How Underage Ragers Fought a Fake ID Bust—and Won

On a cold February evening, Dalia’s phone lit up with a message. “YO. Apparently OldIronsidesFakes got busted by the FBI, and none of the barcodes are working anymore.” Dalia, an underage college student whose name has been changed for her privacy, felt her stomach turn. She and her friends had gotten their fakes from OldIronsides, a well-known fake ID site that most kids assumed sold undetectable dupes. She typed back: “what the FUCK.” Her friends piled on: “That’s why my fake got taken. Be careful,” “FUCK.” Where Dalia lives, getting caught with a fake ID is a felony, punishable by up to seven years in prison, not to mention a serious blow to someone’s social life.  

Dalia quickly realized that she and her friends weren’t alone. Over the next few days, a flood of panicked posts on TikTok and Yik Yak, an anonymous messaging app, claimed that fakes were getting snatched left and right in college towns across the country. As the TikToks racked up millions of views, more localized warnings on Yik Yak dictated what bars and liquor stores were “safe” or not. “It's really easy to get people riled up and get the whole campus talking about one thing just because of Yik Yak,” Dalia told VICE.

Instead of a cinema-worthy FBI bust, though, what took down all the fake IDs was a simple software update. An estimated few thousand age-restricted venues in the U.S. and Canada use an ID-scanning mobile app called Bar & Club Stats (BCS), and in January 2022, BCS released an update that detected fake IDs as invalid when scanned. Over the past six months, BCS boasted that an average of “nearly half of the IDs presented as 21-year-olds registered as invalid.” 

Kids like Dalia pay anywhere from $50 to $150 for a pair of convincing fakes (always bring backup), either through resellers or directly through a vendor’s website. Dalia says that the first time she tried to get a fake, she went through a friend-of-a-friend and “overpaid and never saw it.” A few months later, she and a close friend got together with a group of other college students to get in on a bulk order of fakes from OldIronsides. (OldIronsides did not respond to a request for comment.)

According to Justin Carmona, TikTok’s favorite bartender, the high stakes around fake IDs aren’t really about getting kids in trouble—enforcing the laws is about protecting bars. Carmona works in Baltimore, where it’s illegal to confiscate personal property, even if it’s a fake ID. Bouncers would rather hand you back your fake and send you packing than risk losing the bar’s liquor license, a cost that ranges from $100 to a couple thousand dollars. Still, it’s not a good look to get caught. “Imagine it's like your favorite bar in the area, and you're the reason why that bar got shut down,” Carmona said. “Good luck, underclassmen.” Carmona has to be a hardass about fakes for the sake of his employment, as do all bartenders across the country. Along with a well-trained eye for underage ragers, many rely on tech support from scanners.

Behind the scenes, illicit ID vendors and ID-verification companies hone their crafts in a codependent dance—vendors purchase scanning technology to ensure that their illicit merchandise works, and scanner companies order the latest fake IDs to test their products against them. “There are smart people on both sides,” said Don Lawrence, the president of Bar & Club Stats. He was surprised by how many fake IDs were caught by his app’s January update—then again, he was surprised by the vastness of the fake ID black market to begin with. Lawrence, trained as a software engineer, purchased BCS in 2019 after the previous owner “burned out” as a result of endlessly chasing a growing pool of fake ID vendors. 

Lawrence explained that the app’s data does more than just show how many IDs scan as fake—the company can identify which of its users are fake vendors testing their product by observing patterns in their scanning. “But we’re still evolving,” Lawrence clarified. “Unfortunately, I wish we were better.” He’s referring to the breakneck pace at which ID vendors catch up with verification systems’ moves to thwart them. Dozens of posts on FakeIDVendors, a forum for vendors, illustrate the initial panic, but within a month, many major sellers had updated their barcodes to bypass the BCS scanner. 

Dexter, who operates a fake ID vending platform called OnlyFakes and whose last name has been omitted for his privacy, was nonchalant about the update. He debuted on the FakeIDVendors forum about six months ago, the same month the update came out, and paid someone to bypass the scanner. Dexter told VICE that the BCS update “certainly wasn’t a new challenge.” Updates to BCS and other popular scanning technology haven’t stopped vendors before, he added, and usually, when someone in the community figures out a fix for future fakes, everyone picks it up pretty quickly. 

But before news of the fix could penetrate TikTok, the hysteria over non-functioning fakes began to impact business. “Sales definitely dipped a little bit, especially for some of the smaller vendors,” Dexter said. One post from five months ago on the FakeIDVendors forum is aggressively titled, “The Current BCS Situation Just Shows How Fucking Dumb Tik Tok Kids Are.” It reads: “So it turns out it's not shipping delays or slow [customer service] that can hurt your profit the most as a vendor, it's dumb gullible kids on Tik Tok.” The comments are peppered with pissed-off fake sellers and owners: Vendors grumble that kids have placed orders on hold until vendors show proof that they have fixed the scanning issue.

Don Lawrence, at BCS, also underestimated the vitriol of fake ID users and sellers—along with the iOS App Store’s mysterious quality-control guidelines. Once the internet abandoned its theories about FBI hits or hacks and realized BCS was responsible for the fake outage, it wanted vengeance. Within a few months, a storm of negative comments tanked BCS’s App Store rating to next to nothing. A post on the FakeIDVendors forum from February urges fake vendors and users to take action: “Leave 2 reviews at the spots below. They just need to say 1 star and this app is scanning my real ID as fake on my iphone. Change the wording a bit, but keep the same message.” It continues: “If even a dozen or so people do this, they will change the app version and your fake ID will start scanning again!!!”

In May, Lawrence received the first notice from Apple that the BCS app was at risk of being removed from the App Store for multiple reasons—among them were the app’s review history and some more technical issues with BCS’s subscription system. A few weeks later, after BCS neglected to change their subscription system, the app was removed from the App Store. (Apple did not respond to a request for comment.)

BCS customers who downloaded the app before it was removed from the iOS App Store can continue to use it, and the app is still available for download in the Google Play store, but gone are the days when TikTokers and vendors could install it on a whim to test their fakes. Since the app’s removal, BCS’s downloads and new subscribers have dropped “quite a bit,” but Lawrence said that existing customers keep BCS afloat. 

“The bigger issue,” Lawrence explained, “is that the changes we are forced to make, which will hopefully allow us back on the App Store again, are sizable and take time and effort. They are a distraction from continuing to update our fake ID detection and verification service.”

Lawrence said that the more he talks to iOS developers, the more he understands that the App Store’s rules are often vague and ever-changing. He views this latest setback as “just part of the game” between fake ID vendors and tech companies. He hopes that the next step is a BCS scanning website that doesn’t require it to go through Apple’s review process—anything to stay one step ahead. 

Over the past few months, the bizarre ecosystem resumed its natural rhythm: Vendors rolled out updated IDs, resellers pushed the new product, Lawrence exchanged frustrated emails with Apple, Dalia got a new ID and bar-hopped at non-BCS venues without incident, and Carmona vibe-checked kids at the door. OldIronsidesFakes’s website posted an update of its own. A red, misspelled message now proudly stretches the width of the page: “With hard efforts, OIS team finilly FIXed the BCS scanner issue…Everything is fine.”

That’s a relief for underage partiers on a campus like Dalia’s, where fakes don’t feel optional. “I know people that literally go out six days a week,” she said. “The legal limit doesn’t really change who has access [to alcohol].” And despite Dalia’s initial skittishness, she feels confident that she’ll be able to continue skirting the rules at bars and liquor stores. “I'm not that nervous about getting my fake taken—I have another one anyway,” she said. 

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