Is This Too Good To Be True?

From and ebay auction that came in yesterday...
the R82 is on piece so I scanned the back also. All are very nice and clean.

You don't say what they are asking. If they want $10K each, they're over priced.

I know we'd like to see large margins on these imperf first issues. Is there any way to tell whether perfs have been trimmed? R74, R82, R84. R96. I got the stamps in yesterday, putting them in the collection tonight. If the R84 is truly an "a" it's quite pricey. Regardless of what they are, I love these big first issues and I'm very happy!

The first two are genuine imperfs; the shade, impression, and cancel are correct for both. The last two are trimmed from perforated stamps, the shade is wrong on the $2.50, and 1869 is far too late for a legitimate imperf to have been used. The paper will be wrong as well since it is so late a printing. The $10 is cut to shape and again, 1867 is far too late a usage. The paper will certainly be wrong here as well.
I hope you did not put much money into the bottom two stamps, they really have almost no value.

thank you so much! I figured trimming was possible (probable) with at least those two. I didn't count them as genuine when figuring my bid.So what is the O. & Co. cancel? Preprinted cancel of a steamship line?

Great cancel on the first one. It's not one I have. Without context, attributing the company is virtually impossible. There were zillions of "XXX & Co." cancels, and without a city or state, or a matching example on document, it's going to be difficult.

By Feb 1863 that Passage Ticket stamp might have been used by almost any type of company to pay a tax on almost any kind of document. It is a printed cancel, and a nice one, but as stated above it could be from practically anywhere and the company might have done almost anything. About the only assumption possible is that the company was willing to spend some money for the printed cancels, which could have easily been done for next to nothing by a clerk with a pen and ink.

of course it is a shame that someone would devalue a "c" stamp in this way. They are really nice otherwise. My wife was really impressed by them and believe me, that's rare.

Alas, people have been altering stamps for about 150 years now.