Stamp Stolen During Appraisal - Be Wary

Opinion.
Something doesn't ring true here, an collection appraisal over, he takes one stamp and says he will throw it away.?
I would have expected the person to yell or make some sort of commotion,
I guess he and her would have been alone in the office?

After he takes one stamp, how does she then accurately describe it?

I have experienced both sides of human nature, just Wednesday, I drove up to the City, on the way back I stopped to help a fellow jump start his Mercedes (bragging rights for my Ford), then 200Km further on, I stopped to help a fellow that ran out of gas, I drove to the nearest town, filled up his jerry can with diesel ($30) and drove back, He had no cash on him, I just said "drop the money into PO Box 47, if you are passing"

There is was the very next day !

Then I have been at Stamp shows twice where thefts occurred, one was a stamp club member whom hid a rare stamp down his sock, caught on the premises.

To me this whole thing has the feel of something contrived to extort money. By someone who really doesn't know anything about stamps and their values.

This speculative scenario also makes the Library look bad since they would have then fired someone based upon a false accusation.
Don

I wonder if this would be reported in Linn's Stamp News with more information. I doubt it.

When I first read it I doubted the stamp was worth anything. I don't know if the story is completely accurate since it's only based on the woman's side of the story. However, since the man hasn't showed up to refute it and he was "fired" we can only assume something shady happened.

I do think it's always a good idea to have a record of what you own and make sure to do your own research before handing over your valuables to someone else.

Besides the original story, I have not seen any follow-up in the media. Was there any?

The whole story seemed suspicious to me as well.

I don't know whether or not the library firing their volunteer makes any sense, and it may very well make sense if he did and said what he's accused of. But the story makes no sense in the first place.

An 80-year old George Washington stamp means it was from about 1940 or so. What stamp from that era with Washington on it is worth more than a few dollars? None. Zero.

My guess is the nice older lady had a collection which had been in her family for awhile and which she was told was worth some money. Anyone heard of that happening before? It's one of the most common stories in stamp collecting.

And in this collection there was an "old" stamp she believed was worth a lot of money. Perhaps Grandad or her uncle claimed it was "rare" the way collectors sometimes do to make their hobby look more like an investment than it was. It's not so rare. Collectors have been known to justify spending money on stamps. After all, when they're dead, what is anyone going to do about it? Non-collectors tend to believe this sort of thing because they don't know much about stamps, but they've heard some are rare. And everyone wants to believe there are rare things in their family.

Now, after visiting the library, she no longer has that "rare" stamp. Could she have made up this story out of a sense of personal embarassment? Out of anger at being told the valuable collection wasn't valuable at all? I have no idea. But it sure seems bizarre that someone working for the library would simply remove one stamp from the collection and offer to "throw it away" for her. I don't believe that makes any sense at all.

Keeping the collection to appraise it and returning it with a rare stamp missing might make sense. But this story makes no sense at all. It's not what a person would do. No one takes something claimed as rare and offers to throw it away. And then gives back the rest of the collection. In short, it's a badly made-up story that wasn't thought through very well. And someone got fired over it. Kind of sad.

Too bad they fired the guy without bothering to investigate what actually happened first. By the way, firing someone proves nothing. Organizations cover their butts all the time by doing exactly this -- even when the person fired is completely innocent. "Why sue us? Why we fired the guy so we're off the hook now!"

What I imagine happened was the employee looked at the collection, told the woman it was really not worth anything, and this surprised and upset her. After all, she'd always been told it was worth something. To her, this man must be wrong. Then she made up the story that "he took the one rare stamp and wouldn't give it back to me". Except people don't do that.

What people do is lie. They do that all the time even for innocent reasons like being upset that an old family collection of stamps you always believed was valuable actually isn't valuable at all. Also, why does a person with a "rare" stamp who manages to lose that very stamp not have a photograph or a photocopy or even a description of the rare stamp? Because there was no such stamp. That's why.