Cat-and-Mouse Game Gets Tougher

Outside the Palace nightclub in Hollywood on Friday night, the young people wait in huddles, in pairs, or alone. They count their money, clutch their IDs, eagerly anticipating the 18-and-over dance event. There’s only one obstacle between them and a good time: Eddie Baker.

Palace doorman for seven years, Baker herds them masterfully inside, branding each hand with a technique he’s developed for speed and accuracy. Between the fingers of one hand, he grips two stamps; in the other, he checks their IDs. With a flick of his wrist, it’s either “21” or “No Alcohol.”

In an hour and a half, he scans about 400 IDs--driver’s licenses from California, Texas, Hawaii, Indiana and New York, passports from around the world, military IDs. He knows almost every trick. Some nights, he’ll catch as many as 20 kids with fakes.

When a young man hands him an international driver’s license, usually issued by AAA insurance, that says he’s 23, Baker takes a closer look. “No alcohol.” Busted, the young man shrugs it off without an argument. “I’ll still have a good time,” he says and trots off toward the dance floor.

Most of the time, Baker says it’s easy to spot fakes. Like the kids who glue their picture on an older person’s driver’s license. Or a 5-foot-8 kid whose ID says he’s 6 foot 3. Or the girl who substituted a photo of herself taken in a photo booth with a wavy blue curtain in the background.

Recently, though, his job has become more difficult. Savvy kids can obtain high-quality fake IDs on the Internet or use computers to make or alter their own. Some obtain real IDs from the DMV with documents from look-alike older siblings or friends.

“Some of the fake ones are unbelievable,” Baker says. “They look like the real thing.”

The volume and ingeniousness of the new fakes are causing headaches among authorities and bar and convenience store owners as they try to match wits with the young people who make or use them. As many as 75% to 80% of young people have fake IDs, estimate students and the authorities who study them. In California, DMV spokesman Evan Nossoff says it’s not that easy. DMVs periodically introduce new security features on driver’s licenses, such as holograms, ghost photos, magnetic stripes or bar codes. Considering the spiraling sophistication of the new technology, staying ahead of the curve is “a difficult challenge--on both sides of the street,” Nossoff says.

“There’s nothing more creative than a teenager trying to get hold of cigarettes or a six pack of beer,” agrees Robert Holloway, senior executive vice president for the New York-based Intelli-Check, one of several entrepreneurs who sell specialized scanning machines that detect bogus IDs.

To a previous generation of teenagers who just scraped and re-inked their cards, the new techniques appear to range from the amazing to the hilarious.

One enterprising North Carolina college student built a life-size driver’s license and photographed his customers with their heads behind a cutout window. The photograph was reduced to wallet size, then laminated.

Some have changed numbers by applying White-Out with a hypodermic needle. Others have been able to change the information encoded on the magnetic strip on the back of driver’s licenses (which duplicates information from the front). Holloway’s machine, which sells for $2,495, reads the three invisible lines of DMV information. It can also accept software to read upgraded codes periodically changed by the DMV.

Teenagers, naturally, are aware that scan machines are limited and more often try to fool them with genuine IDs that belong to someone else.

“I can scan their age, but it’s not their picture,” says Axel Arana, the evening clerk at Irvine’s Barranca Shell mini-mart, which uses a less elaborate model, sold by CardCom Technology for $495. After four months, the machine has helped him catch only one or two minors trying to buy cigarettes or alcohol. By checking the photo, he catches about two kids a week, he says.

A 20-year-old college student from Los Angeles, on probation for carrying a fake ID, explains how he might get around both the machine and the clerk: “Say I happened to find an identification of someone on the floor,” he says. “I could take your bar code and put it onto the back of my fake ID.”

Raised on computers, an increasing number of young people are turning to computer graphics programs or the Internet.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations estimated that 30% of all phony IDs were being made on the Internet--either by direct sales of “novelty” IDs, or CD-Rom kits with templates that instruct buyers how to make their own. With the method catching on, says subcommittee investigator Kirk Walder, that figure could now be as high as 60%.

The Demand Is High

Only five years ago, Chris, a young man raised in the San Fernando Valley, says he and his high school friends would drive to MacArthur Park near downtown L.A. and pay $60 to a hustler who snapped their photos for a marginal, typewritten facsimile of a driver’s license.

Now a senior at UC Santa Barbara, Chris says any student can easily find one in his or her dormitory. “Everyone knows a friend who makes them,” he says.

In Santa Barbara, the demand is high, Chris says. Last year, he says his roommate made bogus IDs in his room using a scanner, a computer, an iron, and knowledge gleaned from a computer graphics course at the university. He sold up to five a week, at prices ranging from $60 to $100. The copies were good enough to get Chris a margarita at a restaurant or a six-pack at a small convenience store in town.

Chris says his roommate worked only with licenses that expire in 2003 because he hadn’t yet figured out how to duplicate newer ones, which have a second, “ghost” photo of the driver. “He would use an iron on the ID and hold it there for a while. Through trial and error, he figured out the right temperature at which he could peel off the hologram. There’s a checkered effect that can happen if you don’t get the heat right,” he says. “The checkers would give you away.”

After he scanned the IDs, he used tools in Adobe Photo Shop to cut out numbers from one and replace them on another, lining them up perfectly. He then printed out the new ID, sandwiched it between the hologram and the old backing, relaminated the layers, bonded the edges with Super Glue and “pressed real tight.”

“It didn’t take long, 20 minutes on the computer, maybe less. The big thing was getting the colors right,” says Chris. “He’d make the colors perfect.”

From Confidence Comes Success

No matter how close science can come to a perfect reproduction, there are those who believe that ultimate success is a matter of acting confident when using a fake ID.

One method is to casually toss one’s open wallet down with the money. Another is to nonchalantly pull the ID out before it is requested. Neither, of course, is possible unless the cardholder has mastered the beginner’s first challenge: shaky hands.

Even before anyone checks ID, underage drinkers often give themselves away by their behavior, authorities say. They avoid eye contact. They tend to order sweet drinks like White Russians, sit in dark corners or count their money before they order. Plus, they are notoriously bad tippers.

The closer they get to 21, however, the better and more common the ruse becomes.

The fake ID business is said to be particularly brisk in college and university towns where “the number of underage people going into bars and restaurants with high-quality fake IDs is tremendous,” says David Germroth, a Washington, D.C., lobbyist for the National Licensed Beverage Assn., a group of bar and restaurant owners.

The situation has reached “crisis proportions” for bar, club and convenience store owners, who could be fined or lose their licenses for selling alcohol to minors, but can no longer tell the fake from the real IDs, Germroth says. He is working to introduce federal legislation that would toughen penalties for possession and distribution of the documents.

This month, the U.S. Senate approved similar legislation restricting sales of fake IDs online. The bill, expected to pass both houses soon, broadens the existing law and clarifies that sale or distribution of false identification on the Internet is a crime.

Under California law, anyone caught with a fake ID can receive a maximum $1,000 fine and/or up to six months in jail.

Teenagers are only a small part of the problem and are investigated less frequently than those who use falsified identification to commit bank fraud or immigrate illegally. But jurisdictions around the country are starting to crack down on all those who sell or possess fake IDs.

In May, police in Tempe, Ariz., arrested two 21-year-old college students who had apparently made hundreds of fake IDs with computers, scanners and laminators in their apartment. They sold them to college students for $50 to $75 and reinvested the profits to upgrade their equipment, police said. The same month, 10 students were arrested and charged with possessing fake driver’s licenses at Northwestern University in Evantston, Ill. They obtained them from a sophomore whose connection was in Chico, Calif.

In San Diego, after local bar and nightclub doormen confiscated 6,000 fake IDs over the last three years, police initiated a twice-yearly crackdown, “Operation Trapdoor,” with the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and the DMV. In September, its team of roving investigators arrested 30 minors in one night.

A 19-year-old Arizona college student, caught in a September police raid at a bar near campus, says she was just “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” The young woman, who declined to be identified out of embarrassment, was annoyed that a friend got away with a fake computer reproduction of a Nevada license while she got caught with a real identification card in her sister’s name obtained from the DMV with her sister’s driver’s license.

“They looked at hers and asked her, ‘What’s your sign?’ She said ‘Virgo.’ It should have been Aries but they just said, ‘OK, thanks,’ ” the student says.

Charged with four misdemeanor counts, she eventually paid a $250 fine, lost her license for six months and had to attend an adult diversion class focusing on substance abuse.

Like many on the cusp of the legal age, she feels hamstrung by legal restrictions. “It’s hard. I want to go where everybody else is going. I want to be cool. You don’t want to be the only one who can’t do it. Why should I have to miss out on all that?”

Lynn Ponton, professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco and author of “The Romance of Risk: Why Teenagers Do the Things They Do” (BasicBooks, 1997), says it’s the nature of adolescence for teens to feel frustrated by age restrictions. Even flouting the law to prove they can handle adult responsibilities can be a normal part of adolescent development. At that self-involved age, she says, many think laws are unfair and shouldn’t apply to them.

While parents can assume most young adults probably have a fake ID, they don’t all use it for unhealthy reasons, Ponton says. Quite often, “they want to hear the good music, hang out with friends and have a fun time,” she says.

Wanting to Hang Out With the Older Crowd

Just inside the Palace, some UCLA sophomores say they have, want or plan to get fake IDs--but not necessarily because they want to drink. “The 21-and-older clubs play better music and have way better guys,” says one young woman.

Besides the obvious illegality of fake IDs, the trouble is that they fall into an intersection between healthy and unhealthy risk-taking, Ponton says. Parents can point out to them what the risks are, why it’s important to obey the law, says Ponton.

But with their children so close to legal adulthood, however, parents take diverse views on their role. Some think the laws are too restrictive and try to help by giving their own IDs to their children or enabling them to find fakes. Others look the other way, content to let their offspring spread their wings and fly.

A Los Angeles father of a 20-year-old says he only found out his son had a fake ID when the young man was arrested last year for having one in his possession. Known as a good boy and excellent student, he was also a “fabulous liar” with an active and secret social life, the young man’s father says matter-of-factly. “I only found out he was doing stuff after the fact.”

One mother says she can’t help but send a mixed message to her 20-year-old daughter about using fake IDs. “I know they’re going to be doing these things. I know I’m not going to stop them.”

Perhaps even the best efforts of authorities and institutions can only serve to slow the youngsters down, officials say.

Eddie Baker, the Palace doorman, watches a white limo pull up to the curb. A tangle of young women in sparkly tank tops and tight jeans spills out, after taking a few last sips from what appears to be a beer can. One begs him for a “21” stamp. “Please, please please!” she cries. “I’ll be 21 tomorrow.”

Baker checks her ID and stamps her hand: “No alcohol.”

“Come back tomorrow,” he says.