Owie With Encapsulated Columbian

Don't try this at home.

Instead of paying PSE $15 for this service, it appears someone tried to break open an encapsulated capsule and rescue the entrapped stamp, breaking the stamp in the process.


This is (was) a graded 95 NH stamp with an SMQ of $1,050.

It sold at auction on HipStamp today for $139.

The stamp was clearly listed as damaged in the description. I hope the buyer read that.

https://www.hipstamp.com/listing/us...384/66053199

Thankfully I am old enough to smile.

Its funny, you can see the scrape marks on the plastic, and readily envision exactly how this happened.

Vandalism to put it in there, vandalism to take it out … and who on earth would pay $139 for that? I'd have thrown it in the bin.

Or someone managed to open it, exchange the stamp with his own damaged example and hope to pass it on for a high-graded example?

Unless the stamp was stuck to the capsule, it escapes me how the damage in the corner of the capsule coincides with the tear in a stamp held in the middle of the capsule. It would have required the tool to enter quite far into the capsule and cause a tear without further wrinkling the stamp. The damage to the capsule looks too limited for this.

Looks as if someone may have wanted to remove stamp to get a higher grade. That practice is very common in coin collecting. It seems to be very dangerous in trying to do the same with stamps. This is why I do not buy encapsulated stamps and I do not like them.

For a few dollars the person could of sent it to PSE to have the stamp removed from the holder.

10 ways to safely remove the stamp, that wasn't one of them.