The allure of bar life is a great one, and it’s greatest to those for whom it is legally unattainable: underage drinkers. The loud, nostalgic music, the cheap pitchers, the co-mingling of groups of people you would never see together anywhere else.

Fake identification is expensive and illegal. Bars retain the right to take fake IDs away if they suspect foul play. Some bars require multiple forms of ID, and almost every bar cards. Sneaking into a bar is a practice with a risk of legal ramifications and abysmal embarrassment.

But there is one attempted trick that is not expensive and does not require illegal impersonation: the stamp-back trick.

The stamp-back is a covert transfer of the ink stamp given by the bouncer after one person is successfully carded to an underage comrade. For it to work, the two people would flash their stamps on the way back into the bar. The bouncers would never charge people two covers if they were just stepping out for a smoke break or a phone call outside the bar, so in theory, this utilizes this loophole to gain illegal entry.

For Faegan’s Cafe and Pub, underage drinking and the threat of students sneaking in is never more prominent than on Wednesday nights for Flip Night. There is a high level of attraction held in the premise of the night: If you correctly call a coin flip with the bartender, you get a free drink. Dave Myers, a bouncer for Faegan’s, said he catches 10-12 underage patrons attempting to get in each Wednesday night and has to deny them.

Myers was familiar with the stamp-back trick and knew that there are patrons who would use this method, frantically trying to rub the stamp on one another’s hand before rushing back. While there are certain methods he uses to gauge reactions to people with fake forms of identification, he said it is difficult to decipher when people are getting in using forged stamps.

But in Myers’ experience, the stamp-back trick does not pose as much of a threat as fake ID holders.

“We get a lot of hand-me-down IDs too, from older brothers or sisters,” Myers said. “Anything where they look even remotely similar, they’ll give it a shot.”

Down the street from Faegan’s, at Chuck’s Cafe, the threat of stamping holds a bit more volume. Dan Galloway, a bouncer at Chuck’s, said he would come across people trying to sneak in using the stamp-back trick.

Galloway, along with the other bouncers at Chuck’s, has a solution for the stamp-back trick. Instead of placing the stamp anywhere on the entrant’s hand as they came into the bar, the Chuck’s bouncers very deliberately place stamps in a place on the hand where if it is to be pressed up against another, it would appear backward, making the stamp-back trick useless.

Galloway knew that Chuck’s had a reputation for being difficult to sneak into, and seemed to take pride in that notion as a bouncer of the establishment.

“If you blog it online, it’s the hardest one,” he said with a laugh. “Everybody blogs about how they can’t get in here.”

One senior, who declined to give her name for publication, said she used the stamp-back trip with a “100-percent success rate” in her freshman year.

The senior, along with five other students, would go to the bar each weekend, three of them having forms of ID, three without.

While the stamp-back trick has multiple different variations between people attempting to draw the stamp with eyeliner or licking the stamp before pressing it onto someone else’s hand, this particular group ran over to their friends waiting in the car, shielding their newly inked hand as they ran, and pressed the stamp on for a few seconds.

She notes, though, that an underage friend of hers had been trying the trick this semester to no avail.

Said Myers: “I think it’s more interesting and intriguing to them because they can’t get in.”

Published on November 1, 2012 at 1:21 am

Contact Chelsea: cedebais@syr.edu | @CDeBaise124