Fake Columbians Flooding The Market?

I have a sneaking suspicion that there are a large number of high value ($1 - $5) used Columbians that are forgeries. For one thing, there seems to be more of these being listed than ever before. Just doing an ebay search today for #242 brings up over 130 results. And check out the perfs on this one:
http://www.ebay.ca/itm/nystamps-US-...AOSwanRXgqQG
I encourage everyone who buys a Columbian these days to get it expertly certified.

The perfs on this one look suspicious too. A lot of tiny hair threads emerging from the upper perforations notably.
http://www.ebay.ca/itm/US-242-2-Col...AOSwzJ5XabFa

this one with clearly cut and uneven perfs
http://www.ebay.ca/itm/242-VF-USED-...AOSwvFZW8Juz

The last one has been reperforated at top, but they all appear genuine. The perfs on the Columbians can look pretty funky at times.

does re perforation make a stamp fake ? of course an honest seller should inform potential buyers about it and adjust the price if deliberately don't it's a fraud.

I will buy a high value re perforated stamps if the asking price value is the same as a space filler , I'm mainly interested by the engraving .

I don't check too much the one you link, but Colombian are quite easy to check if they are fake or not , you need only expert for know if they have been repair or modify

I'm not sure that having 130 search results means anything, either. High value Columbians, like Zeppelins C13-C15, are in the unusual class of stamps that are common, yet always expensive. It has been observed by others that prices of Zeppelins do not appear to follow the law of supply and demand strictly, and I think high value Columbians are the same. They were costly when issued, and every successive generation appears to have succeeded in asking and getting a high price because the market will bear it, not necessarily based on supply.

In the case of a Columbian, reperforating makes it altered but not fake.

In the Age of eBay and the other online auctions and the IRL auctions and the dealer websites and and and ... what would we even mean by "flooding the market?"

Perhaps, particularly in the case of eBay, we need to have a concept like "passive listings", eg, things that are listed, but that no one actually expects to sell any time soon.

Imagine if you had every dealer price list issued in 1955 on your desk, except that every stamp appeared as many times as that dealer had that stamp in inventory, eg, if s/he had ten $1 Columbians, every single one was listed individually, even if they were all of a similar grade & price.

eBay searches let us see things "for sale" that were always "for sale" but will never (eg in a period of months or years) be sold.

In that context, 130 listings can be more of a blip than a flood.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

What I am seeing is some "photoshopping" going on here. In the bottom photo (the shot of the back) there is a sizable crease on the bottom right quadrant of the stamp, which is made hard to see by the brightening of the image. Once you locate it, you can see it on the lower left quadrant of the front photo of the stamp.

I don't believe it is just Columbiams which are "flooding the market" these days. We are a dying breed. As disinterested heirs funnel dad's/grandpa's collection to auction, dealers and eBay, with fewer buyers we will see more material out there.

Reperforation and regumming remain issues on popular classic stamps, but at least they are "the devil you know." Genuine but altered, I guess...

Jcpalerno, you express my tough . I stop collecting us stamps they are overpriced . Not that I can't afford them . But it's burning money.

When I collected stamps as a kid, my local stamp store offered a choice of really commons stamps. The store rarely had Columbians over the 10 cent denomination. This is reflected in the collections I see from that era, most stamps are defective because that was all anyone outside of a major city found in the local market. Better stuff went to auction, and there were lots of little places putting out auction catalogs. If I subscribed to enough auction catalogs from around the country, I could get a pretty good selection to choose from. I'd spend a lot of time to build a nice collection like that.

Right now there are 200 on ebay of Scott #240 (50 cent Columbian). Completed auction prices range from $11 to $900 depending on condition. Yep, prices are higher for the better material. They are also lower for the poor quality material. I can buy an average copy of #240 on ebay for $20, less than what I would have paid in the 1970's.

And what makes collecting more exciting now is I have enough choices that I can be really particular. It is not good enough to fill the spaces on the page, I'd like to do it with matching cancellations. I can shop for variants. etc.

So for me the 130 copies of #242 means I can find the copy that matches my collection best.

I am not sure which listing was referred above as "Photoshopped". None of the images appear to have been processed more than straightening and cropping. The us_stamp_shop listing has too much color saturation because of the scanner used. Additional work in Photoshop (Levels, Brightness/Contrast and Hue/Saturation would be needed to bring the shade back to something close to actual. It is fully described including the crease.

Few sellers bother to fix levels or saturation. Certainly not nystamps, a volume operation.

It should be noted that eBay Condition Description is no longer displayed unless an Item Condition is specified. In addition to not displaying the Item Condition, the choices New or Used leave a lot to be desired. A "New" stamp would be a shrink wrapped sheet. An uncancelled stamp separated from a sheet would be "Unused", but eBay removed the term as an Item Condition choice several years ago. It is quite possible that a seller may have filled in the Condition Description in the Sell Your Item (SYI) form or used a third party tool without being realizing that eBay would not display it.

It appears that eBay has no interest in enabling sellers to describe stamp condition.

c'mon - a seller has all the space they need to descibe the stamp condion (along with their terms. Just because there might not be a specific box labled "Condition" doesn't mean a condition description can not be entered.

Yes there are a lot of altered Columbians, but as others have said, they are altered, not fake. And of course a higher % odf the altered ones end up on eBay instead of in one of the better traditional auctions, so if you only look on eBay it will appear worse than it is.

First you claim the law of supply and demand are not being followed. Then you only only refer to supply. Yes supply is enough to not be scarce, but you fail to realize that demand is high. The market would not bear high prices if the demand were not high relative to the supply.