Scary Good Counterfeits?

Just saw these listed on ebay



I believe they have to be counterfeit, though they look very convincing.

Scan of a genuine:



One feature I see is that the right leg of the A in TOBACCO is below the baseline while on the genuine both legs of the A line up.

Thoughts from our experts here?

I have never heard of any counterfeits of this issue except the counterfeit inverted overprint. Catalog values for this series have barely changed in the last 50 years (and I mean barely, a mint set cats about $205 today and was about $165 in 1963), so any counterfeits would likely have been produced long ago when that was relatively a lot more money and be well known by now. And the tax was declared unconstitutional fairly quickly so there probably would not have been time to produce any for defrauding the government.

Were the overprints typographic? Could not the residue from a paper jam have led to some debris tilting the 'A'?

The problem here is that the 40-cent and 80-cent were never overprinted TOBACCO SALE TAX.
Seller identifies them as "unlisted".

1typesetter, why don't you give us the URL to the lot?

Peter

Talked with Eric Jackson today and he indicates that the fraudulent overprints on the 40¢ and 80¢ in the current ebay offering match the 2¢ invert in his reference collection (for which there is a warning in the Scott U.S. Specialized).

I am somewhat surprised that the 40¢ and 80¢ have not turned up in the philatelic record. The fraudulent 2¢ invert overprint was known at least in the 1960's (50 years ago!), when I.I. Silverman wrote about these philatelic fantasies.

This is certainly strange. So 1Typesetter, you may be the first to have identified a counterfeit that may have been around for 50 years.

A new trend is to overprint relatively cheap stamps to increase their value to collectors. We are seeing quite a bit of that with the feature that the overprint is ink jet printed. On source is actually a print shop in Shanghai which has been selling on ebay. Something to watch for when buying.

Faking overprints is an old story, but what is the point here to do it now? This is hardly a hot area with a big ready market, even among revenue collectors. Presumably this was done back then. Perhaps after the invert was found to be readily proven fake they didn't bother putting these out there to any great extent.

Given that this is identifiable as the same fraudulent overprint as the 2¢ invert and further that the 2¢ invert has been known for more than 50 years, isn't it safe to assume that these have been around for many decades. I admit it is curious that we have not seen a report about the 40¢ and 80¢ before.

To all those that have been constantly monitoring this particular post with great anticipation of the next entry, please see below for another variety.



Jim

Same forgery as the two above. Look at the A in TOBACCO, the angle and the bottom serifs match.

Yup, never claimed otherwise.



Jim

At least it is not a new one!

I was making the point that this forgery was created by the same people who created the ones that started the thread, not that you claimed otherwise.