2017 Forever Stamps That Has No Plate Numbers. Is This Automatically Fake.

I bought 2 coils from a seller on mercari.com for $70 + $3.65 shipping.

I read online that every 20 to 25 stamps I should see a plate # on it.
After looking at each stamp I do not see any plate # on it. Are these considered fake?

Welcome to the forum. Yes, most likely are counterfeit. If you are a collector and own a Scott specialized catalog they have a chapter for these and you can check. Another way to check would be the presence of tagging


Peter

The USPS Announcement for PSA Coil Rolls of 100 of this issue states that the plate number appears every 31st stamp.

John

Thank you everyone for the help with this, yea these seem to be fake the more I read about them.

At first, I see the small print of "USPS" on the flag and thought maybe there is a chance they could genuine.

This is the 2nd roll that I didn't bother to open up.

One big red flag about these fake and other design forever stamps is that you purchased them well under face value. In your case, $110 for only $70 + S&H. Had you shopped better, you could have picked up the fakes as low as $9.95 per $55 forever coil roll. But that seller has been removed from ebay, by ebay.

Now current below face forever postage in unopened coils are not all fake, some are just hot finds as in out the back door, five finger discount, shrinkage, self initiated employee compensation increase, fell off the truck, got them in a storage unit auction, individual initiated wealth redistribution, and other similar euphemisms, for those no longer PC terms stolen and looted.

Now if the seller tells you they shut down their retail office, those were the fake coils too as the buyer learned upon receipt.

I don't have a recent US Specialized, but here's photo taken from an ebay seller demonstrating the better quality and number of these fakes.

Personally, I wouldn't buy any of these recent flag and "simple" single design issues that are rife with fraud regardless of price.

Thank you for that image I will save it on my desktop.
I did order a bunch of stamps on the USPS website.

I just wanted more stamps and decided to try that website mercari. The guy and his perfect feedback sure fooled me..haha.

A lot of this stuff is coming from China.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-det...143749TSe9Aq

I see a ton of these for sale on Facebook Marketplace, sadly. Clearly counterfeits, and Rog's link on Alibaba is just the tip of the iceberg. One wonders how much of a revenue hit this is each year to the USPS. Reporting them is like whack-a-mole, and I doubt the Facebook mods take these very seriously.

Thankfully the legit stamps from USPS arrived today so I can use them.

I'm not going to lie, I did test the fake counterfeit on Saturday and mailed out a letter just to see what would happen.
The person I mailed the letter, said she got it.

It was too much for my head to handle, I toss the rest of the stamps in a box and threw it into my closet.