hpr_transcripts/hpr0234.txt

Episode: 234
Title: HPR0234: Creating Identification Cards Part 1
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0234/hpr0234.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 14:33:31

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Music
Hello everyone, this is Class 2 and this is Hacker, public radio, fake ID cards, fake identification.
It can be done by the home hacker and the home hobbyist.
I'm going to talk a little bit about the best ways of doing this, of constructing any kind of fake identification.
I don't really know anything about things like fake passports or anything like that.
But in terms of fake cards, like ID cards, driver license, school IDs, nonsense like that,
we've got a little bit of knowledge about that.
And I'm going to pass it on.
So let's see, first of all, when you're doing a fake identification card, you have to figure what exactly it is you want to fake.
And I guess why or what you need to be different.
Obviously you've got, you probably have some form of identification already for yourself.
So you have to kind of know why you want to fake the information.
Is it because you need to conceal your real address or is it because you need to conceal your name?
Or is it you need to fake your age, you know, from 18 to 21 in, you know, what, two days or so that it takes to make these.
So just kind of get your goal in mind because it's easy to go out and just think, oh man, I'm going to fake an ID.
I'm just going to drum one up.
Well, they're usually a lot harder than that to just drum up.
It's a lot easier if you're just having to retouch small bits of information on the ID card rather than taking it from the complete very, very beginning.
Now, it's also going to probably depend on what your resources are in terms of what cards you have available to you already and what condition they're in.
The way that I know to fake ID cards basically is simply to scan in a good copy, a clean copy of an existing ID card, retouch it, print it out and put it onto an existing card stock, which will go through a little while where to get these supplies.
So you want to make sure that you've got a good source ID.
So I mean, if you think you're going to ever do this, you might as well go and scan your ID right now, especially if it's in good condition.
It's a bit a little bit like the black market, you know, if you have something in good condition, it hasn't been in the wallet and bent up and scratched.
If it's a new ID card, that's the one you want to use.
If this is a serious exercise that you have to do for some reason, it might even be worth going to the DMV or wherever you get your ID cards in your state, whatever they call that place, and getting a brand new card for yourself.
Pay the 10 or 15 bucks, whatever it is, walk away with a pristine identification, take that home, scan it in, and now you've got a really super clean image from which to work.
If you were trying to completely change the information on the card, you might also want to attempt to collect other cards or the images of other cards.
So whether it's scanning in friends cards so that you can use maybe a different last name with your first name or something to that effect, that might be a good idea as well.
The point is here that unless you've got sources at the DMV or whatever state agency issues ID cards in your state, unless you've got resources there of someone who can actually send you an image of a completely clean slate, it's really difficult to take an ID card and just change any kind of information that you want because it's a question of the state officials and the feds.
Knowing that you would try to do this if it was just like a white ID card, you know, I mean they obviously put patterns and designs behind the text and there's just no two ways about it.
That's hard to replicate.
Getting as many different cards from as many different sources that you can helps a lot because then you can kind of patchwork stuff together as needed.
Just in terms of there being different letters in different places, you know, just accounting for different addresses, different names, stuff like that.
Sometimes that helps a little bit, but it also kind of depends on how long you want to spend doing this.
If you're going to try to do drastic changes and you're going to be, you get to basically act like a counterfeit artist and you get to sit there and try to remake all kinds of stuff.
And it's just a pain. So it's a lot easier to do this kind of stuff if you know what you're doing or why you're doing it rather.
If it's just a question of you need to bump up your age in order to get into some place, that's a lot easier because that's a question of taking the ID card as is taking the last two digits of your birth date and changing them.
It is also a lot easier if the cards that you do have available to you, if the images that you do have available to you, have the numbers or the letters that you want to reuse already in them.
So for instance, on a California ID, you know, the birth date is in red, the black text, the name and the addresses and black text over a state seal, things like that.
So if I was going to want to change my address, I would need a pretty good stock of letters.
And you kind of want to look through what you've got available to you, see what letters you've got from other cards or just within your own card if you only have your own card.
And see what you can construct out of existing letters because trying to match like a font with that is just going to be very difficult if not impossible.
It just tends to look too fake if you try to put your own font on there, you really want, you're going to be extracting stuff from the ID and then placing it back down.
So I guess one of the easiest modifications and probably one of the more typical ones will be changing the birth date.
So let's talk about that a little bit. So on the California ID, for instance, there's a birth date in red pasted a little bit over the picture, a little bit over a watermarked picture of the person's face.
Let's say I was born in 1990, which would make me according to the state and the federal law 18, quote, years of age.
So if I needed to move that back a little bit, I would want to see what letters, but what numbers I've got already in my birth date.
So if I had like, I don't know, May, May 13th, what is that? 0513, right?
That's going to be tough to change. I'm not going to be able to tell people that I was born and take that five and make it that I was born 59, 53.
That would be very difficult to change. And I would probably want to hunt down. If possible, I would want to hunt down someone's ID card with maybe an eight in it so that I could make my birth date maybe 85 or something like that.
If I couldn't, if I can't do that, if I don't have that available to me, I would probably try to fashion another a new number out of something.
So if I was born 0513, right, there's that three. Well, if you think about what a three is and what an eight is, they're really, really similar.
So I could take that three in gimp, extract it from the card and then flip it over on itself and make it into an eight.
And that would be really, that would be your best bet. That's going to look believable. And now you've got a new number for you to use.
And you might even just want to use it twice, just make it 88, give yourself 18, 19, 20. It still doesn't work. But okay, so you're going to have to give yourself 85 is your birthday.
That kind of thing is pretty simple. Now how to extract it from gimp. I can't really go into like super hardcore detail about gimp. If you need to know how to use gimp for this kind of thing, the first thing you want to do is practice, practice, practice.
You do not want to let you your attempt at faking an ID card be your first experience with gimp. Trust me, it's not going to work.
Practice one of the best resources to learn the gimp to just kind of get your feet wet is Linux reality episode 90 something 92 maybe there's an episode on how to use the gimp.
And the host of that showed us a pretty good job of explaining it. And that'll get you started and then you're just going to have to practice a lot first and you might as well just practice on the ID, I guess, but just keep a clean copy around obviously because your first attempts are going to be horrible.
But the basic idea is that with just a rectangular marquee is what I usually do is I extract that letter or the number that I need. If I was going to do this, I would extract the number that I need copy it to its own layer, move it over to the year, the year area.
Set it down and then erase around just take the eraser and erase around the edges usually a very, very small you're going to be looking you're going to be using very small tools here rather than kind of staying zoomed out and using big brushes and things like that you're going to want to really zoom in so that you're seeing it pixel per pixel almost and you're going to be working like with that a lot.
You want to retain some of the blurriness there's going to be a natural blurriness to the letter because this is a scanned image and that's just how things bleed on on any kind of printed media so you're going to see that blur and you're going to want to keep that blur because that's that's what it's that's what it's going to look like.
Now for the underneath portion you're going to just want to erase what you have to erase not erase you're going to have to you're going to want to cover up only what you need to cover up so if I'm putting the three over the nine a lot of that's going to be covered anyway you know the nine has a lot of circular action going on there so I would place the eight over the nine and then take my stamp my cloning stamp and kind of cover up the edges that are poking out.
The reason I say this is because at least on the California ID there there's a pattern behind you know the text and trying to replicate that pattern is really really really difficult because they make it difficult to emulate go figure so you want to do is minimal of kind of replicating patterns and watermarks and stuff like that is possible.
Marked images as long as it's just like a faded image of you know your mug shot that's pretty simple to to just clone stamp and kind of touch up the edges whatever you need to do now if it's some kind of holographic image it's a lot harder there are places that you can get supplies for that but that's those are really hard.
The good thing about the holographic images is that a lot of times on aged ID cards or things you know ID cards that have been fairly well abused the holograms kind of start to fade so post after after the after you've made the ID there are some things that you can do to kind of.
Age the ID prematurely so that it doesn't look well number one like you just made it but also to kind of hide the fact that yeah there aren't really holographic images here.
Note while we're talking about it on accuracy and authenticity these fake ID cards are probably not going to get you into maximum security areas or anything like that.
And for that that's way out of certainly my league and probably yours as well these are like home supplies that we're dealing with these are going to be good enough to get you into places with age limitations or get you past landlords who want to know way too much about you when you're applying for an apartment or get you passed an employer potential employer who maybe.
Again it's just wanting to know too much about you so that's that's the level of these ID cards is basically going to be really good to the eye is going to be great for faxing obviously but it would be great or your copying and emailing if someone wants a copy of it but it'll be good to the the naked eye but don't I would not use this fake ID to try to fool.
You know law enforcement in the event that you're really really in trouble I probably I wouldn't hesitate to use it to fool law enforcement if it's more of a cursory track like you know subways you.
If you're in New York and you you scam your way through a subway without paying and then you get caught by a plane closed cop this is this ID card would be fine to get to them I think but certainly nothing any more serious than that I wouldn't really use it for unless you're just really really good counter fitting.
So yeah so that's age just retouching and using the letters and numbers that you've got available to you name is sometimes harder I mean on the California ID again the name is right over the state seal.
And the best thing that I can really think to do in that case is to get a friends ID who trusts you make a scan and take their last name and use it as your last name and then you've got fake information.
It also helps if at the DMV when you go in for your ID if you're able to give an address that you do not actually you know if you're trying to fake an address one of the easiest ways to get a fake address on your ID card is to let the DMV do it for you.
Give them misinformation on whatever level you can I know in California in small towns you can tell them practically anything you want they'll put it on your ID cards not that big of a deal really.
Whereas in other places they make you bring in a bill and things like that so it's harder unless of course you can scan the bill in and modify that print that back out and bring that in you get the idea though.
A lot of the information you want on the ID card really can be done at the office by the people making the ID card so that's that if you're taking someone else's ID card and just pasting your picture over it that's really easy to if you've got anyone's ID card that you might have come across or someone who.
I don't know use your own imagination so you've got someone else's ID card that you can use as a source.
Putting your picture in usually is really simple as well just it's a matter of a little bit of easy gimp stuff make sure you've got a picture that looks like an ID picture make sure that you're blending things correctly the edges on ID cards are really important.
It becomes really obvious when you don't give it the proper authentic bleed because when they're printed at the office they look a certain way and when they're printed on home you know when they're pasted over on the gimp with hard edges and then printed out on an inkjet they look a different way so you want to give the edges a lot of attention.
Make sure that the information is correct that you're not using an expired ID card or if you need to up the expiration date remember to do that make sure that you've got you don't have any weird information on there that looks completely bizarre you know just a mismatching age or whatever.
And it's about it I mean if you've got experience with the gimp you can kind of fill in the rest for yourself the main thing is where to find all this all these supplies and the place that you find them where one such place is a place called let me bring up the webpage exactly poison ID dot com poison ID dot com
p o i s o n i d dot com they have kits they have ID kits you can buy one for four bucks you can buy five probably a better idea because you're going to make mistakes for like 13 bucks better yet they've got they've got kits with mag stripes on the back so that you can get for instance like five for $15
dollars and then you've got you've got five mistakes to make and you've got the nice little magnetic strip on the back now they also have ID holograms and like I say those are a little bit tougher because and I don't really have any experience with it you obviously would need to make sure that you've got an accurate hologram
for whatever state you're posing to be in and this is where it comes into play it the ideal situation would be to have an out of state ID because obviously anyone looking at an in state ID is going to be really really used to seeing that ID card and any kind of flaws going to stand out to them a lot quicker than some kind of flaw in an out of state.
So if you've got access you know if you've got friends and especially the internet age you probably do if you've got friends out of state then you've probably got access to some to some kind of image of an out of state ID and if you can get them to send you a copy of their out of state ID and maybe trade them for your your out of you know to them your your ID will be out of state maybe make a swap or something
that could be a really good source of material as well because using a California ID in California is a lot harder to fake than using a California ID in New York for instance.
People just aren't used to it as much and you can screw around with things a lot easier and a lot safer if you know that you're out if you know that your ID isn't going to actually be used you know in that same state so that's something to keep in mind as well.
So Poison ID has all the supplies what you do is you print it out put it into the onto the ID the card stop and then you need access to a laminating machine those are kind of hard to find to be honest but sometimes the easiest way to get that kind of supply is you know just go to staples or office max or whatever supply store you have in your area.
And purchase it use it return it or if you think this is going to be a new business model for yourself if you're around a college town or something could buy it and keep it and use it a lot make money faking IDs or something that's about it I think remember that when you're doing identity what are we calling this identity modification
identity remixing that sounds hip that the more you have the better so if you've got a state ID that's good it looks official you have a school ID in addition to a state ID that's even better now you're you're you're remixed identity has a little bit more support.
You got a state ID in a college ID and a I don't know bus pass that's even better you know business cards you know all all the the whole deal you know you want to you don't just want one random thing you you kind of want your wallet should you drop it for instance to have all the right information in it you know or if you're standing somewhere and you're being questioned about your identity you want to be able to safely and securely and happily pull out the wallet.
And open it up and know that everything in it is pretty much going to match it's going to look really weird you know if you've got like three different IDs in there for three different people with three different ages and the last names but they're all your picture so consistency very important and just it's really so it helps support the the identity remix.
So that's about all I can think about to say on the subject again do not use this I would not advise doing this for anything too serious this is more I think of a method of confusing information and getting misinformation to people who have really no business knowing any of your information anyway.
So do that do it early you know the earlier you do it the more mundane you can start using your the more mundane things that you can start using your new identity for the better it becomes later on because now there's a history built up about that that new person you know you you've got things in the system already where you know certain internet searches are going to produce information on that person.
Whereas if you just make your new ID card and go out into the world with it right away and try to do big important things with it that's going to be a lot harder to justify or to to to to to make seem believable it's just going to seem like that person was born yesterday so if this person has a history it's a lot better for you a lot better for the person you're trying to scam or a lot worse for them.
Okay that's that's ID cards for you good luck have fun.
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