stated in one of the linked mastodon posts, the abbreviation for the Deutsche Mark was DM, not DEM

Also, I have no idea how the seller thought the German Red Cross would emboss their paper with a circle of stars. If anything, embossing the cross itself would make the most sense. Probably they had the tool on hand from another forgery where it may have made more sense.

> I have no idea how the seller thought the German Red Cross would emboss their paper with a circle of stars

Perhaps because of European Union flag?

https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...

That’s probably what it is but there isn’t any reason for the German Red Cross to be embossing with the EU flag.

To say nothing of the fact that embossing a document in Germany, and Europe in general, is extremely rare and certainly not common on your garden variety receipt or invoice (basically never). They were a bit more common pre-90’s though.

Without the aim of trying to insult anyone, frills like that are more common in the US when trying to emphasize the official nature of documents (e.g., notary public embossing).

Even so, on top of all that, it would make exactly zero sense for the embossing to be the EU stars.

It isn’t even the European stars – the Flag of Europe always had 12 stars, whereas the embossing has 16 stars.

“Ah, 16 stars, because Germany has 16 federal states”, you'd say at first thought. But while the German Red Cross organization has sub-organizations, the Landesverbände, those only partially mirror the modern 16 federal states. Some Landesverbände predate the modern federal states and are instead for more traditional German regions. Instead of a single Landesverband for the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen [1] there are two Landesverbände, one for Nordrhein, one for Westfalia-Lippe. In Lower Saxony there is an extra Landesverband for Oldenburg, in Baden-Württemberg there is an extra Badischer Landesverband. That makes 19 regional sub-organizations, but there aren’t 19 stars.

And all of these 19 regional subs predate 2001. I can’t really see a reason for the DRK in 2001 to use 16 stars.

[1] Nordrhein-Westfalen (North Rhine Westfalia) was created forcefully by the British Military Administration in 1946 out of the former prussian provinces of the Rhine and parts of Westfalia (and small Lippe!) in the creatively named "Operation Marriage". Nobody thought a union between the lively Rhinelanders and the laconic Westfalians (and the Lippians!) could work given the differences – but it seems to work mostly great. Nobody thinks of seceding. Must be the first time in history.

Also "Rechnung #" instead of "Rechnung Nr." or "Rechnungsnr.".

Also note the Rechnung #: 45968L59

So if you type 459 on a keyboard, a natural jump to something in the middle would be 68. 4-5-9, then 6-8 quickly. Right hand finds another letter "L" and then jumps back into the usual 59.

This is not definite but adds slightly to the suspicion.