The online scam that takes advantage of your holiday spirit

I remember feeling very adult the first time I sent out holiday cards with family photos on them.

But the overall cost of this sweet, but fleeting, gesture is getting hard to swallow. The cards are expensive, of course. And then there’s the price of sending them through the mail. Forever stamps now cost 78 cents. When did that happen?

I was rethinking the whole endeavor when I did a little Googling, and bingo! — I found a bunch of websites offering stamps for close to 20 cents a piece. A fraction of the price. Was this for real?

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No, as it turns out. The majorly-discounted stamps advertised online are more than likely counterfeit. And if you use fake stamps, you risk your mail being confiscated or sent back.

“Typically, there is no such thing as a discounted stamp,” said Marjan Barrigan-Husted, a federal agent with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.

Barrigan-Husted said “typically” because the postal service does have agreements with a select number of vendors, mostly big box stores and stamps.com, to sell stamps at a slightly discounted rate — for example, you can get a whopping 25 cents off a roll of 100 stamps from Costco.

That’s not even close to the steals I was finding online with just a little scrolling. And the stamps looked, to me, just like the latest stamps coming hot off the USPS press.

“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,” said Wayne Youngblood, a writer and philatelist — an expert in stamps.

What’s behind the surge in counterfeit stamps?

Youngblood said there has been an “explosion” in counterfeit stamps in recent years, mostly coming from China. Many also come from India, Barrigan-Husted said.

Federal postal agents seized more than 4.4 million fake stamps, worth more than $3 million, just in the first quarter of this fiscal year, according to Barrigan-Husted.

Why the surge? For one thing, they are not easy to detect. “ It's very difficult to tell unless we are analyzing these stamps side-by-side in our lab with very technical equipment,” Barrigan-Husted said.

Plus, she thinks the temptation might just be too great for those on a tight income.

“The economy has been rough ever since COVID,” Barrigan-Husted said. “People with no ill intentions are thinking that they can save some money here and there by cutting costs, and one of those ways of cutting costs is to get discounted stamps.”

‘It’s like wack-a-mole’

Shutting down the websites that sell fake stamps seems like an obvious answer to the problem, or so I thought.

“ We are doing our best to shut these websites down,” Barrigan-Husted said. “But there are millions of them that just keep popping up.”

Plus, the Postal Inspection Service that Barrigan-Husted works for is a small agency, with arguably bigger fish to fry.  They also investigate child exploitation crimes, money laundering, elicit drug trafficking and other major crimes associated with the mail system.

“And so those kinds of things kind of take their priority,” Youngblood said.

What happens if you use fake stamps?

Mail fraud is a federal crime. But postal agents are more focused on suppliers of counterfeit stamps than the often unwitting consumers who buy them. But Barrigan-Husted said your mail might be confiscated and even opened if it has a fake stamp on it. Or, it could be sent back.

She said consumers should also be wary of giving their credit card information to online businesses offering stamps that are too cheap to be legit.

“ The scammers are using that information as well,” Barrigan-Husted said.

In the end, the postal service is likely the biggest victim of the illicit stamp industry — Youngblood estimates that USPS loses more than $1 billion annually when people use counterfeit stamps instead of buying the real ones.

That loss also translates to higher prices for all mail users — including the continual rise in the cost of stamps.

“ We're having to make up for all of the counterfeit stamps that have gone through the mail stream,” Barrigan-Husted said, “we still have to make up that revenue.”

For me, this all translates into an excellent excuse not to send cards this year. It’s getting late anyway. Maybe next year.