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By Root 355 0

it’s not like they’re embedded with holograms or even barcodes. Supposedly counterfeiting was a big problem at first, and Cast Members were instructed to feel the edges of the ticket to make sure there were perforations in the proper places (the top and bottom). Apparently a lot of people were printing them out on cardstock at home and using a paper cutter to cut them out of bigger sheets, not realizing that actual FastPasses are distributed from a perforated roll. The obvious solution here is to use perforated cardstock (the kind used for business cards) or even better, rolls used for garment labels, which can be ordered online from a myriad of distributors. In order for this to be effective with the business card-type cardstock you’d buy from Staples, you’d still need to use a paper cutter to get clean edges on the sides, while retaining the perforation on the top and bottom.

Frankly, going through all of this time and effort to counterfeit FastPasses isn’t worth it, unless you plan on selling them to suckers on eBay (which from the look of recent auction listings happens on a regular basis).

The better scams are the simpler and more clever ones. For example, there’s the infamous “button” on the back of the FastPass machines: when you press it, a FastPass magically spits out! This only works if the CM on duty left the button unlocked, which in the past seemed to be done almost by default. Unfortunately too many people were using this scam and the CMs got wise to it and started locking all of the machines in a FP queue except for maybe one. So for this to work you’d possibly have to press the button on the back of each machine before you found the one that was unlocked, by which point the on-duty CM would have likely realized something was up. And the rumor mill now says that anyone caught pressing this button will be immediately escorted from the park. So probably not worth it.

However, you can still use this button trick to your advantage by getting the CM to press it for you! If you carry around an old, expired park ticket, when you insert it into the FP machine it’ll spit back out without giving you a FP. These magnetic-strip tickets are easily demagnetized, and the CMs are too frazzled at busy times of the day to troubleshoot why your ticket won’t work properly. So 99% of the time they’ll just push the button for you! Score, free extra FastPass!

Another scam also preys on the volume of people the CMs have to deal with in regards to the FP systems. My friend Keith thought this up:

“I was there for a week one time and hadn’t used a few of my prior days’ FastPasses, and I was still carrying them around in my wallet. I went to Toy Story Mania and got my FP as usual, and then had to come back 45 minutes later. So I just shoved them into my wallet along with the ones from the previous day.

“Well, I showed the first CM the correct FastPass for TSM, and again, shoved it back into my wallet, thinking that was the end of it. But then the second CM later on in the queue wanted to actually collect the ticket, so I pulled it out of my wallet and gave it to her. She didn’t even look at it, just took it from me, and we walked onto the ride.

“It was only when I got back to the resort and started dumping receipts out of my wallet that I realized I’d given her a FP from the previous day, and that the TSM one was still in my wallet!

“The possibilities for scamming seemed pretty vast once I realized that the second CM, the one who actually takes the tickets from you, doesn’t check them. It’s only the first CM at the beginning of the queue who checks them. So in theory you could collect a bunch of FPs from rides with no lines, and only one for a high-volume ride, and reuse the high-volume one to get on that really popular ride over and over throughout the day.

“I tried this out by getting a FP early on for Space Mountain. Before I rode Space Mountain each time I’d get a FP for Mickey’s Philharmagic. I ended up keeping the 10AM Space Mountain FP I got and re-using that all day long, getting another FP from Mickey’s Philharmagic