In general, philatelic fakes and forgeries are labels that look like postage stamps but have been produced to deceive or defraud. Learning to identify these can be a challenging branch of philately.
To a large extent the definitions below are consistent with those given in the introduction to various recent editions of the Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue.
"We use the term "forgery" to indicate stamps produced to defraud collectors (properly known as forgeries) and to defraud stamp-issuing governments (properly known as counterfeits).
"Fake" is used to indicate the alteration of a genuine stamp to make it appear as something else. Fakes might refer to cancellations, overprints, added or clipped perforations, stamp design alterations, etc."
The first postage stamp was issued in Great Britain in 1840, and by the early 1860s the first postage stamp forgery appeared on the market.
By 1863 forgeries were so common that the book Forged Stamps: How to Detect Them was published and by 1864, forgeries were being produced of both common and scarce stamps from a wide range of issuing countries such as Austria, British Guiana, Finland, India and Spain.
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| War mail forgery Ludwig III. (left). On the right the original. |
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| Left: counterfeit stamp from envelope. Right: genuine stamp. |
