4,080 counterfeit U.S. stamps were seized recently by U.S. Customs & Border Protection (CBP)     officers at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

CBP officers discovered the fraudulent postage stamps after inspecting a manifest that identified as “hand account/self-adhesive sheets.”  Once opened, officers found poor quality, badly printed, U.S. postage stamps inside. One of the packages contained 200 Forever Stamps with a declared value of $10. Since the current value of a Forever Stamps is 63c it would have cost consumers $126 if the stamps had been genuine.

There has been a notable rise in the number of counterfeit postage stamps showing up online on e-commerce and social media platforms recently and this trend is set to increase according to industry commentators.

Postage stamp integrity has been a consideration ever since the first stamp, the Penny Black, was   issued in 1840 in the UK.  The security and integrity of postage stamps is ever evolving. Postal authorities go to considerable lengths to defend the integrity of their stamps in circulation.

A stamp is not only a legal document of defined value but an embodiment of a country’s identity. Fraudulent reproduction of postage stamps not only deprives a postal authority of revenue, it is also a defamation of that identity.

Never has it been more important in this digital age to ensure that defence mechanisms evolve quickly enough to meet the increasing sophistication of the would-be counterfeiter.