FORGERIES: Merode stamps 1914 COB 126-128

Well,

I'm gonna spill the beans here, the left one is the only real one...

The other two are two different types of forgeries. A so called easy forgery and a dangerous forgery...

The middle one is the easiest to spot, even by naked eye, the right one, you'll need a magnifying glass...

On with the dangerous forgery then, as it is easy to spot the other one!

For the green 5c Mérodes:


=> REAL one has minced 5



=> EASY FAKE one has nice full 5



=> DANGEROUS FAKE has an even more minced 5 at top, with naked eye, it looks detached!


---
Also


=> DANGEROUS FAKE one: There is no half circle line in sphere above right where in the real stamp, there clearly is!

The 20 cent violet one is the hardest to distinguish... in the dangerous forgery that is

Best thing to look at here is a duller color (you will have to compare to a real stamp), a shinier gum (if unused) and the following:



 
first one = real, second = fake

There's a dot in the real stamp's 0 (in the '20') and none in the fake.
Same counts for the other side:


 
first one = real, second = fake


That concludes this topic...
Oh, and there are undentilated ones, mostly fakes as well

Thanks bjornbelgium for your detailed description of this series of stamps. After reading the posts of course I had to check mine out and no surprise, all 3 of mine are forgeries. Scott states that forgeries abound. The good news is that I was not duped. Most of my world wide stamps have come from old collections bought at very reasonable prices so I did not go out and buy many individual stamps or sets. My Belgium collection has probably around 1000 stamps and I stop at 1965 with lots of the classics but I doubt there is any great value. I feel confident that I have 100’s if not 1000’s of forgeries in my world wide collection. 

I think by that time (era), perforations were not that much of an issue anymore, nor was paper. Although you can clearly see a difference in paperstructure on the foto's of the 20c!...

Also, it was war soon after and forging stamps payed off I guess... I have no idea however when they were produced but I can imagine, even after the war, it would have been lucrative to fake them. If they were later issues (this issue was no longer used by 1920), the reason for forging would have been the low printing quantities of 150.000 and 50.000 for the 20c.

At the same time of these, there were also three smaller ones produced with the head of Albert I, they were equally forged and also with the Q being an O...

Don't know very much of the printing processes back in 1914 and how it was exactly done, but I think it had allready evolved into metal plates (just still using the lithographic process??)
They made a negative die first, transferred a positive image onto a roll die and than retransferred (pressed) that via the roll onto rows on a big metal plate so again you had a negative image right?

Something I didn't mention indeed is the fact that the real stamps are much finer in their engravings, the forgeries (all of them) are much more vague and erratic. There's lots of other features that I left out, some of the curls are totally different on the easy fake but it's not mentioned here since the Q being an O stands out so much, you really don't need to look further...

When you have only one or two copies, and not sure whether real of fake, it's best to look at the certain features. If you have a set that you know is real for sure, it is indeed possible to look for difference in engraving as well, as it will show instantly

There are also differences in the red crosses, often they will have white spots or lines, while in the real ones, they are cleaner, crisper anf have straighter edges... but that is perhaps a more difficult feature to look for.

Nice thread!

Here's a whole sheet of forgeries!

One of the best features I think is the raster just above BELGIE. If it were reprints of the same original plates, they would have gotten this right too I think... As for the Steindruck, I thought that it was the 'procedure' rather than flatprinting off of an actual stone plate? Wouldn't that have been very hard to get all the engravings right every time?

I find it very interesting to learn more about the different printing techniques and how they evolved through time... They might have been stone plates right in the beginning (1840's) but not sure that they didn't better the technique by the 1900's allready...

Anyone can recommend a good book about this?

Hi bjornbelgium
Thanks for the address of this interesting site.
The Dutch translation is much more understandable than the German.
Congratulations on your full membership.

Hi michael
I did not find the printing method in Scott.
If you look in Michel you will notice more information (perforation K14, 3 panel 5x5 in sheet) - it is Scott's style not to provide this information that helps identification.