I used a variation of this trick when I was a resident assistant in college. We had the unfortunate job of busting drinking parties in the dorms and part of our responsibility was to collect ID numbers or social security numbers if the person claimed to not have their IDs. People would quite happily rattle-off a fake SSN. But if you wait 60 seconds and come back to them and ask for the number in reverse, it's essentially impossible to repeat the same fake, especially if you've been drinking.

I would have a hard time doing this with mine, and I'm sober.

Would people memorize fakes to give away consistently, or would they just rattle off a random nine digit number?

Sometimes.

I used to be a bouncer in my college town and you'd be surprised at what lengths kids will go to pass off their fake ID's as real. they'll memorize everything on the ID, including where the city is located - "So Flagstaff, is that North or South of Phoenix? I can never remember?"

I would ask for all the information on the ID if I thought they looked young. Then once the person was confident they had passed my tests, I'd ask them what their area code was when they call home. 9/10 a fake ID holder will fail this test because its not something on the ID, but something they should know without fail.

That's a pretty good idea! But doesn't this rather depend on you knowing the area code yourself?

We didn't have to. We had a slick way to find out without tipping off the ID holder.

It went something like this:

As I'm asking the kid the details on his ID, I make a hand gesture to the waitress that works the rear bar near the door. She would then have the manager call the phone at the front desk where we were. As I was talking to the kid, I would show Bouncer #2 the city and as I was talking to the kid, Bouncer #2 would ask the manager the area code over the phone in a simple coded manner.

The bouncer would give the city and state initials to the manager. So if it was Phoneix, AZ. He would say, "Yeah, its a PH, AZ." The manager would then confirm he had the right city and then relate the area code. After a few months, I had memorized a lot of the shorthand we had for cities so that it only took a few seconds to confirm. Considering most fakes come from the same states and cities, it wasn't a long list to learn.

By the time I got down stalling, the other bouncer would then ask him the question, already knowing the answer.

Haha, either that, or pretending you do. You're only looking for people who are not confident.

As someone who frequently forgets how old he is, I'd be kind of irked if someone denied me entry because I said "I'm 28. No, wait, shit, 29!"

Knowing some bouncers and bar tenders, they tend to have a dynamic level of skepticism. If you look 25-ish, that sort of slip probably won't deny you entry. If you look 20-ish, it may be more likely.

The difficulty here is that the incentives heavily favor allowing false negatives, and denying false positives. I know that in Virginia, the bar tenders were personally responsible if they served alcohol to anyone underage. And in a college town (where I was for quite some time in grad school), there are loads of underage kids trying to get into the bars, and the authorities would sometimes hire underage kids to test the bars.

Oh yeah, I definitely don't blame them, and I understand the incentive structure. I don't even think that I necessarily disagree with it, given our laws about drinking. It's just an irk :p

Why use an ID from a different city in the first place? I'd say keep everything except for the year the same and there'd be no problem.

As I understand it, some states' IDs are easier to fake than others. Your supplier may only have Arizona IDs to give you.

> ask for the number in reverse, it's essentially impossible to repeat the same fake, especially if you've been drinking

I would find this extraordinarily difficult to do in any state of mind.

The only way I could give you the digits of my telephone number backwards would be to mentally go through my telephone number from beginning to end once for each digit of the number, and stop a digit earlier on each pass.

Yep, that's basically what everyone has to do.

Whenever I give a fake phone number (which I do quite often when inspecting real estate) I always confidently reel off the number I had fifteen years ago. It still trips easily off the tongue.

I hope the poor sucker who has that number now doesn't get too many follow up calls.

Similar thing when giving your phone number to someone hitting on you. Better strategy is to swap two digits with each other, making it easier to remember and increasing the plausibility of an "honest mistake."

That's not exactly what's going on here. The point is to use the sensory memories to improve the interviewee's ability to recall, and then see who actually recalled better the second time around. Yes, you could probably compare the two for inconsistencies as well, but that's not what he was measuring for this—just the change in level of detail between the two versions.

That's right, and another difference is that word frequencies change. E.g., in a lie there might be many references to "the green car", while a truthful story would refer to it variously as "the old green car", "the yellowish hatchback", "that ugly old car", etc. Yes there are inconsistencies in those descriptors. That is a property of memory, not of guilt.

Which shows yet another deficiency in LEOs' standard methods. They interrogate until they get an inconsistency, which they know the courts will interpret as guilt, even though this research shows that it is no such thing. Therefore intelligent guilty people can talk to the police with no fear, while no innocent person should ever talk to them.