Counterfeit Forever Stamps

Pretty sure the Country of Origin of a counterfeit stamp would show as USA and as such would not have a tariff applied. They're lying already about the stamp, lying about the CoO is easy.

Except that the limit is $800 per person per day. They would have to schedule the multiple $799 shipments to arrive only once per day. If two or more arrived on the same day (as would normally happen with shipping containers), the importer would have to pay the tariff on the additional packages past the first, if I am reading this correctly.
https://www.cbp.gov/trade/basic-imp...ommerce/faqs
Of course they could possibly make up fake names for 1000 different persons as recipients at the same address and possibly get around this.

More generally, how does this timing dilemma impact ordinary consumers? If someone purchases (places an order and pays for) $500 worth of goods on Monday, and another $500 on Wednesday from different overseas sellers, expecting them to arrive on different days, but they happened to arrive at the port on the same day, does the receiver now unexpectedly owe a $$$ tariff on the excess past the $800 daily limit?

Is there any data on whether the UK barcoded postage is working to stop lost revenue from counterfeits? I saw an article from last year about how the same culprits of the U.S. forgeries are making easy work out of the new barcodes, but at least Royal Mail is able to scan and easily identify counterfeits from legitimate postage.

Given whatever data Royal Mail has on the success of the program, I'd be curious to see USPS use what was learned from Royal Mail towards ending the trade of counterfeit stamps. There are only so many USPIS agents that can comb through listings of fake junk stamps (and even then, I am sure they are working on things of a more urgent nature).

Fake

https://www.ebay.com/itm/389575105470

Counterfeit being sold as a printing error.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/296006168578?

I just found out that every stamp design issued in 2025 has CF, except for the following:

• CVP15, CVP16 (vending machine issues)
• 6024 – Putting a Stamp on the American Experience (released in a prestige booklet, so not worthwhile to CF)
• 6031 – Luna Moth (non-machinable surcharge so low market demand)
• 6043 – James "Jimmy" Carter, U.S. President (maybe because it has not entered the market yet)

It's not surprising, but it is disappointing.

It's now to the point that if I purchase postage locally, I won't touch FOREVER stamps. I will only buy denominated stamps.

Looking through the U.S. Specialized, I don't have time to become an expert in modern issues to try and differentiate between the real and the fake. Some stamps have many dozens of different listed counterfeits, and online sites are rife with them.

I took a close look at a few reference counterfeits at the recent MSDA show, and there is NO WAY a layperson, postal clerk, or even intermediate collector would be able to tell the stamps are fake.

It's not a war I'm willing to wage.

It's like many other areas of collecting, if one does not put in the time and effort to study the area one will never know it. I can see why many will not want to spend the time in this area; I suspect that only the collectors already interested in fakes and forgeries will really get into it.

Updated: Every stamp design issued in 2025 has CF, except for the following:

• CVP15, CVP16 (vending machine issues)
• 6024 – Putting a Stamp on the American Experience (released in a prestige booklet, so not worthwhile to CF)
• 6031 – Luna Moth (non-machinable surcharge so low market demand) ~> CF already in the market as of Mar 2026
• 6043 – James "Jimmy" Carter, U.S. President (maybe because it has not entered the market yet)

March 5, 2026. San Diego man arrested for selling $6 million in counterfeit postage.
https://www.uspis.gov/california-ma...stamp-scheme

Now let's do the math. $6 million in profit is probably at least $12 million in face value. The article reports "Since October 2024, U.S. postal inspectors have seized counterfeit stamps worth more than $16 million." So this recent bust is by far the biggest catch in the last year and a half, yet $16 million is still a drop in the bucket out of the $1 billion of losses annually, estimated by Wayne Youngblood, as one example,
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2...usps-revenue

Great that they caught someone, but they need to do a lot more to have any meaningful impact on the problem.

It needs to be solved at a political/diplomatic level, not at the local LE level. Whack-a-mole is a waste of time.

Won't happen. It's been a large-scale problem years under successive administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, and nothing's been done. And even if the flow from China were to be stopped, there's nothing to stop the criminals from just setting up shop domestically.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the only way out of this problem is to stop the use of Forever stamps on mail (and, perhaps, all stamps in general) in the not-so-distant future. Switch to one-time use codes as have been trialed in the Netherlands. If we really must have them, then they can be sold at a post office and applied by a postal clerk.

Seriously, the financial impact of these counterfeits to USPS' bottom line is not worth keeping stamps around any longer. I'd rather have the USPS around, sans stamps, than having neither stamps nor the USPS.

Highly unlikely to happen.

They would have to allow redemption of existing postage stamps en masse for either refund or credit against future services, and that would be a bookkeeping nightmare.

It wouldn't be easy for sure, but it's an easier technical problem to solve than the counterfeiting problem. Didn't Royal Mail just deal with this a couple years ago when they devalued all of the non-barcoded stamps?

I can just imagine the lawsuits if they tried to devalue the outstanding stamps.