iraq-stamps.com

This is always interesting, an old 1960s label/stamp to collect funding for the palestinian resistance, I have featured one of the stamps in this post, this is another one which I have not seen before, it is on eBay at the moment, I recommend this purchase.

I have noticed that the same Bogus Iraq FDCs I reported about here, are being sold again on eBay by the user 4wstamps which I featured in a previous post

Try to avoid these items.

Due to the artistamps I have running out, I have completely changed the shop items for sale. The stamps are now only sold in collections, I only have 3 items for sale at the moment

1. 24 sets of artistamps (the most complete collection I have now)
2. 22 sets of artistamps
3. 15 sets of artistamps

have a look.

Well I don’t know whether to be happy or sad, I guess I am more happy at this news.

I see a new set of stamps issued by the Iraq Postal Authority called No To Terrorism, and they are very similar to the designs of the artistamps I made in a set called “NO”.

See for your selves

NEW Official Iraqi Issue

Iraq-stamps.com artistamps issue

I have been monitoring this user’s items for some time now and I have found the same junk being sold by this user as the other users that I have mentioned on this website.

Please be aware that stamps which have colours changing or missing, or parts of stamps missing are at the most forgeries and at the least deliberately introduced actions or damaged stamps, they are not genuine errors as such.

Examples being sold today by this seller include

these are very easy changes to the stamps, there are a number of methods to achieve this including exposure to sun light for some time, or using diluted bleach or other techniques which are more sophisticated.

The user has the following line in his adverts, All the items I list is authentic and there is no forgeries, I always stand behind the items I sell, which is a dangerous thing to say.

I challenge this user to find any authority which will verify the authenticity of these errors. The sad situation is that he is selling them for a lot of money.

There are other items that he is selling that are very suspecious but I will not list them here because if someone is trying to sell these stamps then I will not trust any item from them any more.

Thanks to all the people that bought the FDCs from the shop over the months that passed.
All the FDCs have now been sold, and there will not be made again, so please do not ask for them as I genuinely do not have any more.

This will be the case with the artistamps themselves soon, so if you need to buy for yourself or a second spare set please do so quickly.

I need to update the shop area to reflect the changes, I do not have all the artistamps shown in the shop area, if you buy something I do not have then I will refund the money to you or offer you something different.

I do not have any plans for more artistamps, but if you have any new ideas for stamps subjects, use the contact form (see the link in the navigation, top of this page) to get in touch.

This is an article I stumbled on while doing a bit of research into stamps forgery, things like fading and change colours in stamps. It is from the Telegraph newspaper but its an old interesting story.

Here is the link.

Here is the translated story in Arabic

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Well the answer is yes, here are the statistics which I have collected from eBay today:

On the UK eBay site, there are less than 150 philatelic items for sale with any Iraq connection. Of those, only 10 have bids at this moment. That’s a 7% chance of anyone bidding on an item.

On the USA eBay site, there are less than 350 philatelic items for sale with any Iraq connection, only 35 have bids at this moment. That’s a 10% chance anyone bidding on an item.

On the Australian eBay site, there are less than 30 philatelic items for sale with any Iraq connection, NONE have bids at this moment. That’s a 0% chance anyone bidding on an item.

In my experience, these are the worse figures for a long time and shows a remarkable slowdown.

The slowdown could be the result of a number of reasons, one of them is eBay fees especially with such a low successful sale rate as mentioned above. The second reason would be that the items themselves are not of interest or good quality, there is a lot of rubbish being advertised, especially fake errors which are not worth the paper they are printed on. The third reason maybe the un-reasonable prices that sellers are charging for items.

But I believe the main reason is that there are less buyers at the moment because after all, stamps collecting is an expensive hobby and the cost of living is rising sharply and people would not be able to sustain their hobby demands any more.

I have had a couple of emails from people (who are either the ones I mentioned in previous articles or their friends) claiming that my attack on people that sell fake Iraqi stamps as either errors or supposed to be genuine is not fair and that I am not sure if these stamps are actually fake.

Well, I take pride in being an Iraqi stamps collector and I will not tolerate people taking advantage of others that may not realise they are buying fake items.

So if those I named in my articles or their friends or any body can prove to me that the stamps I have flagged up to be fake are actually REAL then I will post an apology. Until that time, I will keep making people aware of these items and who sells them.

If you want to sell fake Iraqi stamps, its not a problem as long as you label it as fake and not fool people into thinking they are buying this rare item which no one has seen before. There are people that make it their business to alter stamps and sell them on as rare errors.

There are a couple of more sellers on eBay who are have started selling those fake items and if I see them continuing then they will be next.

here are some of the items that this user sells which are all fakes but he sells them as genuine errors.