Editor's Note: In today’s Sunday feature, a surreal read from the American heartland intersecting the corridors of our largest technology companies, the United States Postal Service, and a wild culture of Chinese scam artists running more or less unchecked across the internet. It is a weirdly… charming tale? Of crime, modernity, and civic decay. But also hope. River Page reports — enjoy.

-Solana

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Richard McPheeters has no idea what I’m talking about. The Oklahoma native has been in the coin business since 1968. He was part of the commission that designed the Oklahoma centennial quarter in 2007, and made headlines in the local paper a few years ago when he offered $10,000 for a rare penny he needed to complete his collection. Now, he’s on the phone with a reporter from Miami asking him about a website that’s hijacked the identity of his business to sell fake stamps from China. He tells me that he used to deal in stamps too, but doesn’t much anymore “because the stamp business is so poor right now.” In any case, he says he doesn’t have a website, and complained that the online directories still list his business in Claremont as “Tulsa Coin and Stamp,” even though he left Tulsa some years ago and deals coins under his own name in Claremont now. He doesn’t know why a website is selling stamps online under the name of his old business, or why they’re claiming to be shipping from his store’s address. “I’m pretty well known here in Oklahoma,” he chuckles, “I’m not sure why they’d be doin’ that.” 

Of course, the people who are running the site have probably never been to Oklahoma. TulsaStamps.com is just one of dozens of websites selling fraudulent stamps — usually manufactured in China — that I found through Google Shopping ads by searching “stamps.” There are many more on Facebook, eBay, and elsewhere. Unlike legitimate stamp dealers, which usually focus on rare, old stamps meant for collectors and sold at a markup, these fraudulent stamp companies usually sell Forever Stamps, meant to be used as postage. Often they’re sold in bulk at prices much lower than their current value (66 cents each, as of this writing).

These websites sometimes assume the identities of real Americans and real American businesses, as is the case here. Tulsa Stamps uses Mr. McPheeters’ (former) business name, and his business address, although they aren’t very sophisticated about it. On its website, directly below its Google Maps listing that shows Mr. McPheeters’ address, is the name of a company called Chengdu Yibei Trading Co., Ltd., a manufacturer of sunglasses — and assumedly counterfeit stamps — located in Sichuan, China. 

The United States Postal Service, which lost $2.5 billion last quarter alone, knows that postage fraud is a problem. They’ve committed to “fighting back” by adopting a new rule wherein they throw away items that are mailed using counterfeit postage, as opposed to return them with an explanation that the postage is counterfeit, like they previously did. This means that people who are both most likely to fall for online scams and to pay their bills by mail, particularly the elderly, won’t know why their mail isn’t being delivered. With late fees and interest, things could quickly spiral out of control. The new rule doesn’t “fight” postage fraud at all, it just minimizes some of the costs associated with dealing with it.

That is, if USPS is able to determine that the postage is fake. Since the 1960s, stamps have been “tagged” with a phosphorescent coating that makes them glow under shortwave UV light, which triggers the cancellation of stamps during the mail-sorting process. However, in the summer of 2022, more sophisticated counterfeits from China with phosphorescent tagging started to appear on the market, and they seem to be proliferating. TulsaStamps.com even addresses this in their FAQ section under the clumsy subheading: “Why stamp use Phosphor Tagged Paper?” If their stamps do indeed use phosphorescent tagging, it's likely they would pass through the mail system undetected. It’s unclear how much money fake stamps cost USPS every year, but the UK — a much smaller country which recently added a barcode to their stamps to protect against forgeries — estimated that the problem cost Royal Mail “tens of millions” of pounds a year.

It isn’t just fake Forever Stamps. Before 2020, Chinese vendors reported that sending small items to the United States, like a pair of earrings, cost about 9 cents — for context, sending your next door neighbor a letter would have cost 55 cents. All in all the United States was losing between $300 million to $500 million dollars per year delivering Chinese goods to American buyers — a massive giveaway to Chinese businesses that put American ones at a disadvantage. In 2019, the Trump administration aggressively pressured the Universal Postal Union — which governs international mail rates — into changing the rates for US-bound packages from China.

But after the subsidy was taken away, some Chinese vendors stole it back. Between November 1, 2022 and April 30, 2023, a Chinese woman in Walnut, California, was arrested after shipping over 9 million packages on behalf of Chinese e-commerce vendors using fake postage, costing the USPS over $60 million. It’s likely that the real number is much larger, as her husband and business partner had fled the US in November 2019 after being questioned by postal inspectors.

If USPS, which just got a much needed $107 billion taxpayer bailout last year, lost $60 million in just six months to one unscrupulous Chinese operation that had been on its radar for three years, God knows how much they are losing to similar scams they haven’t even uncovered yet. Enforcement seems incredibly lax. Although the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) — the Postal Service’s law enforcement wing — maintains an email address for reporting fake postage, these mail cops don’t seem too keen on pursuing the leads the public provides them. John Crudele of the New York Post wrote that when he tried to raise the alarm about a local, in-person counterfeit stamp operation, he was shrugged off by postal inspectors. “But what would you like us to do? We can’t stop the machines every time we detect a fake,” they told him. Crudele wrote: 

What I wanted was for them to go with me to the mom-and-pop grocery stores where these fake stamps were being sold — often at a discount — and find out who was producing them. We even had a good idea where some of the production was being done.

The USPS inspectors just weren’t interested.

This was in 2018, four years before Chinese manufacturers started producing stamps with phosphorescent tagging en masse. If USPS wasn’t willing to crack down when they could easily detect fake postage, they certainly aren’t going to do so when it’s hard. It’s a wonder why they maintain a hotline at all. Within 20 minutes of accidently finding fake stamps through a Google ad, I was able to identify both the Chinese manufacturer of the stamps, the owner of the American business whose identity they had hijacked, and contact information for each. The website domain is registered through a third-party anonymizer service, but in all likelihood investigators could just subpoena the company for payment information to unmask the name of the owner. On sites like eBay, which maintain seller information as well as tracking for packages, this process would be even easier. Since China is a non-extradition country, it might be difficult to deal with Chinese selling fake stamps abroad, but USPIS could weed out the US-based distributors they work with if it was willing to put even minimal effort into enforcing the law. A few five-year prison sentences could go a long way in deterring unscrupulous Chinese away from what is now one of the easiest scams in America. 

I’ll end by addressing the inevitable “who cares” response. Despite having just written an entire article criticizing it, I like the Postal Service and so do most Americans. It’s the second most popular government agency we have, right below the National Park Service. It’s easy to understand why. Despite its flaws, USPS is one of the few government agencies that more or less functions as advertised — the mail comes every day. Every dollar Chinese scammers take is a dollar that law abiding Americans have to cover, either through increased prices or taxpayer bailouts. It's an open-air robbery happening on one of the most trafficked parts of the internet and nobody seems to care. It’s demoralizing to watch.

The Postal Service was founded by the Second Continental Congress. It’s our oldest institution, even older than the Constitution itself. Through disastrous trade deals, the federal government has already given the Chinese our industrial base, and it’s sat more or less idly by as they’ve stolen intellectual property from American companies and filled our streets with fentanyl. The Chinese have scammed and robbed this country ten ways to sundown with such incredible ease that you can hardly blame them for embracing the opportunity. If merely for the sake of national dignity, could we at least get their hands off the Post Office?

USPIS did not respond to our request for an interview.

-River Page