One thing that occurs to me is that with so many thousand possible stamps, it sounds extremely difficult to build a machine to scan a letter to verify if the stamp is legitimate or not. Not only is there a huge variety of valid stamps, but as near as I can tell, there is not a hidden digital code or some other method that would allow for straightforward and reliable verification. You’d have to scan the image in with a color scanner, and somehow correct for slightly wrinkled and distorted stamp paper, water damage from the user licking it, and so on.
The most valuable postage stamps for collectors are those that a printing error caused damage - those are valid, too!
The only thing I can think of is that there isn’t any protection against counterfeits. Instead, the secret service must somehow hunt down the sellers of counterfeit stamps.
Maybe they somehow make the businesses who sell stamps go through some kind of process to verify they aren’t selling counterfeits. When I used to work in a grocery store, the stamp books were kept in the till as if they were cash.
In order for a criminal to make any money, they would have to sell an awful lot of counterfeit stamps, which would require a large organization with a lot of parts for law enforcement to attack.
One technique is fluorescence. The “white” on the stamp actually glows under UV, so they can identify real stamps from fake unless someone’s been really clever. Then, just identify the overweight mail and pass through the others.
I have heard many stories in the 40 years since Canada Post began automating, that fake stamps made it through quite often.
They don’t explicitly say so, but presumably that helps weed out forgeries.
Nowadays I suspect the answer is that they don’t really do much to stop it, for the same reason nobody checks for counterfeit coins. They’d be much more interested in large scale fraud, which would not involve stamps.
I wouldn’t think counterfeiting is a particular problem with stamps. You counterfeit money to buy products, and to get genuine money in the change. When you counterfeit stamps, you don’t get anything other than free postage.
the time value it would take me to do that is more than the cost of a new stamp, I just can’t see that it would be cost effective in very many situations.
Actually there have been quite a lot of forgeries of British stamps discovered, with the quality varying from pretty terrible to extremely good.
Because stamps are widely sold in supermarkets, newsagents etc, the forgers can sell books of fake stamps in bulk to such retailers. The retailers pay less for the fakes than they would for the real stamps*, so everyone makes money out of the deal. Until they get caught…
The retailers might not know that the stamps are fake - they might be spun some story about returned or surplus stock going cheap.
I think the post ofice used to rely on the delivery mailman as the final stop-gap against this sort of counterfeit. They would keep an eye out for anything suspicious.
Also- consider that postage meters pre-date powerful computers by several decades, yet they appear to have no serious detection measures built in. The meter number may be visible, but it was not easily machine-readable, and the design was simple enough I imagine a decent print shop could fake it… but it brings us back to the problem of “why?” There’s not a lot of money in faking stamps, unless you sell them retail - then the more you sell the greater the risk of being caught.
at the beginning of postage stamps in the 1840s the designers went to considerable trouble to make the forger’s life as difficult as possible.
Nowadays one would wonder why anybody would go to the trouble.