The Post Office minister, Kevin Hollinrake, has called on Royal Mail to investigate allegations that factories in China are mass-producing fake British stamps for export.
Use of a counterfeit stamp can result in a £5 fine but realistic fakes are being sold online and bought unwittingly by the public and smaller retailers.
Four Chinese suppliers offering to print up to 1m counterfeit Royal Mail stamps a week for as little as 4p each were identified by the Telegraph. The Mail reported seeing Chinese websites offering sheets of 50 counterfeit stamps for buyers willing to commit to a minimum purchase of 20,000. The stamps included an imitation of the new barcodes.
The apparent scale of the operation has prompted the suggestion that this may be sanctioned by the Chinese state and intended as a form of “economic warfare”.
Hollinrake said he would work with Royal Mail and retailers to investigate. He told the Mail: “It is key to prevent counterfeit stamps entering our supply chain in the UK. The Royal Mail must do everything possible to prevent counterfeits entering our circulation and must establish where they are coming from and how they are entering our marketplace.”
Alan Mendoza, of the Henry Jackson Society, a neoconservative thinktank, told the Telegraph: “It is inconceivable that a large-scale counterfeit operation like this could be occurring without the knowledge and therefore tacit approval of the Chinese Communist party. It’s an obvious form of economic warfare.”
Fake stamps are becoming so realistic that even figures at the Royal Mail admit they find it hard to tell the difference on sight. David Gold, the director of external affairs and policy at Royal Mail, told BBC One’s Watchdog programme: “The reality is counterfeiters are now so good at what they do that even I – and I work for Royal Mail – I can’t tell the difference just by looking at them.”
The fakes are often entering the supply chain via smaller shops which are not required to buy directly from Royal Mail and instead source from wholesalers in bulk. According to the Telegraph, the fakes are sold on widely used online stores as well as websites that mimic the official Royal Mail site.
Stamps bought directly from the Post Office are not affected as these are all made in a factory in Wolverhampton.
Royal Mail added barcodes to stamps in 2022 as it was losing tens of millions of pounds every year to counterfeits.
A Royal Mail spokesperson said: “We are working hard to remove counterfeit stamps from circulation. We regularly monitor online marketplaces to detect suspicious activity, such as sales of heavily discounted stamps, and work closely with retailers and law enforcement agencies to identify those who produce counterfeit stamps.
“We work closely with a number of police forces across the country and in recent cases we have recovered stamps with a retail value of over £250,000.”
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in London told the Times the claims of possible state involvement were “absurd”. He said: “It is totally ridiculous, absurd and ill-intentional. How could one imagine a sovereign country triggers war by bringing fake stamps? If this case really happened, [the] first thing to do is to have [a] thorough investigation over the internal supply chain, instead of pursuing the attention of [the] media.”
