Quote:
Originally Posted by RichardSimon
I was aware of the art, it always gets press coverage.
But do stamps and coins have as much fraud as this hobby?
Do less popular collectibles have a lot of fraud?
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I suppose it depends on what you think of as both "as much" and fraud.
Stamps has plenty of low level stuff going on. altering something to appear to be something it's not is pretty easy. And doing stuff to make less saleable items saleable is even easier. And that's been going on almost as long as there's been a hobby. Sometimes it was done years ago, and that can get amusing at times.
The main area I collect is the 1873 and 1879 officials. in 1875 the POD decided to print reprints of every us stamp ever issued as part of the upcoming centennial celebrations. To prevent illegal use, they overprinted the officials with "specimen" Some were really common, some sold less than 100 copies. And for years collectors didn't think much of those overprinted stamps. The common ones often have the "Specimen" erased and a fake cancel added sometimes it's well done, sometimes they just crossed the overprint out with a pen. On ones like the 1cent executive dept its an effort to turn a stamp that might sell for $15 into one that might bring 2-400. On others it gets sort of comical... I have one of the really uncommon ones that was done to. 72 copies sold, catalog value 1200. I got it for $20 as a common used copy of the basic stamp. It's not worth 1200, but certainly more than 20 and whoever altered it in the past sort of did me a favor as I probably wouldn't own one otherwise.
Cancellations and other postal markings are faked pretty often, stamps are added to covers to represent rare uses, etc. Most aren't truly expensive, and that's because the authenticating groups take their time making a decision. And ALL the really expesnive stuff gets scrutinized very closely. Even stuff that's known to be "good" .
A few articles
http://www.rfrajola.com/opinions/klep.htm
http://www.rfrajola.com/opinions/gslc.htm
This one is a summary of a controversial group of stamps. The most recent expertizing took 5 Years and resulted in a book full of details that even most stamp collectors couldn't love.
http://www.rfrajola.com/grinnells/grinnells.htm