Kurt Groetsch @ OldTasty.com

My walk to work in the morning takes me past a subway station, a light rail station, a long-distance bus station and several local bus stops, not to mention the Beijing North train station that’s a few blocks away. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of foot traffic in the area, making it an ideal spot for all kinds of questionable commercial activity. More than anything else, though, are graffiti ads like the one in the photo above for fake IDs. Fake marriage licenses, fake residency cards (very attractive as official residency is hard to secure in Beijing) and totally counterfeit college diplomas are all available from these guys — all you have to do is call. Of course, with their phone numbers scrawled all over town, they get busted pretty quickly. Which doesn’t matter that much, because by the time they’re back on the streets, their numbers have been painted over, giving them a clean canvas to work with.