Fingerprints used in manufacturing/packaging

[Cody515]

Good morning,

I came across a submitted latent lift this week that was a little extraordinary, and thought it was worth sharing with the fingerprint community:

Last week, I received one latent lift with a remarkable latent print, one of the best I've come across. Something about the print struck me - it looked familiar and "too good to be true." While reviewing the information from the latent lift, I realized that the print had been lifted from a Nike shoebox. Several months ago, while still in training, I was working a vehicle with another latent print examiner, and the car was full of Nike boxes. One particular box, a black box, caught my attention in that what appeared to be a fingerprint was visible from a distance. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the print had been placed upon the box as part of the packaging. A little research revealed through various chat boards and Google search results, this was perhaps some sort of authentication for a certain line of Air Jordans.

Flash forward to last week, I began to suspect that this "latent print" was actually a lift of the shoebox. I Google searched a few keywords, something like "Nike shoebox fingerprint" and one of the images brought up the fingerprint on the box. I uploaded the image into our onscreen comparison software, compared it to the submitted lift, and determined it was overwhelmingly an identification.

Upon bringing it to my supervisor's attention, we contacted Nike headquarters. We received a call back from their Global Investigations department. According to them, the print was "a promotional item on the 2012 Air Jordan shoes. It is a lacquered print on the box (Michael Jordan's thumb print)."

I have attached images of the latent, the image I found online and compared, and another image of the print on the box, also found online. I thought it was worth sharing with the community to make other examiner's aware. It also may be interesting to run a latent vs. latent search in AFIS systems to see if this has been input as a genuine latent in any older cases. We did the same in our unit and it fortunately did not. If anyone would like a high-res scan of the latent, I have that available as well.


Cody Rowlett
Latent Print Unit
Tennessee Bureau of Investigation

[Boyd Baumgartner]

That print pops up all over the place. It used to be the first one that came up when you google'd 'fingerprint' around 2007-ish and it was print quality as well.

In addition to finding it on shoe boxes, you can find it on:

Hip Hop CD's

Akon-Konvicted-CD.jpg

Fingerprint Books

Habers-Fingerprint.jpg

King County's 2013 Annual Report cover page

KCRA.jpg

the giveaway is that vertical crease at the base of the print and the very lambda-esque delta

[rsc55]

Yup, I've gotten that print submitted as evidence before. The CSI must have thought they found gold when they didn't even have to powder the box! Luckily, they submitted a digital photograph of it, so there were quite a few of dead give-a-ways that this was not actual evidence. I, too, googled the Air Jordan shoe boxes and printed out the same images as case documentation to explain why I wasn't going to do anything further with it.

For funsies though, I did end up running the print through FBI as a training exercise. No hit, for the curious.

At least it's a fun story to bring out at parties