It’s early on a Friday night, and Josh’s* phone is buzzing. He’s got calls coming in from Queen Anne, calls coming in from Capitol Hill, calls coming in from Madrona. The requests are a little bit different each time. One guy and his two buddies want an eighteen-pack of Keystone or Icehouse, whichever is cheaper. A group of girls asks for a fifth of Monarch Vodka. Maybe Josh will oblige the request if he’s in the neighborhood, but regardless, if you’re a high school kid trying to get drunk on the weekend, he’s the guy that you want to have in your phone. He can hook you up. Josh has a fake ID.

Josh’s first attempt at making a fake was on Paint, the Microsoft computer program. It was shoddily put together, but he says “it worked at 7-Elevens and places like that.” Over the summer, he would go to those same mini-marts over and over, eventually befriending the workers there. By then, they had stopped carding him.

Buying beer at corner stores was all well and good, but several months ago, Josh decided to upgrade. He had heard about a guy through a friend of a friend who could make legitimate-looking phonies — scan-able and practically indistinguishable from a genuine driver’s license. Josh mailed the man the personal information that would be on the card, as well as a photograph, a signature, and over one hundred dollars in cash to pay for the ID. Several weeks later, it arrived: a California driver’s license that made Josh a legal drinker.

Under Washington State law, any establishment that serves alcohol to a minor runs the risk of being shut down. Furthermore, any person who tries to “forge, alter, counterfeit, otherwise prepare or acquire and supply to a person under the age of twenty-one years a facsimile of any of the officially issued cards of identification” has committed a gross misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail and a minimum fine of $2,500. Despite the potentially harsh consequences, Josh isn’t really worried about use of the ID.

“It’s never been rejected,” he says.

The closest call he ever had was at restaurant. Josh and several of his friends who all had fake IDs sat down and ordered drinks. When the waiter asked to see identification, he was handed a bevy of phony cards.

“He stared at all of our IDs for a while, and finally said, ‘Damn, these are good,’” Josh says. But he still served them the drinks they ordered.

Alcohol sales are regulated by the Washington State Liquor Control Board. The Board issues a license to every establishment in the state selling or serving alcoholic beverages. This ranges from tiny corner stores to large-scale wine distributers. It’s also their job to assure that stores stay on a tight leash in terms of serving alcohol to minors. Their primary means of doing so is an undercover sting operation known as a compliance check.

The Board often collaborates with local police, including the Seattle Police Department, when performing a compliance check. Usually they send a minor to attempt to purchase alcohol while the agent waits outside. If the minor is successful, then the store fails. For a store with a bad history, plainclothes cops might be sent in to observe the scene. While a store that fails once might get off without much more than a warning, a second failure will prompt serious restriction. Four failures in two years necessitates revocation of the store’s liquor license.

State liquor stores, the only locations in Washington where hard alcohol can be purchased by the bottle, have a minimum of two compliance checks per year. In this case, employees are fined a portion of their wages if they fail the check. After a second failure, an employee will likely lose his job. According to Liquor Control Board Director of Communications Brian Smith, State liquor stores are adamant about their carding: they pass compliance checks at a rate of 93%.

Still, despite the stringent policy enacted against establishments that sell alcoholic beverages, the attitude towards the minors attempting the actual purchase can be far less harsh and more difficult to enforce.

For ’07 graduate Adam*, it wasn’t difficult to avoid prosecution even after he got busted. It was spring of Adam’s senior year, three days before prom. He and a few of his friends drove in his car over to the liquor store to buy a couple bottles of alcohol. Adam had the ID of his older brother’s friend, whom he resembled, so the pressure was on him to do the buying. He went into the store as his friends stayed in the car with the keys, listening to the radio. He had purchased the goods without a problem when an employee approached him and asked, “Is that your white Subaru out front?”

Knowing this meant trouble, Adam lied. “No, I took the bus here,” he replied. He left the store and started walking away, but not before the suspicious employees wrote down all his information. Panicking, Adam called his friends. “Just get into the driver’s seat and get out of there,” he told them. But his friends had already split from the scene. The liquor store employees had never suspected Sean was underage. Instead, they had seen him in his car with a lot of young faces, and believed that he was buying alcohol for minors. While Adam was inside, the employee had yelled at his friends to get away from the liquor store, and they had left, leaving behind the keys so that Adam would be able to drive away. The miscommunication had disastrous consequences. When Adam returned to the lot to get his car, he found a note on the windshield reading “Claim your keys inside.” The suspicious liquor store employees, finding the sketchy vehicle unattended, had seized his keys.

When Adam went back into the store, the police were waiting for him. Scared that he was in way above his head, Adam confessed to everything.

Even though Adam had bought alcohol, the officers didn’t give him a Minor in Possession Charge. They told him that because he had used someone else’s identification, it wasn’t a simple case of ID counterfeiting, which is a misdemeanor. Instead, he could be charged with fraud, which is a felony and carries with it a minimum penalty of one year jail time.

After dropping that bombshell, the cops called his mother and released him, telling Adam they would contact him.

Fortunately for Adam, he never heard from them again. Just like that, he got off free.

In one sense, Adam lucked out that he didn’t have to face charges. In another, it was bad luck that he was ever caught using fake identification in the first place. Renee Witt, a detective with the Media Relations Office for the Seattle Police, acknowledges that most perpetrators do get away.

“Often there are store clerks or bouncers who aren’t alert or don’t care,” she says. “It’s easy for kids violating the law to fly under the radar.”

Another veteran East Precinct Detective, who did not want to be identified, echoed Detective Witt.

“If an owner sells alcohol to someone and then has doubts, they certainly won’t notify the police,” she explains, because they would get in trouble for selling to a minor if their doubts proved true. “And if they send someone away, they probably still won’t call us.”

It’s easy to tell that the officers are right. I spoke with several small grocery owners within several miles of Garfield, all of whom assured me that they had never encountered a fake ID used in their store. These establishments must have been fortunate to have been avoided by underage buyers — or they fall into one of the categories outlined by the detective.

Even if employees are committed to following the law, a high quality fake can be nearly impossible to detect — even by government agencies. According to Smith, the Liquor Control Board employee, at some State liquor stores the ID barcode must be scanned before the sale. That way, the employee can verify that the information on the barcode matches the information printed on the card. But even this can be faked by a top-end ID card. Still, at many stores — including the State liquor store on 23rd and Union, located just a few blocks from Garfield — identification check is purely visual, relying on the knowledge and alertness of the clerk.

A top-notch ID can even pass the biggest test of all: law enforcement officers. Recently, Josh was drinking with a friend on a college campus. One of them peed on a statue, and the cops were called. Josh was on his phone when the cars pulled up.

“I was pretty drunk,” he says. “I had like four beers and a quarter of a fifth.” The police asked him how old he was. He showed them his ID and told them he was 21. Just to verify, the policeman called in all of Josh’s information to the station, but no problems came up. The ID had worked perfectly. “By the end of the conversation, we were all just having fun together.”

In the future, holograms, blacklights, and sophisticated scanning devices might make it impossible to forge an ID. But nowadays, it is relatively simple for the determined teen to acquire phony identification, whether via some fancy Photoshop manipulation or a few hundred bucks dealt to an illicit source. For a parent, this might mean a few more sleepless nights wondering if the system designed to keep her son sober is failing. For kids, it might mean they need to find a friend like Josh.

*Name has been changed.