Are Stamp Companies Selling Fake Stamps

I just bought 1000 worldwide stamps from mystic stamp. And when I sorted the stamps, some of the stamps felt like their made from the same Smooth paper without gum even though their from different countries, are the stamps fake or precanceled?

Hi Justinokay. Answer to your question is that I do not believe Mystic would knowingly be selling fake stamps. And why do you throw the word precanceled in with the fakes? You could show us some pictures maybe?

Peter

Sounds like you bought a mix of CTO (Canceled to order) stamps. Are a lot of them from Eastern European nations? If so, those are real stamps.

Peter he probably means CTO stamps

Q/ Do the suspect stamps all have perfectly clean cancels that capture only one corner of the stamp?

Give us some scans of that stamps

If these are modern stamps, the answer is likely simple. Many countries lack the funds, expert personnel, or even the space needed to run their own stamp printing plants and operations, so they contract this function out to private firms in other countries. An example is Stamperija of Lithuania, which prints stamps for Benin (Bénin), Botswana, Burundi, Cape Verde (Cabo Verde), Central African Rep. (Centrafrique), Comoros (Comores), Djibouti, Ethiopia, Guinea (Guinée), Guinea-Bissau (Guiné-Bissau), Haiti, Ivory Coast (Côte D'ivoire), Maldives, Mozambique (Moçambique), Namibia, Niger, Russia, São Tomé and Príncipe (São Tomé E Príncipe), Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Togo, and Uganda.

To reduce costs, these firms commonly use the same paper and production processes for all their different government customers, and in many cases the contractor even creates the stamp designs subject to a particular country's approval. In some cases the resulting stamps are never even sold within a particular country and never see genuine postal use, they are sold only into the collector's market. Some use extremely thin application of a cheap dull gum. The quality or appearance of the gum isn't important for stamps that almost never are affixed to covers or go through the postal system.

Thus, you're likely seeing stamps that the same contractor produced for different country customers.

Thank you and here are some stamps from Korea and Laos from the mix
And also I was just curious why the stamps all feel the same and have no gum

Yes I do suspect those stamps to have clean cancels and are usually on the corners

the cancels are printed in the printers factory, they are not real postmarks!

Welcome. Be CERTAIN to use the search engine above with the keyword MYSTIC and learn more about their prices for common stamps!

Cancelled stamps don't have gum , but what you have are CTO, many of them come with gum, and personally I hate when they come with gum, they curl because of the humidity is not absorbed the same by the gum and the paper.

Justinokay, thank you for posting the pictures. And yes, they are what we call CTO's, Cancelled To Order. only in this case the name is a bit wrong, because these stamps were canceled before they left the printers.
They were never used for the job they were intended to.
But to be honest, I remember as a kid I used to go and buy a series of say Dutch Red Cross stamps at the post office in my town in Holland. I would stick them to a cover and ask the clerk to cancel them lightly and voila, I had a complete series of used stamps. They were really CTO's.
The stamps that you got from Mystic may or may not have been sold by the countries' post office. Please follow KirkS's advise and read about these stamps. You may be paying way too much!

Peter

Thank you