Style

In 1869 a group of people decided to create counterfeit Mexican stamps that they would sell to businesses that used large amounts of bulk postage. These people did not harm the average stamp collector. No they harmed the Mexican Government, a much bigger fish in 1869. In fact, if anything, they produced counterfeits that have become a philatelically important part of Mexican postal history.

Nobody knows even today who the forgers were. We can speculate, basing our speculation on certain facts, but quite frankly it would still only be speculation. Whomever the people were, they apparently had access to the Mexican Government Printing Office facility. This is known because the stamps were imprinted using the actual lithographic printing stones that were used to print the production stamps.

As a result of the proliferation of the postal forgeries, the Postal Administration took various steps to eliminate the hemorrhaging. These steps are outlined in several articles and books. Roberto Liera wrote two articles on the subject, one was published in MEXICANA in the July 1991 journal, entitled "Type of Mexico - It's History Set Straight", and in October 1977, "Postal Forgeries of the 1868 Issue". Then in December of 1997 and January of 1998, John Heath's two part article, entitled "The 1868 Issue & the Great Postal Fraud" was printed in MEXICANA, the official MEPSI journal. Plus the handbook published by MEPSI entitled "Mexico, The 1868 Issue, A Specialist Handbook" by John Heath and Doug Stout provides good information about the Tipos, Habilitados and Anotados.

So this web will not dwell so much on the details of the actual fraud, but will more illustrate the stamps that were produced those 140 years ago.

Specialists divide the tipos into 4 periods, which seem to correlate when the forgeries were produced. A quick glance at the district number and the date will tell you which of the 4 periods the stamp should be classified.

1st period		Imprinted with a '69 year
2nd period	district # and year inverted	Imprinted with a '70 year
3rd period	district # and year normal	Imprinted with a '70 year
4th period		Imprinted with a '71 year

This web will also not dwell in the subject of how to detect a postal forgery, there are ample articles and books that will do that. However, the key to the postal forgeries is the district name overprint. The forgers used a different font for the office names, that is normally quite easy to recognize. And, they used different papers mostly, although for some of their printings they may have been successful obtaining production paper that was obviously stolen from the GPO. So the paper becomes an untrustworthy test at some point. Regardless of the paper though, the forgers district names were always different than those used by the offices. So the best method for detection is to become familiar with the fake names. The section in this web for "OFFICES" will illustrate most of the bogus names. Use those to gain a familiarity.