Cheap, fake stamps are cutting into postal service revenue

A version of this story first appeared on LAist.

A growing market for illicit stamps is robbing revenue from the U.S. Postal Service. Do a little Googling, and you’ll find lots of websites offering stamps for around 20 cents apiece — a fraction of the 78 cents you pay at the post office.

My first thought when I came across these sites: What a deal! But it turns out it’s a deal too good to be true.

“Ninty-nine percent of the time they are Chinese counterfeits,” said Wayne Youngblood, a lifelong stamp collector and writer who’s been on the stamp beat for close to 40 years. He started his career writing for Linn’s Stamp Weekly and continues to write and lecture about stamps and postal history.

Youngblood said there’s been an explosion in recent years in websites selling counterfeit stamps, mostly produced in China and India. The counterfeiters even copy the special, new designs the postal service puts out each year — and fast.

“Flag stamps, commemorative stamps — you name it — have been counterfeited. It takes 'em about six weeks to turn around from the time the stamp is issued until it's available in the United States as a counterfeit,” Youngblood said.

Why not just shut the counterfeiters down? For one thing, counterfeit stamps are not easy to detect, even for the postal service.

“ It's very difficult to tell unless we are analyzing these stamps side by side in our lab with very technical equipment,” said Marjan Barrigan-Husted, an agent with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the law enforcement wing of the postal system.

Cracking down on the sellers of fake stamps has become a game of whack-a-mole, she said. “ We are doing our best to shut these websites down. But there are millions of them that just keep popping up.”

U.S. law enforcement tries to catch counterfeits as they come into the country. Agents seized more than 4.4 million fake stamps in the first quarter of this fiscal year, according to Barrigan-Husted.

But that may be just a drop in the bucket. Youngblood, the stamp journalist, estimates the postal service is losing more than $1 billion annually on counterfeit stamps.

Barrigan-Husted wouldn’t confirm that estimate, but she acknowledged that the flood of counterfeit stamps is hitting USPS hard during a time when it’s already struggling — and contributing to the rising cost of postage.

The price of first-class stamps has risen 42% since 2020.

“We still have to make up that revenue, so it’s because of the problem that the cost has risen,” she said.

Not all stamps you buy online are counterfeit, and it is possible to buy stamps at a slight discount from a few select vendors, like Stamps.com and Costco. But if the discount is more than a few cents per stamp, chances are they’re not real.