Promise Fraud

Promise stamps are unique to each person and hard to forge without considerable experience. It is however, much easier to steal them.

Once in possession of someone else’s stamp, it is essentially possible to spend their money, but only with people who don’t know them personally. Because of the local nature of promissaries, it’s often quite hard to get away with using a stolen stamp. Fraudulent transactions are usually detected by the local promissary, at which point they will inform the stamp owner and notify other locations. If a fraudulent transaction goes undetected, and gets approved, it may be detected by The Mint, and can be reversed before being stamped. However, if a transaction (or the ledger it’s recorded in) makes it into The Mint’s permanent records, it’s more-or-less set in stone. This gives most victims of stamp theft 2 or 3 days to do damage control before suffering actual monetary loss.