Gonna Call This One As A Fake

I'm seeing perforation notches at the top and left, and the really dry print doesn't look like it was from the early prints.

The scribbled date looks like April 8, 1865?

If so, too late to be a legit imperf.

Jim

http://www.ebay.com/itm/WCstamps-U-...AOSwnF9Y6XC9

Hi Jim

It might be dated 8 April 1869, but I suppose might very well be 1865 not really important.

Too bad SCOUSSC does not address trimming these examples.

How do you call the centering?

Stampmaster

Hi Stampmaster,

Going to call the centering "trying to look like a poorly trimmed imperf."

Ha ha

Jim

It's a fake. Wrong paper, bad margins. "Two Margin Syndrome", which is that two adjoining margins are very wide and two are tiny or non existent. Anytime a stamp has margins such as these it is all but guaranteed to be fake. In addition, the margins themselves were trimmed using a series of small cuts in order to leave the biggest margins when removing the perfs. No one using the stamp would ever cut an imperf that way, three to five cuts per side.

Not even close to his worst!

Check out lot 272836773433 and look at the top left corner

Well named WCstamps. This one belongs in the WC.

But it's only listed at 10% of the catalog value!

It's got to be a bargain!



Jim

Another one for the WC.


http://www.ebay.com/itm/WCstamps-U-...AOSwpP9Y6W~r

For future browsers in this topic, this is the stamp that was mentioned by Staterevs:



Note the "incompletely trimmed" perforation holes at the top left.

It does seem that some ebay sellers may want to include a visit to their local optometrist when they are next out on errands.

Jim

Bart has highlighted another example of a stamp with two nice margins but with two very close margins.

Again, this stamp shows evidence of perforation "holes" in the tiny margins, indicating that this stamp was trimmed.

The end result is that an occasional listing is maybe a mistake in identification, but numerous, similar listings are indicative of something else.

(sorry, but I believe in saving for future viewers the images that we all see now, but which will be gone in a few months.)

Jim

The ebay seller who has been the subject of this thread has removed both the R2a and the R92a after I wrote to him and referred him to his thread! A small victory in the war against altered stamps. Next Thursday (Sept 14), I will mention this episode when I lead a course entitled Detecting Philatelic Forgeries" the day before MILCOPEX 2017 opens. This course is sponsored by the American Philatelic Society and is specifically designed to examine revenue forgeries that were philatelically inspired. Both the American Revenue Association and the State Revenue Society will have a major presence at MILCOPEX.

I hope you will try to impress upon your students the fact that not every nick in an imperf stamp is the remnant of a perforation. I agree with the conclusion on these three stamps but not how we got there. I think only one of these stamps may actually show remnants of perforations.

All of them show remnants of perforations to the trained eye. But I agree that stamps that have been torn against a steel rule or similar object can show a variety of nicks that are not from perforations.

The trained eye. You are so funny.

Hi,

Just curious:

Are you insinuating that an individual that daily looks at and studies in great detail pretty much nothing but revenue stamps, for many long decades, and has available the most detailed and comprehensive collection of reference materials existent, and has easy access to state-of-the-art diagnostic tools, and can tap into the collected knowledge and experience of dozens of other experts in this area, as well as no doubt personally owning a considerable collection of revenue stamps, would not, by now, become very skilled at recognizing fakes from genuine, silk papers from watermarked papers, reperfs, and most other manner of varieties of these particular stamps?

Or what...?

Jim

Jim,

Just to remind you, we are talking about perforation remnants. Not watermarks, silk paper, or reperfs. Now, if your laundry list of resources and qualifications is what it takes to recognize a trimmed stamp. How are you able to do it?