Scott Specialized Catalogue Of United States Counterfeits To Double In Size

As per Amos Media:




Double in size in ONE YEAR. Houston, we have a large problem.

Quite a juxtaposition in my mind...Communist Chinese counterfeits being used by American publisher to make a buck by encouraging the collector market for them (by assigning catalog values).
Don

Communist Chinese Counterfeit Postage Don?

Yes (sorry for the poor wording), we have previously posted links to several Chinese companies who are printing and selling US counterfeit postage stamps.

Early this year (03/16/2023) the U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport seized an incoming shipment of US counterfeit stamps coming in from China.
And in Feb of this year, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service announced seizure of $2.5 million in counterfeit stamps coming from China.
https://www.uspis.gov/u-s-postal-in...feit-postage

Don

Actually, I was referring to the abbreviation CCCP.

The UK, also, is being flooded with forgeries, It took very little time for the King Charles III definitives to be forged. And the quality is getting better. Most come from China. I cannot say I have heard much about forgeries of Dutch stamps.

You make a good point.
If they had not done that, it could have been a good book on what "not" to buy.

Counterfeits are nothing new, they have been around for 150 years, and have always been popular with collectors.

From Fournier and Sperati to Peter Winter and many in-between, most were created in limited quantities and not intended to defraud the postal service. That has changed exponentially in the last few years.

I make a distinction between forgeries (meant to deceive collectors) and counterfeits (meant to deceive postal systems).

Using that definition, I cannot recall 150-year-old counterfeit stamps.
Don

Nothing new indeed. The difference here is that a Nation, China, and specifically the Chinese Communist Party, is flooding the marketplace with millions of dollars (certainly in the tens of millions and perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars) of very high-quality counterfeits. Why? Perhaps just to make money or maybe to undermine one of our institutions or it could be a combination of both. In any case it is a wholesale attempt to undermine a segment of our economy.

We are not talking about some "artisan" seeing how far he can take his craft nor are we talking about something from another age that we can justify as being historical in nature and as such something to study and collect.

This type of behavior by China is nothing new. They have long stolen intellectual property and knocked-off products from lightbulbs to prescription drugs. It is not at all a victimless crime.

We have discussed in other posts how feckless Washington has been in dealing with these attacks on our economy so I will leave that be here.

IMO it is shameful for Amos to assign values to these, helping to create a secondary market for modern fakes especially when they are still flooding the marketplace. A bad taste in one's mouth.

PS: Will the 2025 edition be twice the size of the 2024 edition which is twice the size of the 2023 edition. When is it officially a snake that finally needs its head cut off.

Definitely. A Sperati forgery of US 9X1 or #2, for example, are very collectible and interesting items.

This stuff is something else.

While the scale of modern counterfeiting is certainly egregious, postal forgeries designed to defraud the Spanish postal system were being produced in Spain as early as the 1850s. Postally used most are rare/uncommon and very collectible.

Side note - to counteract this practice is why Spain issued a new series of stamps every year. It seems to have just given the forgers more material to practice on...

There were revenue stamps counterfeited during the Civil War to defraud the Government. There were a LOT of revenue stamps counterfeited during prohibition to defraud the government and the imbibers. There were postal counterfeits in the 1890's and the 1920's.

Note the name under which they are known. They, however, adhere to your definition of counterfeit and are 151 years old.

https://www.linns.com/news/world-st...-been-solved

Some declarations are opinion not fact. In any case, if one makes something easy to copy then it can be easily exploited .The motive is simple...money for the buyer and seller.

So is anyone aware of China receiving counterfeit stamps? I'm getting old and crotchety - maybe we should return the favor?