Comment by dfox
3 hours ago
You are assuming that the forgers care about the machine readable part at all. Vast majority of forged EU ID cards I have seen are trivially recognizable by the fact that the MRZ contains something that kinda-sorta matches the human readable part, but is syntactically invalid and has wrong checksums.
I imagine a good forger would add wear marks to the barcode so it doesn’t scan for a plausible reason.