A Warning About Souvenir Card Cutouts That Look Like Proofs

I just saw these two items sell on e-bay. At first glance, this first one looks like it could be a 3P2 Roosevelt small die proof or another card proof, but I believe it is just a cutout from a souvenir card worth about $5.


My warning is, if you are not an expert in an area, don't spend big dollars on something that you don't know much about. Can't blame the dealer, completely, because they did offer it "As Is", but that is another red flag that they don't know what it is either, or they do know but didn't want to tell you.




Here is the second one.


This resembles the bi-color essay 286-E8 (pictured below from the Smithsonian Postal Museum), but again I believe the item above is just a cutout from an inexpensive souvenir card.




Photos from ebay unless otherwise noted.

No surprise when I see who the seller is. Been going on for decades.

What is odd to me, though, is that I purchased a handful of lots from nystamps over the years and they were all fine - exactly as expected. None were probably more than $20 ... but then there is something disheartening like this. Perhaps it's such a mill at the place that material is received and then just posted by non-stamp people exactly as it was received and described without any vetting?

Maybe, but there are hundreds of comments on this forum and others over the years about this very thing and the "mistakes" trend in one direction. In the seller's favor.

From 2010:

ttps://www.stampcommunity.org/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=9423&whichpage=1

From 2015:

https://www.stampcommunity.org/topi...PIC_ID=46609