Two thousand Site Safety Training cards just stopped working across New York City job sites.

The Department of Buildings invalidated the cards after tracing them to an alleged fraud scheme, according to ENR — the same scheme behind last week's Brooklyn indictment of a company that sold fake OSHA and DOB safety cards for around $500 apiece, no class required.

We covered that indictment when it landed. What's new is the scale DOB itself is now confirming: not a handful of forged cards from one bad actor, but 2,000 credentials citywide that the department has pulled from its system entirely.

Here's why that number matters on a Monday morning. Local Law 196 requires every worker on a major NYC construction site to carry SST training — 40 hours for a supervisor, 10 for a worker — before they can badge in. If your crew has a card issued or renewed anytime in the last few years and you can't point to the class it came from, DOB's database is the only way to know if it's now void.

A void card isn't a paperwork problem. It's a stop-work problem. Under Local Law 196, a site caught with untrained or fraudulently-credentialed workers can get shut down cold, and the GC holding the contract eats the delay — not the worker who bought the card.

So if you're a GC or a super, this is the week to run your crew list against DOB's SST database rather than trust the laminate in someone's wallet. It takes ten minutes and it's free. Finding out on an inspector's tablet costs a lot more than that.

The fraud case itself — two individuals and a company indicted for manufacturing and selling counterfeit site safety and OSHA cards — was first reported by the Brooklyn District Attorney's office; DOB's card invalidation was first reported by ENR.