I am not to sure about the accuracy of Jim Hill's post because he said that CM's are feeling the top for the perferations that shoud supposedly be there. I have a few fast passes left over from our most recent trip and they are crisp and clean on all four edges. The machines spit them out, you don't tear them off like prize tickets
I just checked some that I had thrown in an old fanny pack and they are smooth as well.
The Jim Hill blurb apparently came from an article in the LA Times about the mouse trying to stop the use of re-entry passes...not Fastpasses per se.
The re-entry passes and rider switch passes (both are similar, printed on the same format) DO indeed have perforations at both the top and the bottom.
IF they have no expiration date on them (which about half of the ones for the Magic Kingdom that I've seen either in person or on Ebay do not---unlike the same type passes at, say, Epcot, which ALWAYS have an expiration date but even it is a month or so in advance), then printing and selling them becomes a relatively easy thing to do. And, even though it's also an easy matter to use a paper cutter with a perforation thingy on it, apparently Disney doesn't think the sellers have thought of that. Yet.
The re-entry passes are printed en masse legitimately by TPTB and handed out in huge stacks at City Hall as compensation for real or imagined damage to a guest's vacation somewhere on Disney property. Last June, we were getting anniversary buttons and next to us a guy came in with a code number they'd given him at
EPCOT for something that had happened to him at Electric Umbrella or another CS, and they gave him a HUGE stack of re-entry passes.
Until they stop practices like the above, then anyone could go through the motions to get these and sell them on Ebay, just like you can get a child swap (rider switch) pass with no intention of using it and sell those, too. I do think, however, many of these auctions are run by current or past CMs; too many originate in Florida. But, there are many sellers of HUGE amounts of these located in the midwest, New York, etc. They have to be getting them somewhere...or making their own.
My question is, there are SO many of these totally legitimate passes in circulation that have no expiration (issued as I described above by Guest Relations), that I don't see HOW Disney can deny their use and not make a lot of legitimate users of these very unhappy. It all boils down to trying to find some middle ground where they don't upset any guests---and that's totally impossible, so ?????
Just an FYI (and my two cents regarding the matter).
Scott in MO