Fake Oklahoma Covers On Ebay...again.

I always enjoy seeing other specialists calling out crook ebay dealers trying to pull a fast one. Seeing the seedy side has helped me as a buyer, thank you!

The covers shown below were previously contested to ebay by me and other members of the Oklahoma Postal History Society a few years ago. They disappeared for a while, but now they are showing up again:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Five-5-Vin...AOSwK8BbPl~z

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Two-2-Vint...AOSwmSZbPmz2

They started as legitimate circa 1930s stamped envelopes. However, these are horrible, obvious fakes for multiple reasons:

1. Osage County, Oklahoma was not Indian Territory after 1890.

2. There never was a tribal court building, let alone a "Main Tribal Courts Building."

3. The giant corner card (I mean cachet) would never say Oklahoma AND Indian Territory in the 1930s.

4. While both of the penalty hand stamps are different, I have never seen those ever used to designate non-official postal stationary as official. Maybe the Official guys can correct me.

5. Not quite sure what "Indian Reservation Postage Remittal" is and how that applies with tribal police acting under official post office business (per the penalty hand stamp).

Unfortunately, I came across a non-philatelist who actually had some of these. He refused to listen to me when I told him they were fakes. He actually got pretty mad and I had to back down.

ebay is a source of things that would have taken a lifetime (or more) to find before it existed. You just have to know the wheat from the chaff. It just really upsets me when someone is trying to make a buck off my area, the postal history of Osage County, Oklahoma

Great post! Very informative.

Re. point #4, the "corner cards" are definitely fake but the overprints might not be. I've definitely seen overprints like the ones in the second link (they aren't handstamps, they were applied by a canceling machine) to make "official use" penalty mail envelopes out of ordinary stationery. I've never seen the penalty mail overprint type in the first auction link, though; those do look like the result of a rubber stamp and might be bogus.

Strange pricing. $112.95 and 47.95. Who prices like that? Not a major issue but it just adds to the strangeness of these lots.

I agree with the direction codehappy takes.
To look at these items in the sequence of production:
A. The envelopes are certainly real.
B. Many obsolete envelopes from the 1920s and 1930s were converted/salvaged into penalty envelopes by running them through a canceling machine with a penalty slogan, rendering the original postage imprint valueless. These all seem to be real and are documented in the Postal Stationery literature.
C. The "Indian Reservation / Postage Remittal" handstamp may indeed be real also (I lean in that direction). It would be consistent with a penalty envelope use as official mail back to the PO and struck in a magenta color consistent with postal inks.
D. The corner card for the Indian Police is clearly bogus and added recently.

Thank you all for your insights. I knew I could learn something else from you guys!

Arrows2atoms, while these are spurious, when do figure they originated? Is this something created recently or do you believe these may have originated in the period of the envelope's period use?

That "Indian Police" cachet just screams "Fake!!" It's much newer looking than the rest of the covers. And for actual Indian Police (which I assume exist on reservations) what would be the purpose of such cacheted envelopes -- just to look fancy for no particular reason? Someone most likely made up the design and printed it on otherwise modestly interesting envelopes to enhance their value. This is very common, and in fact many First Day Covers from decades back got modern cachets printed on them to make them sell better. It's an easy thing to do for people with questionable ethics.