Years ago a friend was searching her daughter’s room and found a driver’s license that showed her being 21, when in reality she was 17.
She showed me the license and I couldn’t tell it wasn’t real. We went to a friend’s bar and showed it to him. He insisted it was real, using a UV light, magnifying glass, etc.
I guess difficult-to-counterfeit =/=impossible-to-counterfeit.
Counterfeit and fraudulent aren’t the same thing. A DMV employee taking $100 to print a fake ID on real stock is not unheard of. In the same vein, we had someone steal a business cheque we had sent out and alter the payee. We got our money back because it was a fraudulent altered but genuinely issued cheque. A fake cheque would not have had the same protections.
When is “years ago”?
It is trivial for someone with a 2024 desktop scanner and desktop publishing app to recreate an altered version of a 1990s driver’s license.
It’s very hard bordering on impossible to use the same tools to counterfeit a 2024 DL from a reasonably modern state.
Anything, even US $100 bills, is counterfeit-able given enough resources.
22 years ago would be my guesstimate. Before I met my gf, but after the bar we stopped at was remodeled.
The owner of the bar was amazed. He’d been (and still is) involved in running a bar forever.