USPS Oig Report On Counterfeit Stamps 16 June 2026

The whole point is that relevant is now in the eyes of the beholder. But I still don't see it happening. This problem is about number 10000 on the list of current issues to be addressed.

"yet it gives postal investigators exact details about when and where the package was shipped from, which they could then monitor for future shipments and nab the seller. Sounds easy, or maybe this only works in the movies."

It doesn't give the shipper's address, just the PO they took it to. And again, how do they know what packages to track?

"They just have not done it. It's also not true that the USPS can't identify counterfeits in the mail stream. They can and do. That's how the have put a number on lost revenue."

What they likely have done is sample some mail and then take those statistics to get an estimate. Or they could have simply compared the number of stamped letters sent and compared it to the number of stamps sold and found more letters are being mailed than stamps sold and decided the difference is the counterfeit quantity. Or a combination of those methods. It doesn't mean they have a large scale ability to ID fakes.

edited to add I hadn't yet read down to what revcollector wrote 13 hours ago of a similar nature.

I did ask on another chat board with a long thread about the UK and was told that the number of counterfeits was down since they introduced bard codes.

>> it gives postal investigators exact details about when and where the package was shipped from, which they could then monitor for future shipments and nab the seller. Sounds easy, or maybe this only works in the movies.

> It doesn't give the shipper's address, just the PO they took it to. And again, how do they know what packages to track?

Correct, just the post office they took the packages to, and which days and approximate times they visited. The federal government law enforcement has buckets of tools for basic surveillance and data science to identify probable suspects.

Either the seller prints the bar code and tracking number from home, or they have it printed at the post office, so there's going to be digital fingerprints and/or video from the post office counter where they dropped off the packages.

To summarize:
- e-bay provides the FBI a list of USPS tracking numbers of all packages containing products sold as discount postage.
- FBI obtains from USPS the date/time and location where each package was sent from.
- The list is sorted to find clusters of which cities and post offices where the most suspected packages were sent from.
- For each of the most frequent locations in this list, are there any other noticeable patterns (e.g. package drop offs every Monday at lunch time). If so, review Post Office security cameras to visibly identify a potential suspect. LE does what LE does to get a search warrant and pulls the the suspect aside for questioning the next time they drop off a load of packages.
- Correlate package drop off days with cell phone records to identify further potential suspect's patterns and be on the lookout for them.

Obviously I am not in law enforcement and I am oversimplifying this, but the police do this type of thing all the time for tracking down major burglary suspects. I know we don't want to live in a surveillance state or to shake down Etsy craft sellers that drop off sketchy looking packages. But those video cameras are plastered all over the post offices for a reason, presumably to prevent crime and investigate crimes, and if a $350 million theft of service is not a crime, I don't know what is.

This won't catch the professionals, or all $350M in one shot, but at this point it looks like there are a lot of copy cats and opportunists that may not be as careful and are more easily caught. One arrest publicized every year or two is not enough of a deterrent, but multiple frequent arrests all around the country could have an impact.

It's a big problem and will need a multi-pronged approach towards both the buyers and the sellers, with assistance from mainstream news media and social media.

Sorry to hijack the thread and rant. I know the issue has been discussed ad naseum in other threads and I am late to the party. Yet with all the good ideas, nothing appears to be happening to solve the problem and it just keeps getting worse.

> I did ask on another chat board with a long thread about the UK and was told that the number of counterfeits was down since they introduced bard codes.

England and those Shakespearian bard codes.
90% reduction in counterfeits is what I heard.

I think they attacked the problem before it got too out of hand. The issues that UK had with the rollout and exchange process would be amplified greatly here because of the size of the US market, and the great flood of counterfeits since 2022 when UK launched the exchange process.

IMHO there are too many counterfeited stamps today (both in number of different issues, and total stamps in customer's possession) to reliably do an exchange of old Forever postage for new barcoded postage. Unless they cut their losses and bought out (exchanged) each customer's counterfeit postage at face value. Otherwise I predict too many false positives and false negatives in the validation process which would be a PR fiasco. No good solution, but the longer they wait, the worse it gets.