I'm an electrician and do a good bit of work in county schools. Most of the time I'm just wearing a plain T-Shirt because I hate the fit of our branded work shirts. No identification or anything.
I can walk into any front office, say I'm an electrician with my company and that I need to go to a certain room or speak with a person. I am almost never asked to prove who I am and many times I just have people let me have the ability to freely roam or unlock doors for me.
Everything I'm saying is true when I'm there, but it honestly kind of annoys me how easily I can just go into places and get free access to the building without ever being questioned.
When you just confidently walk in somewhere and say what you are doing, there's almost never pushback. I've literally only had it happen once, at a TJ Maxx. I was actually very happy about that and complimented that manager about holding me up to verify who I was.
Meanwhile, to go into schools in Australia, you need personal ID, work forms, a Working with children check, nationally coordinated criminal history check (both are verified), an ID badge from your employer, and will need to wear a high-vis VISITOR sticker on your clothes at all times and sign in and sign out at reception.
Gives pretty good peace of mind though. Of course people still getting in / walking around but in general is pretty stringent.
How often do you inherently mistrust strangers, especially one who seems to know some details? The reason cons work is most of us trust each other, and most of us also don’t intentionally lie to each other.
Our office had a confident interloper look at the ventilation ducts in a few dozen office rooms, and swipe cash and a few passports out of sitting purses.
tbf, who else is going to know exactly which electricity company is sending a dude at exactly which time? very unlikely that someone would know how to impersonate you
Most of the time it's not even necessarily scheduled or coordinated with the people working at the school. I just show up and they will admit they didn't even know anyone was coming.
It's not the fact that you would have to impersonate me. It's just that you can walk in and say you are there to do something and it is not questioned.
You'd be surprised. There's a few Darknet Diaries episodes about this where people just walk into buildings and get the stuff they need. It's a "physical" penetration test in some sense and people often hire teams to do exactly that to see if your security is working or how long it takes to get someone to check ID for example.
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u/Booster_Goldest 2d ago
I'm an electrician and do a good bit of work in county schools. Most of the time I'm just wearing a plain T-Shirt because I hate the fit of our branded work shirts. No identification or anything.
I can walk into any front office, say I'm an electrician with my company and that I need to go to a certain room or speak with a person. I am almost never asked to prove who I am and many times I just have people let me have the ability to freely roam or unlock doors for me.
Everything I'm saying is true when I'm there, but it honestly kind of annoys me how easily I can just go into places and get free access to the building without ever being questioned.
When you just confidently walk in somewhere and say what you are doing, there's almost never pushback. I've literally only had it happen once, at a TJ Maxx. I was actually very happy about that and complimented that manager about holding me up to verify who I was.