Early Saturday morning, a Provo Police task force arrested two men for forgery in an undercover sting operation led by Officer Derryl Jones. The arrests came after months of invested police work in an effort to stop the duo from continuing to manufacture fake beard cards. Posing as a BYU student wanting to avoid shaving before every testing center midterm, Officer Jones contacted the perpetrators, Cory Davenport and Jake Elliot, to rendezvous for the purchase. At the moment of the exchange, the rest of the task force revealed themselves, arresting Davenport and Elliot in the act.

“This bust was definitely a win for Provo,” said Jones. “The black market here is full of some wild stuff, but these fakes are amongst the worst of it. It’s a relief to know we got scum like that off of our streets, and I feel honored to be making our city a safer place through work like this.”

Beard cards, ID cards that allow for BYU students to sport beards that are otherwise not permissible, are hugely popular in the Utah County document forgery scene. Similar to how fake IDs allow for underaged users to attempt entry into 21+ establishments, fake beard cards allow for bearded users to exist on BYU’s campus without being reported. Sources have confirmed that, as of this year, document-forgers in the area have even shifted to producing more fake beard cards than fake IDs.

Davenport and Elliot seem to be only the first in what locals are hoping to be a trail of many arrests to come. However, officers on the beat have their doubts.

“They find a loophole and exploit it,” said Sergeant Hyrum of the Provo document fraud squad, which hasn’t arrested anyone since its formation last year. “We don’t know how they do it. It’s tricky business, these beards.”

The counterfeit-producing pair have since been charged with the manufacturing of false identification and are currently being held in the Honor Code Office on a $50,000 bond.