“Extremely troubling,” is how one Arizona public safety officer described the small items in front of him. “Better than we’ve ever seen” was the reaction of Assistant U.S. Attorney for New Hampshire Al Rubega. And Charles Shumer, Senator from the state of New York minced no words when announcing a need to “strangle their source of funding” of its purveyors, “and put them out of business.” The object of their alarm? An innocuous-looking laminated card, with an photo, name address and basic demographics of its owner.

By all appearances, a genuine driver’s license. But nevertheless a fake.

An emerging concern for legislators, law enforcement and even ordinary shopkeepers is the level of sophistication built into these IDs, as well as their source -- China. First cropping up on high school and college campuses, the fake IDs could be ordered through an anonymous email address of a “Chinese guy”: buyers supply the name, address, birth-date and other basic information which appears on their driver's licenses, wire several hundred dollars to a bank account, and in several weeks’ time receive their card from China, hidden in between the packaging of some small item.

To their credit, some businesses are already taking steps to detect these Chinese counterfeits - investing in better ID readers, which automatically check for all document security features, for instance. State and federal agencies are also fighting back by issuing more and harder duplicating security features. This makes the need for reliable ID readers all the stronger, as the sheer amount and diversity of the new features will make it impossible to verify with any confidence with the naked eye. Unfortunately, counterfeiters have gotten too good at creating the authentic look of the documents and are now moving on to duplicating some of the under-the-surface parts. Businesses must develop a way to reliably verify the authenticity of these documents -- or a few teenagers sneaking in will be the least of their worries.