In the ID Wars, the Fakes Gain

EARLY last month, after being shut down by the police for two days for serving underage drinkers, the owners of the West End, a Manhattan bar and restaurant near Columbia University, deployed a new weapon in their continuing battle against fake ID's: an E-Seek scanner, a high-tech age-verification device designed to tell a real driver's license from a fake in a simple swipe.

But if the arrival of this fake-ID devourer - its manufacturer makes a similar hand-held model called the Buster - was supposed to strike fear in the hearts of aspiring beer guzzlers in the freshman and sophomore classes at Columbia, it hasn't had quite that effect.

"Within a week I could be beating the West End no problem," said a Columbia student who claims to have forged over 400 driver's licenses but said he stopped for fear of being arrested (and wanted his name withheld for the same reason). "If you know how to use Photoshop and a simple Epson printer, you can print ID's in your dorm room."

The age-old battle of wits pitting police officers and bar owners on the one hand against under-age drinkers on the other is as lively as ever, though it has entered a new technologically advanced phase. Gone are the days of the art major down the hall who was a wizard with an X-Acto knife, a stencil and some super glue. Using Internet resources and sophisticated computer graphics software, college students are forging drivers' licenses of startlingly good quality, complete with shimmering holograms, special inks and data encoding that can fool the police and even occasionally the latest generation of scanners. To hear law enforcement officers tell it, in the fake-ID arms race the kids are winning.

"They're definitely a step ahead of us," said Steven Ernst, the district administrator in San Diego for the California Alcoholic Beverage Control Department. "In terms of the color, the typeset and the hologram they're real, real good. Most can't be picked out by the naked eye."

While getting a fake ID is a right of passage for many young people who want no more than access to the occasional six-pack or campus pub, the potential security threat posed by forged drivers' licenses - most prominently, the threat of access to commercial airliners - has cast the old barroom conflict in a new light.

"People think of fake ID's for buying beer or cigarettes when you're 19," said Sgt. William Planeta, who runs the New York Police Department's document fraud squad. "But it has a lot of different implications in a post-9/11 world. You can use that fake ID to do all sorts of things."

In an effort to catch up with counterfeiters, therefore, the government and a growing document verification industry are turning to both legislation and technological innovations. "We're going to give the fake ID a run for its money," said James E. Copple, the director of the nonprofit International Institute for Alcohol Awareness at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, with headquarters in Maryland, which studies public health.

They are having some success, at least with clumsily forged ID's. With help from his Intelli-Check scanner, Paul Barclay, 48, the owner of a Boston club called the Rack, confiscated 600 fake ID's last year, including 13 in a single weekend night. Mr. Barclay said he pays his bouncers $20 for each fake they bring in.

"It's a full-blown war at this point," he said. "We've come across amazing ones, where they've impregnated the back with legitimate data from someone else. The kids have gotten a lot more clever."

Scanners, though, are rare, and word quickly circulates when a bar gets one. Web sites like www.hotspotboston.com rate bars and clubs by the strictness of their ID policies, so under-age drinkers know which ones to avoid.

When it comes to getting a fake ID, students can be as discriminating as they are about the music on their iPods. Students shy away from fake licenses from nearby states because bouncers and bartenders are so familiar with the authentic versions. They also avoid certain licenses, like one older type from New Jersey, that are so easy to tamper with that no bouncer worth his black light would let one pass without a thorough going-over.

"ID's made by students tend to be much better than ID's you buy in the Village or Times Square," said a 19-year-old Columbia sophomore who has a fake driver's license and asked not to be identified for fear of the police. As for the importance of having a fake ID, she said: "All of my friends have fake ID's, everyone I know from high school and all my friends at school. It's definitely a necessity."

THE nation's fixation with security cards and ID systems has also been a boon for manufacturers of fake ID's. The widespread use of corporate ID's has created a large pool of people who know the inner workings of the security features in the cards. In online chat rooms dedicated exclusively to the manufacture of fake ID's, unscrupulous members of this pool - including some drivers' license bureau workers, the police say - share or sell information about security features and even run a black market in the more sophisticated components of ID's.

"There are guys online who manufacture the bar codes and holograms," said the Columbia student who made fake ID's. "The hologram like on a Texas will glow. I can order that."

Some ID mills are offshore and sell online. Many sites purporting to sell fake ID's are scams set up to take advantage of gullible under-age drinkers, but Michael Cawthon, the special agent in charge of the Nashville district of the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission, said that others offer forgeries of drivers' licenses. Mr. Cawthon said some offshore counterfeiting outfits solicit students to market for them on campuses and even conduct background checks on their American liaisons to make sure they are not the law.

"The Internet stuff is beginning to kill us," he said.

For students who prefer to make their own ID's, the Web offers all the raw materials. High-quality graphics templates for most state drivers' licenses - with accurate renderings of intricate background patterns and color schemes - can be found online. High-tech driver's license plastics and laminates that were once available only to drivers' license bureaus are now easily available online as well at legitimate office supply sites and specialty sites.

Once counterfeiters have compiled the necessary raw materials for a convincing fake, they get photographs from their customers, which are easily taken in a dorm room with a Web cam. Then they fill in the personal information on the template with a computer, assemble the pieces and laminate them. High-quality fake ID's can cost $50 to $200. Once college students have gone through all this trouble for a fake ID, they seldom make just one.

"It's not unusual to bust a counterfeiter who has made over 10,000 falsified documents," said Maj. David Myers of the Florida Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco Division.

From the under-age drinker's point of view - and, the police would add, the terrorist's - the holy grail of fake ID's is an authentic driver's license issued to someone presenting a bogus or borrowed birth certificate or Social Security card. Short of that, discriminating buyers of fake ID's want forged licenses that are properly encoded and can pass muster with a scanner.

Licenses store information in two formats: magnetic stripes like those on credit cards, and two-dimensional bar codes, strips of small dots arranged to convey information in a kind of graphic Morse code. Magnetic stripes can be erased with a magnet and reprogrammed with, say, a new birth date, using basic ID-making equipment, and bar codes can be photocopied or transferred from a legitimate ID to a fake one.

While a careful bouncer or police officer might figure out such ruses by comparing the information from the data strip to that on the front of the ID, most don't bother. Instead, scanners search the encoded strips for a birth date and issue a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down on whether the cardholder is the legal drinking age.

"All it tells you is if the age is older than 21 or not," said the former ID maker at Columbia. "You just have them all programmed over 21."

PENALTIES for possessing and making fake ID's vary from state to state. In New York possession of a fake driver's license is a felony punishable by up to seven years. Often when the police encounter a fake ID these days, they are more interested in getting information on who made it than in prosecuting the under-age user.

That was the case in Louisiana in late 2003, when a 19-year-old L.S.U. student named Corey James Domingue died of acute alcohol poisoning after using a fake Texas driver's license to buy four fifths of liquor from a local Winn-Dixie supermarket. By questioning Mr. Domingue's roommate and friends with similar forged ID's, Louisiana authorities were able to unravel a high-tech ring that had issued thousands of counterfeit licenses.

"These kids built their own computers from scratch," said Steven E. Spalitta, the enforcement director of the Louisiana Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control, who handled the case. "We learned the ID's were not just perfect but they were encoded. There's almost no way you can tell it's a fake with the naked eye."

In all, five people pleaded guilty to forgery and a sixth is facing trial. Using computer records Mr. Spalitta's agency also tracked down and issued hundreds of criminal citations to students who bought fake ID's from the ring.

Mr. Spalitta said that finding the violators was easier than he had anticipated. "The students used their personal information" on the fakes, he said. "The only thing they changed were their addresses and their dates of birth."

Mr. Copple, of the Pacific Institute, said that in the coming year a variety of changes could make getting away with a fake ID tougher.

Some states will begin using new watermark technology akin to that used on currency for drivers' licenses next year. This spring the United States Senate is expected to vote on a bill already passed by the House that would require states to standardize the format of the data encoded on the backs of drivers' licenses, making it easier to scan them. Software companies are rushing to develop verification programs for scanners that can be updated in real time, not unlike antivirus software, in response to evolving forgery techniques.

While the backers of these efforts say they herald the demise of the fake ID, officers on the beat have doubts.

"They find a loophole and exploit it," said Sergeant Planeta of the New York document fraud squad, which has arrested 90 people for faking documents since its formation last year. "We plug it, and they find their way around it. And it goes back and forth."