Possible Machin Forgery

Hello everyone, I have a 24p Machin which appears to be a forgery. It has 11.5 square type perfs that resemble perfs you might see on older Canadian coil stamps and not like any Machins I have seen. Do Machin forgeries exist and if so, is this one?



*** Moved by Staff to a more appropriate forum. ***

Yes, Machin forgeries exist, and yes, this is one. More than that, I'll leave to the Machin experts.

You can tell the 24p forgery quite easily by the perforations.
The real stamp was perf 15x14 while the forgery was perf 11.
Also there is a more flat appearance.

A nice find mhc99

Londonbus1

I just read the thread in the testing area so will add to that here:

The forgery shown by mhc99 above is from 1993. Colour-Chestnut.

A year later a second Class Bright Blue forgery appeared on the market in Booklet form. This was a much better forgery but the difference of colour, paper and the blurred iamge of the Queen were tell-tale signs. The Phosphor band was simulated and did not show up under UV lamp.

In 2005, 1st Class Gold forgeries were also found in booklets. The stamp itself was blurred and dull and the Queen's portrait was dark.

Both the above forgeries, unlike the 24p, had very good perforations and Ellipses. Both can be found on ebay and the like from time to time.

Nottherealthingbus1

Here is some more info :

24p Machin Forgery

In the late 1980's, when stamps started to be sold in retail outlets other than post offices, the scope for forgers to produce stamps was immense. The origin of the 24p forgery is unclear but most were distributed and used in or around London.

It is believed that the stamps were sold to small businesses and corner shops, and generally any places where stamps could be sold and distributed without many questions being asked. Because of the low profit margins offered to retailers by Royal Mail, disreputable small shops were all too eager to snap up the forgeries at huge discounts.

The stamps in themselves were very well printed and to the naked eye an ordinary user would not tell the difference. They were let down immensely by the perforations which were 11x11 rather than the usual 14x15. This made them instantly noticeable as fake to all post office staff, which then caught the attention of the media. The paper was also of a very bad quality and lacked the glossy finish of normal stamps. Had the paper and perforation issues been resolved, many experts believe that the forgeries would have remained undetected. Obviously the distribution network for the stamps was also badly organised and raised many questions as to their origin.

Not much is known about the forger or the printing methods. Several arrests were made, and certainly the printing stopped, but no official announcements were ever made, probably at the request of the post office. People interested in this subject may find other details readily available on the internet, but for legal reasons I am not prepared to speculate. I believe one such philatelic magazine did once attempt to publish a full article on this subject, and its writers go down in history as the first stamp collectors to be sued for slander!
Mark Steele

taken from : http://www.thetenoclockshow.co.uk/c...view/142/43/

I have a copy of the forgery used on piece... somewhere, I will see if I can find it and put up a scan.

Note: Bumped thread from 2011

20th May 2018

Why would they forge a 24p stamp and not a 1st class ?

Those perfs look like they were made with a sewing machine.

24p was the rate for 1st class at the time, so these are 1st class stamps.

Of course !!!! why didn't I think of that.

there must have been a pretty huge number of those used. I found one in a bag of kiloware at about this time. Of course most would have been binned along with the worthless real ones!

If it is line perforation 11.75 then it was made by an old Rosback stroke perforator.

Here is a machin I am pretty sure is a forgery. There is no colour errors listed for this, so must be a forgery. Apart from the colour it looks perfect and would fool most. It fooled me.
2000 Millenium 1st class SG2124.
The 2nd scan is how it should look, the left stamp..

Dynamode, I think that's just heavily sun-bleached. I've seen the likes of this machin before.

steevh. Possibly. I have had it for at least 15 years. I cannot remember if it came in the post, or amongst a huge lot (binbag full) of machins I obtained. Never did get round to sorting them. Probably never will, I am not a fan of them.