Posts Filed Under near-field
UPS "damaged" my passport
Let’s start with some background information. I am a French citizen, living and working out of Los Angeles on a L-1b visa for Nokia.
My passport was sent to CIBT in New York mid-October to obtain a Ghanaian visa stamp for a business trip starting 11/6/2007. “CIBT [..] offers complete document expediting services in the United States. [...] With nearly 200 professionals nationwide, and a state-of-the-art tracking system, CIBT always knows exactly where your documents are in the process.” Remember this, it is important.
CIBT obtained the said visa stamp in time and used the services of UPS NEXT DAY AIR to ship my passport back. The UPS website showed a pick-up time for the package on 10/31/2007 at 5:29 P.M. (All dates, time, and location information from the UPS tracking website).
The next day, the UPS driver came and went at 10 A.M. without the package containing my passport. I had a flight to London at 9 P.M. The UPS website showed IN TRANSIT to a location in IL, USA. We called UPS, they assured us that the package was on its way and would get to our office this afternoon. At 5 P.M., the package had not been delivered; time to reschedule my flight to the next day.
On Friday 11/2/2007, the UPS driver came and went at 10 A.M. without the package containing my passport. The UPS website still showed IN TRANSIT to a location in IL, USA. Our assistant spent the entire morning on the phone with CIBT and several departments of UPS to have a status on the package containing my passport. UPS refused to share any information with us since we were the recipients. Seriously? Meanwhile I rushed to the Consulate General of France in Los Angeles to see if they could issue a 1-year temporary passport. It was possible however since 9/11 the Department of Homeland Security do not issue (temporary) visa on temporary passports anymore nor consider valid damaged passports. I could have left the country with my temporary passport but would not have been able to return to the U.S.A. In a nutshell, I was grounded.
Back at the office, I received the following email from CIBT around 12pm:
Dear Mr. Grignani,
My name is Daniel [lastname removed], and I am assisting with locating your UPS package. The agent handling this request has already placed numerous calls to UPS to try and have them track this down, and she has followed all the UPS protocol for lost packages.
UPS has placed a tracer on this package and we will be notified as soon as they find any information regarding the package. The last time UPS scanned it was in NYC and then there are no further scans. This does not mean that it is still in NYC, and that is why we have to let UPS investigate the shipment.
I wanted to send you an email to assure you that we are doing everything possible to get this resolved and are in touch with and will continue to be in touch with UPS.
Time to reschedule my flight to Monday. The UPS website now showed Status: Exception.
At this point, I was nearly losing it. I spent the past 6 weeks organizing this business trip for 2 other designers and me. All of us spent Sunday at the office for a briefing, status review, rescheduling, redistribution of the equipment, brain dump session. Fantastic.
On Monday 11/5/2007 morning, some hope…
Dear Mr. Grignani,
I spoke to UPS this morning and they have located your package. They are going to ship this out and it will arrive tomorrow morning.
We should be able to track the package with the same tracking number, but it may not be updated until this evening.
I apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused, and UPS has also expressed their sincere apology for the delay with this shipment.
Any questions, please feel free to call me at any time.
Sincerely,
Daniel
I called Daniel immediately. According to him, a UPS representative told him that the label on the package has been lost therefore UPS did not know who the recipient was. Okay.
At this point, I called the team in transit to Ghana to notify them that I will arrive on Wednesday evening.
On Tuesday morning, CIBT emailed the new tracking number. The UPS website showed two things:
A new origin for the package: NEW YORK, NY, US on 11/02/2007 at 12:28 P.M. from UNKNOWN OVERGOODS-MISSING OR ILLEGIBLE LABEL PACKAGE FORWARDED TO CORPORATE OVERGOODS SITE FOR FURTHER PROCESSING / RETURNED TO SHIPPER
The package was scanned at VAN NUYS, CA, US on 11/06/2007 and was OUT FOR DELIVERY at 8:09 A.M.
The UPS driver arrived at the office at 9:50 A.M. Our assistant signed the package, it was in good shape but when she opened it in front of the UPS driver, this is what she found.
The cover of the passport is missing, the pages are held together with an elastic band. When removing the elastic band, some pages show tire traces and dirt marks. All pages are present including the I-94. Considering the condition of the passport, I knew that I could not travel anywhere even if I had a valid temporary one along with it.
Time to call the lawyers, cancel the trip, and call the team in Ghana for the nth time.
Later that morning, I went back to the Consulate General of France in Los Angeles to void my current passport and apply for a new one. On close inspection, the vice-consul was surprised to see the cover missing considering the overall good condition of the pages and suggested that it might have been removed intentionally to make a fake passport. The vice-consul went on to describe how the French passport is constructed; the cover and pages are really thick and sturdy and are sewn together. It is nearly impossible to detach the cover without human intervention. Notice on the pictures how all the other pages are still sewn together and fairly intact. If it is hard to physically damage it, according to this report from Sénat français, “the French passport is very attractive [to criminals] because its security features against falsification are relative and it allows its owner to prove his/her French nationality and his/her identity as well as to enjoy the consequential rights and benefits and to have a travel document“. Apologies for the poor translation.
Back at the office, I took a closer look at the UPS package my passport came in. Notice on the image below how the labels are stickers and that there are two of them. How can it be lost?
Today, UPS is still investigating the claim – the claim type being Damaged Package. I am still waiting for a written letter from UPS detailing why the package was not delivered to us on time. Also it is worth noticing that UPS has a clause in its contract stating they will only reimburse the price of the damage good (86$ in this case). So forget about the costs of canceling my business trip, the hassles to apply for a new passport, the 10 days in Europe + lawyer fees + paperwork to re-apply for a L-1b visa stamp at a US Embassy, etc. You get the picture.
To conclude, I want to briefly touch on the issues this incident raises, (I am planning to discuss them in full in another post). Unless my passport did open the package it was in, jump out of it, pulled out its cover and then threw itself under a Fenwick, someone somewhere in the UPS world did.
The security of shipping services. CIBT is known to handle passports, identity documents, etc. therefore any package coming from them become a potential and easy target. What kind of security measures need to be introduced to ensure the integrity, privacy and security of packages?
Proving theft within a UPS facility is nearly impossible and considering their liability clauses, one can expect this type of incident to happen repeatedly. A Google search: “UPS lost my passport” returns a significant number of results. UPS lost track of a second package coming from CIBT the same week of mine. Coincidence?
RFID Passports “will continuously broadcast the holder’s name, nationality, age, address and whatever else is on the RFID chip.” Why bother reading labels when one can just scan all packages with a cheap commercially available RFID reader until one get a positive hit? Bruce Schneier has a very interesting blog post on this matter and why RFID passports are a very bad idea.
This is what BROWN can do for you.
Filed Under: identity, near-field, shipping, ups