Do People Toss Bad Certifications?

I've wondered if anyone has heard of a situation where a person submits a previously certified stamp (say something with a certification over 10 years old) and the new one comes back noting faults/reperfs etc not found on the original (or a lessor grade). Ignore the new when selling and just mention the favorable/older certification? Probably a very rare occurrence but wonder if anyone has heard of this.

On a similar note, I know PF has a nice searchable certificate database but nothing like that exists on PSE - any particular reason PSE doesn't have a lookup where you can see the opinion?

Certificates are trash-canned all the time [but more prevalent with graded coins]. The PF database can help keep sellers honest.

It occurs to me that you are asking the owner to take it for granted that the second (less favorable) certification is correct.

But with the example that you give - reperfs - I am not sure why the second cert would necessarily be more correct.

Surely, experts can differ, n'est-ce pas?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

This is my biggest fear when I purchase certified stamps. It is always in the back of my mind... especially stamps with older certs. Many of these have been handled and moved around. Stamps are fragile. There is not much you can do as buyer to protect yourself. Guess you can check PF database for recent cert but it would be hard to identify among hundreds or even thousand certs of the particular stamp you are looking at. Of course the old cert would be easy to find at PF since you have it. Not so easy to find new cert on PF website if seller discarded it and you don't have it in hand... this is a problem without a good solution... stabbing stamps may me one way to avoid it but stamp collectors seem to frown on slabbing, unlike the world of sports cards.

Certs are nice but I choose not to play that game. There is too much deception and subjectivity. I go for general appearance and let it go at that. Same goes for grading.

Jack Kelley

Surely one could just ask for another cert to be made if the stamp value is high enough. I doubt that I would buy a stamp for more than $20,00 without an up-to-date cert. But then, you are still left with wondering about the validity of that one too. Hmmm, it might just be safer to see that stamp before buying

Some dishonest dealers will switch certs this way, but most do not. And stamps do sometimes change between certs. Plus certs more than about 20 years old do not usually show condition anyway. Certs are not just about condition, they are also about whether a stamp is genuine or not, so there are some stamps that simply must have a cert unless one is sufficiently knowledgeable in a particular area.

Automated image matching would speed up the process of checking certificates. If a low population stamp without a certificate appears for expertizing, one of the necessary tasks is to look at old available certificates (or auction catalogs) to see if the stamp previously had a certificate. While much faster with on-line databases like the PF repository, or Siegel Auctions the task can still be tedious.

I think that you are asking more than you think you are.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

I disagree. Google's VGG works superbly well, and the University of Oxford and others have done great work applying it in various ways and developing other neural network based classifiers. Stamp images, in the grand scheme, are relatively simple for a software classifier to process, compared to video, images of faces, and others. The training set is not especially large, particularly if you are talking about just the classics for one country, and already exists in databases like Arago, Siegel and the PF's certificate repository.

The situation with new certificates having different opinions compared to old certificates happens all the time. The techniques used by the certifying organisations evolve as does everything else...

If I find certificates that vouch for forgeries (or the other way around), I list them on my site.

I find it astonishing that people are not more critical when they seek expertizing services.
If you send a German stamp to an expert in 18-century US stamps and ask for his opinion, you are asking for trouble...

Chris,
I do not think that technology is the issue; it is participation. You would need the certification organizations to share data. (And beyond that, some sort of permission might also be needed from the original owners of the certification.)

The first step would to be getting all the players to agree upon an image, file and data specification so that data can be consistent and shared seamlessly. I tried to do this for several years but gave up (a meta-data project called 'PIN').

To pull this off would require a level of technically empathy, cooperation, and funding that philately simply does not have at any level. I guess if you could come up with some kind of financial incentive it might get some interest but keep in mind that the history of our hobby is to not share information.
Don

Thanks for the replies ... it's been interesting. As to that second question, I find it odd that the PSE site doesn't have a way to see their opinions. They seem to be the most agressive promoters of stamp grading/authentication ... I would think a searchable database on their site would in their and their customer's best interests.

Don, would you be kind enough to elucidate a bit about your comment?




One of the best things about SCF is not just learning about stamps themselves, but the people, culture, and business around them.

Hi RK1468,
My opinion is that the history of our hobby is to restrict access to information and use it as a commodity. Publishers like Amos, Linn's and Stanley Gibbons (SG) have thrived for decades doing this. Local and national organizations have done the same; they charge for membership to gain access. Heck, some even charge for access once you become a member.

And hobbyists themselves hold their cards tightly to their chests. I have had many hobbyists tell me that they do not share information, several are on this forum. They lurk to learn themselves but when it comes to educating others they choose to remain quiet. I think it is considered a competitive advantage to 'know more than the other guy'. As evidence I would point to threads on this forum where folks inquire about good sources/dealers to buy from, these are often highly viewed but the number of posts are generally very low. One of the uglier truths of our hobby is how many hobbyists have taken years and years of experience and knowledge to the grave with them without passing it on.

It is not a coincidence that if an organization is selling 'Beginner's Handbooks' they might be hesitant to post the same info on their website for free. Not to pick on them but consider the sometimes odd information presentation on the APS website. Say you are a new hobbyists and want to learn more on how to 'get stamps', you go to the APS website and read this page.



Note not a single reference about buying from online auction sites like ebay, Delcampe, Hip, etc? Are we to assume that this might just be an oversight or were there other reasons for this? The APS has a huge advantage over other online stamp selling sites, they can offer great recourse, they should be leveraging their trust.

But say you are a new hobbyist or a more experienced hobbyist with a few dollars to spend this holiday season on some new stamps. You aren't sure what you might want to buy. As bad as ebay might be, it is still ahead of the APS Store in terms of simply browsing the offerings.

People would rather deal with the trash, risk, and silly ebay policies than to spend time on browsing the APS Store. The APS Store offers good searching but only as long as you know exactly what you are looking for.

It is certainly not unusual for an organization to avoid freely distributing information (like plate number info) if they are selling the only catalog with the same info. I think the slow adoption of online technologies is mostly due to the perceived threat to this legacy. They are clinging to restricting information access mostly out of fear of losing their profit centers. Many are only slowly changing because they have to, not because they want to. Please allow me to be perfectly clear, I am not saying that we throw open the information doors and/or that all information should be free. Information will always be an asset.

But in this new digital age, many of our hobby's cornerstone organizations and publishers find themselves becoming obsolete. They were very slow to recognize that they are competing with the internet and that they had to change to meet this new challenge. A few, such as the US Philatelic Classics Society, recognized this paradigm shift and rose to the challenge. They began offering more online information but contemporaneously also offered additional services for its members.

Other organizations and publishers should have followed their lead and looked to increase their online traffic and exposure by making more information freely available. For example, catalog publishers could have been offering free access to basic catalog info years ago to drive more web traffic/views. They could have held back key parts of their intellectual properties (i.e. catalog values), offered 'for pay' services such as powerful search or filtering capabilities, or removed ads by subscription.

My opinion is that the internet is providing a grassroots change mechanism for our hobby; forums like this one are indeed a part of this changing force. The hobby will eventually catch up but I fear that many of the 'old school' publishers and organizations will become much less dominate. In this forum we can find 10 times more recommendations to go the Mystic or WorldStamps website rather than telling folks to go to the Amos or SG website. Either the 'old school' organizations and publishers will figure this out in the next 5-8 years or they risk becoming road kill on the side of this information highway.
Don
APS #094826

At the last Schuyler Rumsey sale, for at least one lot (some 19th century US rarity) this was exactly the case: the stamp came with an older, clean cert and a newer cert that mentioned repairs. Auctioneer, hoping to draw a bid, said "come on folks, you can just run the new cert through the shredder and resell for a 100% profit!" A bit tongue-in-cheek of course, but don't kid yourselves: there are sellers who pull exactly that shenanigan...