Cape of Good Hope: Forgeries of Stamps, Covers & Cancels

Interesting. You were right to save the images and post them here.

I see that the fakes sell well at auctions, they are sought after by specialists and experts in the sector,  precisely to be used as reference points for comparison.

They are also interesting to some collectors precisely because they are fake.
Fakes have their own charm too.

Sorry for being slow to post a response, Rob (REL1948 ).  I agree with Alex (vikingeck ) and Ludovico (rex ) that it is an excellent collection of Cape triangle forgeries.

I never cease to be amazed at how much money the forgeries can bring.  It's generally not as much as the genuine stamps, but sometimes the prices for forgeries are not far off.  I just saw one of the Spiro forgeries of the 6-pence offered for €40.00 (about $45.00) on Delcampe.  I paid substantially less than that for one of my own genuine used copies of the 6-pence!

Anyway, thanks for posting and starting this thread, Rob, as it will make a good place to track any members' experience with Cape triangle forgeries.

Thanks for your post, JeffS.  I quite agree that this is clearly a forgery, probably a Spiro one, but please don't quote me on that, as I have no expertise on that level.

Can you see the original listing?  Was it identified as a forgery by the seller?  If so, I would never pay that much for it, but perhaps someone else might.

Other opinions are welcome, of course.

Hi, JeffS and Alex (vikingeck):

I decided to move these posts about the forgery over to the dedicated thread started by Rob (REL1948) some time ago.  I hope you don't mind, but I like the idea of keeping this sort of info together.  Thanks for your understanding.

I won this little lot of counterfeits (facsimiles), at $15.+ including tax and shipping (less than $3 each) I thought it a fun lot to have

JeffS: I moved your two posts on forgeries over to this subject-specific thread.

I have been trying to find out more about the one you posted (1-Penny in blue), and if I find anything of interest, I will post again.  In the meantime, I will tag Morten (classicalstamps) to ask if he knows anything about your example.  There is a red one on his site that looks similar to yours, but the maker is not specified.

stampforgeries.com/forged-stamps-of-cape-of-good-hope-triangle-1d/

Always for a challenge and learning something new, I believe your Cape 1 Penny Blue JeffS is a forgery from the woodblock printings.

Thanks for your post, JeffS .  I took the liberty of moving this one over to the Cape Triangles Forgeries thread, too.

Interesting that you should post about this particular example.  I sent the seller a message a few days ago letting him know that it is a forgery.  It seems pretty clear (to me at least) that the bidders think that they are getting a genuine stamp.  It is hard for me to imagine that any informed bidder would be willing to pay nearly $30 for a common Spiro forgery, therefore I conclude that the bidders don't realize that this is the case.

It's a poor show on the part of this seller that he has not taken any action after my message to him.

The previously-mentioned forgery of the Cape triangle shilling sold for $48.89, a shameful situation given that the seller, markomarkeymark was advised of it's forgery status but failed to reply to notifications by two different people and continued with it's fraudulent sale.

The sellers name is actually marcomarkeymark. They have a long history on eBay and sell a lot of better classics. I am not sure if they edited the listing but they vaguely covered themselves with the item title 'CAPE OF GOOD HOPE 1854-1862 Used Imperf Triangle 1/- Green Unchecked for Type VF' . Rather sneaky and sleazy way to do business. 

stanley64 - thanks for your comment which I had not seen until today. Could you clarify what you wrote:

I believe your Cape 1 Penny Blue JeffS is a forgery from the woodblock printings.

Thanks for letting us know this, Steve (Admin).  I am certainly interested in hearing what he has to say.

An email string of 18 messages failed to get a cogent response (perhaps attributable to language differences).

As best I can determine, the seller took offense to having been publicly "outed" (my word) without having a chance to respond, and also to an email received which threatened to report him to ebay.


His reason for not responding to notifications was that he was undergoing surgery to have a tumor removed (he even sent me an image of the freshly stitched and bandaged scar).

I asked if he had contacted the stamp's buyer to make him or her aware that the stamp was or may be a forgery and his response was essentially, I'm here because of the comments and what's happening with the sale was not for me to know.

He continued to assert that I wasn't accepting him for membership so that he could reply, even though I'd made multiple request for him to provide a reply that I could post on his behalf. 

His final comment to me follows:

I closed the conversation by advising him that I would post what I believed to be his primary concerns. His membership application has been rejected.

I didn't see his listing and can't comment on the stamp's validity but I do think that we need to seriously consider whether or not "naming and shaming" is a practice that is allowed on the Forum. This is an issue to be addressed within the Moderator team.