US -Official Stamps -Forgeries 068-070

Picked up a forgery collection from the stamp auction firm HARMERS INTERNATIONAL and these were in the lot ,so decided to add them to my worldwide collection of forgeries .

There seems to be quite a few forgeries of the State Dept Dollar values, the more dangerous of them seem to be the "Snef" facsimiles, produced in Gremany around the turn of the last century which appear as engraved stamps. Actually quite well made, forutnatly they were overprinted in black with"Facsimile between the arch of Department of and State, as your forgerys are. There are others, probably a later "issue" of the Snef facsimiles that are also overprinted in purple across the lower part of the vignette. I have one of the orignal Snefs that had the overprint scraped off and a fake cancel applied over it and three of the later issue with both overprints. I am not sure that the second op wasn't applied later.

I saw a pretty good forgery made from one of these about two weeks ago. Someone scratched out the word "facsimile", drew in green lines for the background, and added some black dots to even out the color. It wouldn't fool someone really knowledgeable, but it might fool a lot of less experienced collectors, especially in the usual stamp show lighting.

Heres a crop of the full scan of the $20 facsimile above. I've tweaked the image a bit trying to bring out the background running through the TWENTY DOLLs. The bckground lines are verticle from the T to the upright of the D, then horizontal lines show, 4 in the period alone. This is a 1200 dpi scan. Tweaked in Picasa 3.

I have seen eight different forgery types of these stamps, including varieties from the same forgers:

1 - Senf forgery without overprint
2 - Senf with small FACSIMILE overprint
3 - Senf with small overprint + purple FACSIMILE handstamp
4 - Senf with large FACSIMILE overprint
5 - Spiro(?) forgery with bust type #1
6 - Spiro(?) with bust type #2
7 - Kuhl & Co. forgery
8 - Unknown forgery with FALSCH overprint (just the $20)

I will post images if I can figure out how to do so. If anyone has other please let me know so I can include them in my checklist.