The USPS is unable to do much about it because it’s hard to prove that the stamps are fake until you actually get them. Stamp dealers have been selling stamps in bulk for less than face value for a long time, stamp dealers sell to collectors and the stamps sold at or below face value are usually because they are very common stamps that aren’t worth much more than face value and the dealer just needs to get them sold to generate revenue and make room for new inventory. Other people run legitimate business operations buying stamps in bulk to earn large amounts of credit card points or cashback or even collect on introductory credit card offers, and then resell the stamps at or slightly below face value to recoup their cost, and then their profit is made through the bonuses they get from manufactured spend. All of this is to say that just because stamps are sold below face value doesn’t mean they’re counterfeit. However, after purchasing stamps it is fairly easy to determine whether they’re fake or not if you’ve been a stamp collector for a while, but the fake stamps can be similar enough to the real ones to fool anyone who doesn’t look very closely or pull out a magnifying glass.
USPS machines detect the phosphor tagging on the stamp in order to locate the stamp on the envelope and apply a postmark, so if the counterfeiters add phosphor to the fake stamps it will already fool the machines, and unless a postal employee looks at the stamp closely it will most likely fool them as well. I’ve spoken with many other collectors who have located fake stamps on mail and when purchasing them online and found that they usually have different paper, less clean perforations, and printing that is not as crisp when compared to the real versions of the stamps.
So what does the USPS do about it? There’s unfortunately not a whole lot that can be done to stop it. They can request that the USPS Postal Inspectors or FBI investigate it and shut down the websites where these fake stamps are being sold, but as soon as one website is closed down, another can be easily built and online quickly. These stamps are most often being produced overseas and imported to the United States in the same process that legitimate products are being imported. The US Customs officers inspect a lot of the cargo entering the country and find tons of counterfeit products every year, which are all confiscated and destroyed, and I would assume that they’ve found counterfeit postage stamps as well. The reality is that there are far too many goods imported into the US every day for customs to inspect every item, and as a result of that, fake stamps enter the country the same way that fake shoes, handbags, watches, medications, cosmetics, and consumer electronics do.
So how do the counterfeiters ship it to customers with real street addresses, etc? Most commonly they use a freight forwarder. Freight forwarding services are common for orders of imported goods, sellers pack individual orders up and ship them all together (think a full truckload of various products) to the US. That full truckload travels all together to the US and is unloaded at a port. Once they arrive here, a company will scan each package and apply a USPS shipping label to each of them to deliver within the country. The forwarding companies don’t know what’s in each package, they just know that the items were ordered online and have people to get delivered to.
Additionally, a lot of times when people are running shady businesses like this they’ll put down fake addresses for return addresses, etc. Or other times, they’ll put down legitimate addresses that belong to a random business, like a grocery store or a pizza shop.
The USPS recently announced that mail bearing counterfeit postage will be treated as abandoned, but I’m curious to see how they expect to actually implement this. I’m sure there are some people who are using fake stamps to defraud the USPS, but I think that the vast majority of people using fake stamps to send mail don’t even know that they’re fake because they’ve been deceived by criminals posing as sellers of legitimate stamps. And then in addition to that, if the stamps are tricking USPS machines it’s even harder to do anything about it.
Bottom line- Customers are being deceived into purchasing counterfeit stamps, there are several crimes that people producing the fake stamps should get charged with, but sadly, there is very little that the USPS can actually do about it.
I will be buying only from the post office.
also if you read my post you would of seen I posted a side by side comparison of both the authentic and fake ones. Both of which have the same date. most people can’t tell counterfeits unless they are avid stamp collectors. I had never had any before so I didn’t know what to look out for. It wasn’t until I did more research I was able to tell. The first sign of them being fake was the lack of scratch and sniff smell. I contacted the seller and they gave the excuse of them being old so the scent was gone. I sort of believed it but also still thought it was weird because the authentic ones I had still smelled. Either way it was an honest mistake on my part and I can correctly identify fake stamps now because of this experience.
