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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Related: Not US postage labels, but suspicious US postage stamps, seemed to also be used as a crude currency.

A third-party seller on Amazon or eBay was including sheets of suspicious US postage stamps in product shipments, unsolicited, with full-color glossy notes offering more stamps in exchange for positive reviews.

(I took the stamps and note I received to a post office, where a manager agreed they looked suspicious, and I asked them forward it up the chain. I like the USPS as a trustworthy service and institution, and I hate counterfeiting.)

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It might have to do with the fact that the First Class stamps exploded in price recently. It was $0.55 right before covid, but now it's $0.82. It's like printing counterfeit money, except easier. A 4x5 sheet the size of a postcard becomes worth $16. The stamps themselves have relatively little in the way of counterfeiting measures, especially if you consider that "Forever" stamps exist. So even if they introduce anti-counterfeiting measures into new stamps, a pirate could print old-style Forever stamps, circumventing the new measures.

The USPS is also, ahem, rather incompetent, and their own report [1] shows that "mitigation efforts are limited, with no substantive approach to identify counterfeit stamps in the Postal Service network. While the Postal Service and the Postal Inspection Service have increased prevention-related efforts, the quantity of counterfeit stamps in the network remains unknown."

So the increased value of the stamps, the inability to change old Forever stamps, and the lack of enforcement have created a perfect storm for the counterfeiters.

[1] https://www.uspsoig.gov/reports/audit-reports/counterfeit-st...

The UK moved to stamps with unique QR codes back in 2023 for the bulk of its stock.

https://www.royalmail.com/sending/barcoded-stamps

There are still some "Forever" stamps (those with pictures on or Christmas Stamps) but the old non-QR code non-forever stamps stopped being legal a while back (but you can always swap them for the new ones for free).

I've had people try and reuse a QR-coded stamp, you just get a postcard saying there's an item of mail with invalid postage for you to collect (and pay for). You get to look at it before you decide whether to pay the fine or not and then your argument is with the sender to reimburse you or not.

> swap them for the new ones for free

This was almost my thought for mitigating USA stamp fraud. Exchange Forever stamps for $currentValue stamps, but show your ID so you’ll be subject to extra scrutiny if you try to trade in a million of them. (QR code’s better and more fair.)

> show your ID.

What about the marginalized communities who don't have IDs, or are you saying USPS needs more security than federal elections?

Rhetorical question aside, federal elections use voter rolls that identify each potentially eligible voter and actively monitor for issues like double voting. There's no "forever stamp-holder" roll for the USPS to check.

How do you know it's actually John Smith who came to vote?

I think they’re saying there is more evidence of fraud in stamps because of the direct monetary value, where there is no evidence that our current registration-time voting controls need to be supplemented with additional friction at voting time, because what little evidence there is of voter fraud is mostly just lies: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/us/politics/nevada-voters...

maybe federal elections needs more security than usps?

“Forever” stamps in US terms are what 1st class / 2nd class stamps have always been in the UK since they appeared in the ‘80s, where they remain valid for a level of service forever. The US went through a weird phase where they had 1st class stamps, but they would only actually be for the monetary value of whatever the 1st class rate was when issued, so if the rate went up you’d have to add extra postage.

The basic split between what has barcodes and what doesn’t it that the everyday “definitive” stamps (both 1st/2nd etc. and those with a direct monetary value) were withdrawn and reissued with barcodes, but commemorative and special stamps weren’t. Basically, stuff sold to stamp collectors to be put in a box and never used on postage doesn’t have them.

> but they would only actually be for the monetary value of whatever the 1st class rate was when issued, so if the rate went up you’d have to add extra postage.

Reminds me of our monetary stamps. They were the old fashioned monetary value stamps which had a fixed value on it, so when the price hiked you could get 5ct/1ct stamps to add to get to the new rate, fixed value of the stamps stayed the same. People added real money to it since they were not going to buy a full sheet of 5ct stamps for one older one to compensate. And since the mail usually didn't care you sometimes got a free 5ct coin as recipient! (As a kid this was always fun to receive).

Fun thing is that those coins are way heavier than the paper so adding them might get you onto the next cost bracket making the whole excersize pointless.

Stamp value still matters in the US for normal letters because of the janky way extra weight is priced. In particular, the current price of a max-weight letter is two stamps plus 5 cents.

But one can get non-denominated extra-ounce stamps (for two ounce, three ounce, or "extra ounce" to use with another stamp) for letters over an ounce https://store.usps.com/store/stamps/additional-ounces/_/N-d7...

I thought "forever" referenced the Royal Mail's typical transit time.

Typical transit time seems pretty good for me

> The USPS is also, ahem, rather incompetent, and their own report [1] shows that "mitigation efforts are limited, with no substantive approach to identify counterfeit stamps in the Postal Service network.

They've been underfunded for a long time. Meanwhile they still have the legal requirement to deliver everywhere in the US. So the big guys like Amazon will happily deliver their own packages in densely populated areas where it's easily profitable. The areas where it's not can be done by USPS...

So basically the taxpayer is paying for Amazon to not have to deliver where it would be costly for them.

>The USPS is also, ahem, rather incompetent,...

Just as a datapoint, the USPIS has a >= 98% conviction rate for cases that go to trial

Incompetence can result in cases that don't go to trial, though.

I thought that for a while now all stamps are "forever" rather than it being s separate type.

Forever stamps guarantee delivery forever (subject to terms and conditions on weight/size). Regular stamps denote value, e.g. 50 cents. They will always be usable but you will need to match the inflation of prices (e.g., mailing a letter might be 50 cents in the past but 100 cents in the future)

Numbers for demonstration only

USPS still sells denominated stamps from $0.01 to $10.00, in addition to "First Class Forever" stamps - see near the bottom of the filters sidebar on https://store.usps.com/store/stamps

There's also other types of forever stamps, such as the domestic Postcard and Global Forever stamp!

These are problematic as well - they don’t have a way to tally the stamps, they just look for the marker and process it. A postal employee at the delivery point may flag it.

Also if you mail stuff this way you’ll have mail inspected for bombs or anthrax.

It's common in the UK to sell them both with a £ denominated value on them or the class of service. My brother bought loads of the latter a few years ago, which was a great idea, because as mentioned postal rates have increased significantly. The UK post office will also exchange your old unused stamps for new versions (now with QR codes or with sticky backs) for free. So even if they go out of date they alcan be upgraded at no cost.

I miss the taste of the glue.

Fun fact: Charles Ponzi (yes, THAT Ponzi) got started buying and selling postage stamps via arbitrage. It was legal until he started doing some shenanigans regarding over-promised ROIs and needed to use new investor money to pay older investors.

He would buy a stamp in Spain for 30 centavos, then exchange it for a 5 cent stamp in the US. Spain’s currency was depreciating against the dollar, so you could make some surprising returns. Really, his numbers weren’t straight-up lies, it’s just that it would’ve been impractical at the time to transport enough stamps to make that payout occur.

Correction: his idea was that he could buy international reply coupons (which were different than regular stamps) and arbitrage the rates against whatever currency value was greater. As an academic exercise, it was interesting (if utterly unpractical, especially for 1920).

But he NEVER did anything legal. In fact, he didn’t even receive his first attempt at successfully buying a small number of international reply coupons from a friend in Italy until his scam unraveled. And he’d never figured out how he could turn those coupons into cash.

And the reason his arbitrage excuse was caught so quickly (it was basically one summer that he was able to run his scam before his money ran out), was because the global supply of all the international reply coupons in the world were valued at significantly less than his revenues from his schemes, a fact experts pointed out to the local papers as the scam was happening. In fact, he even stopped telling new investors about the postal reply coupons scheme and had moved on to other lies about how people could double their money so quickly.

Thanks for the corrections! I only heard the story once quite a while ago :)

> I hate counterfeiting

There is a good book about Konrad Kujau who forged heaps of stuff before faking Hitler diaries and the getting caught. It’s worth a read.

A line that’s stuck with me (and is hopefully remembered correctly) ‘there are efficient documents and inefficient documents.’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Diaries

Kujau became famous as a counterfeiter, so some people counterfeited his counterfeits.

What was the end result of this?

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