As long as stamps have existed, so have forgeries – but could you beat the scammers?

Jean de Sperati. He just sounds like a 19th century con artist, doesn’t he? Like someone Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might have dreamed up for Sherlock Holmes to outfox. If Holmes were to take on a dastardly stamp forger, that is.

In the world of stamp forgery – which so worried the Victorians they made sure the first ever stamp, the Penny Black, had a fiendishly complicated design so that it would be hard to replicate – Sperati’s legend looms large. He was, in the words of one expert, “the king of them all”. His forgeries were so good they could trick even the most renowned experts of the time. These days, a Sperati fake goes for up to £2,500 – at least as much as one of the original stamps he was copying.

But whether the fakes which continue to blight Royal Mail – the latest of which came out of China to infiltrate Britain’s stamp market – will one day sell for quite as much remains to be seen.

The revelation that our stamp supply chain has been sullied once more by counterfeits has meanwhile come as no surprise to the philatelists who have been tracking the ebb and flow of stamp forgeries since 1840.

Though an expert could spot a fake (even a very good one) a mile off, most of us might struggle to detect the subtle changes in colour and design. Alongside a top philatelist, we looked at some of the most notable forgeries of the past 180 years and found the hidden clues that gave them away.

The Penny Black, 1840

Released three years into Queen Victoria’s reign, there was such concern about the possibility Britain’s first stamp could be forged they gave it an intricate, hard-to-copy design. “There was such a problem with forged bank notes from provincial banks in England, the people coming up with the first stamps were paranoid that there would be mass stamp forgery,” explains Vincent Green, chairman of Sandafayre, a stamp firm based in Cheshire.

The bottom corners of each Penny Black featured letters which would tell the Post Office clerks where an individual stamp came in a sheet. “There were 240 pennies in the old pound, so a sheet of stamps would be 240.

“They put a different letter in the corners of each one. So your first stamp would be AA. The next one would be AB. The idea was that the clerks working in the Post Office would notice the same two letters coming through if somebody successfully managed to produce one good fake.”

In this iteration, then, a clerk may have spotted the AB in the corners, which would have been a good indication of a fake.

The V and the R (which stood for Victoria Regina) are a giveaway too, says Green. The Penny Blacks used by government officials featured a V and an R in the top corners, making them rarer than the rest of the collection, which featured a star in each corner. In this fake, the “poor copying” of the VR is obvious to experts as the letters are “in the wrong font”, says Green.

The Queen Victoria Two Pence Blue, 1840

It’s the quality of the reproduction which makes this one stand out, says Green. “It just wouldn’t pass. It’s a photographic reproduction of an engraved stamp. I can see that it is just flat compared to the one on the left which is sharply engraved.”

Green suspects it was reproduced in the 20th century using a colour camera – though not one of high enough quality to really capture the soft details in the original Victorian engraving. This one is likely to have been made more than 100 years after the original stamp was in circulation, meaning it was made to defraud collectors rather than being a real attempt to defraud the Post Office.

The Queen Victoria One Shilling, 1872

This is one of a sack of forged stamps that were only discovered to be fakes 20 years after they were made. “In the London Stock Exchange the traders used to send telegrams all the time, and you’d have to stick a shilling on the telegraph form and postmark it – that was the fee,” explains Green. “Someone in that office faked the shilling green stamps and stuck them on the forms, postmarked them and threw them into a bin. And it wasn’t until 20 years later that a stamp dealer bought sacks of them and started to soak them off the telegraph forms and realised they didn’t have water marks.

“Whoever it was made a fortune because he would have stolen the genuine stamps and sold them to someone else. And we never knew who it was.”

To Green, the fake is obvious thanks to the engraving lines around the Queen’s cheek, which are much coarser on the forgery. The image is also “grainier” than the original, he says.

The Queen Victoria Two Shilling, 1876-1880

This Sperati fake is as detailed and convincing as stamp forgery ever got before the advent of modern technology. “The perforations are right, the post mark is genuine – he managed to keep the genuine postmarks,” says Green, who says forgeries like this one are in high demand. “Collectors will try to find as many versions of a stamp as possible. With an unlimited budget, collectors would have the requisition letter to an artist, the sketches, the engravers’ trials. They try and get everything from soup to nuts and an attempt at a forgery can often fit into that approach of wanting everything to do with the stamps.”

In this case, Sperati “managed to bleach out the stamp that was on that piece of paper which was a cheaper stamp”.

“He then put a new stamp design over it. And so the paper is right, the perforations are right, the postmark is right, and he’s just filled in the stamps.”

What gives it away, then? It’s only really the slightly bolder colour and thicker lines around the Queen’s face and neck that give it away. The real deal is just a little more delicate.

The Queen Victoria One Penny, 1881

This really shouldn’t fool anyone, says Green. The perforations are all wrong, for a start. “The spaces between the holes are much bigger, so the teeth of the perforation are fatter. So there are effectively less holes down the side of the forged stamp than the other one.”

The paper on the forged stamp is also “really white”, which means it’s likely to be a 20th century photographic rendition. “If you look at the beautiful engraving on the face around the nose and cheek of the real one you can just see – it’s a very simple thing.”

The King Edward VII One Pound, 1907

The rough line work in the forgery gives this one away. There is a lack of clarity about the image compared to the original. “To those of us who are handling the stamps all the time it would pop as not being right,” says Green. “You can see it’s not been reproduced to the same exacting standards.”

Whereas these days, even a basic printer can produce a decent image (and the ones being used by the Chinese fraudsters will be high quality), forgeries made pre-1980 don’t tend to have been “commercially successful”, says Green, who explains most 20th century forgeries “fall down because they’re not as well printed”.

The King George V Two and a Half Pence, 1912-24

Here, an attempt to reproduce this early 20th century stamp has been let down by “a photographic technique has failed to keep the fine engraving lines”, says Green. “If you look at the back of George V’s head you can see individual hairs on the original.”

The perforation holes are wrong again. “You can see the teeth are much fatter. So the perforating machine – they couldn’t get the gauge of the distance between the holes right.”

Green suspects this was made to fool collectors rather than the Post Office, and likely made 20 years after the original was first printed.

The Universal Postal Congress One Pound, 1929

“This stamp is often considered the most beautiful stamp ever created,” says Green. “It looks like a bank note or a bond.”

Again, he says, you look at the forgery and “you can just see that the photographic process has failed to keep the quality of the design”.

“So it’s just coarser and rougher and the paper is white and modern and doesn’t have a watermark.”

The Queen Elizabeth II 24 Pence, 1992

This stamp is what Green considers “a proper forgery” in that it was produced to defraud the Post Office. “A lot of forgeries are created to con collectors but this – together with the stuff coming out of China at the moment – is used to defraud the Post Office itself.”

It’s a decent fake, he says, though when you see the two together you can immediately see some problems. Namely, the late Queen’s profile is all wrong, with a pointier nose, more pursed lips, and a slightly shorter, slimmer neck. “The coarseness of the reproduction means the design looks completely different,” says Green, who points to the “more subtle, refined printing on the genuine version”.

“They haven’t drawn it themselves, they’ve copied one they’ve got, and the technology of the time didn’t do a brilliant job.”