Not so much a forgery, as a blatant fraud

I was sent this picture last week, of a piece taken from kiloware.  The self-adhesive 1p stamps were carefully placed over the edges of the £1 'stamp'.  And yet this was cancelled at the counter at a post office branch in Leamington Spa.  I suppose after that, Royal Mail's Revenue Protection team would not pay it as much attention as if it had been on a (non-) machineable letter.

 

The corners of the two £1 'stamps' do overlap, so it is possible that they have both been cut from a photocopy of a sheet of genuine stamps.  (Thanks SW)

I've also been sent a piece bearing 3 (was four) 1st class Large forgeries, easy to see by the absence of year code.  Our correspondent says that the gum is not water-soluble (as so many price labels aren't) but the very thin stamp did float off in lighter fuel and the gum went into solution with the lighter fuel, unlike genuine self-adhesive stamps where the gum remains separate.

Compare this with the image I took from eBay of a forgery and the latest piece shows a distinct white line below the bust, the hair, and the chin which are not present on the earlier example.  However, because one picture is my scan, and the other is a screen capture of somebody else's any further comparison doesn't really help.  These were posted in Loughborough and sent to Denmark.  No postmark, so possibly just a packet dropped in a postbox.  £4.04 would have been 11p short of the small parcel 100gr rate, or 19p more than the large letter 250gr rate.  (Thanks RG)

 

When people can get away with this, it's little wonder that prices have to be increased every year.  It is probably still cheaper to surcharge the inland mail that is noticed than to chase all the sellers.

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