An auction lot that raises my hackles.

You didn't say how big the lot was. I would expect a few damaged stamps in any lot, but if I felt there were too many I would ask to return the lot as it was not as described (I assume they were supposed to be collectable). The seller may then offer a discount instead of being forced by eBay to accept the return and pay the cost of the return postage.

I’m not sure what I’d do there, but boy is that frustrating! Just seeing those carelessly clipped stamps drives me slightly nuts.

I had a well-intentioned aunt who always saved stamps for me when I was young and who always ran her scissors into those ugly pokey teeth things around the stamps. A member of the extended family had some reason for living in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) and of the few postally used copies I have from Upper Volta, virtually all of them have had a number of the teeth trimmed off by my aunt ... oh well, not so tragic since I wasn't paying for them but still, I'd prefer to see the stamps with teeth!

Ryan

Here in Uk lots of well meaning folk save stamps from their house hold mail especially around Christmas, and pass them on to charities like Oxfam etc who will bag them up into bulk lots and get some cash from dealers who trade quantities as “Kiloware” selling bags by weight , 500g 1 kg etc

All too often the well meaning citizen is the culprit careless with the scissors. Oh so often I have had offerings from little old ladies in a church group passing on small accumulations in “very mixed condition “ . I weed out obvious clipped or damaged before passing the rest to Oxfam. The wholesale dealer probably doesn’t waste time weeding out the dross from the acceptable.

Was philatelia’s purchase such kiloware?

Good to see she was willing to compensate I hope she follows through and you receive worthwhile replacements.

Have you asked the seller if she sent you the replacements with tracking? If so, and if the number matches, send her the notice that you received.

From my perspective, the USPS would be better served by both informing and warning the sender, rather than just telling the recipient, that the sender is using counterfeit postage stamps.

Unfortunately, printing counterfeit stamps is cheap. Tracking down the sender and tracking down the deli/smoke shop/whatever that is selling the counterfeits is expensive in terms of human resources and court costs. The USPS would have to cover the costs, and that would impact postage rates, and there'd be another uproar about that, and more people would feel priced out and be more prone to buying counterfeits.

The most efficient way would probably be to open packages from places that are known to harbor counterfeiters (which includes quite a bit of the world, not just China), but I'm sure there would be a lot of whining about police states and the like. I don't know that most Americans would think fake postage is such a big deal that it's worth opening everything that comes in. It sounds plausible to raid smoke shops in areas where the counterfeit postage appears to be showing up, but if it's showing up outside of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, good luck finding all these smoke shops. (Anybody here remember "bath salts"?)


I know what you mean. Some people get into something way over their heads, and that doesn't necessarily mean that they're bad people. The thought even occurs to me that this unfortunate vendor might have bought the stamps - maybe even at face value - from some criminal who persuaded him/her that they're leftovers from another failed eBay business.

But I wonder: this person knows enough to know that people buy stamp mixtures, and knows how to procure enough mixture-material from somebody/somewhere to open an eBay storefront, but doesn't know that damaged stamps are worthless. To me, that doesn't add up, or if it does it adds up to an imaginary number.

Can you contact USPS to see if they can tell you the name of the sender??