Unauthorized Issues ... or something else?

(I'm still working on this one.)

It is not always clear which stamps are official government issues and which ones are produced by other companies or organizations.  The big catalogs will occasionally mention "unofficial" issues or remove listings after new information becomes available, or refuse to list certain issues as being "illegal".  The Scott catalog recently removed most of the stamps of Afghanistan from the 1990s as being condemned by the government as illegal.  This is a tricky subject.  I mean, the stamps still exist and might even be more rare than the official issues.  Most of the bogus issues across the decades have been designed to appeal to topical collectors, and a collector of dogs on stamps might still want that pictured item whether it was official or not.  But it's still a picture selected or designed to draw someone's interest and try to get their money.  Sometimes the country itself is made up.  But people still buy them.  If nobody bought them, these shady dealers would have no motivation to create and list more of them.

Whether the item was printed to defraud a government or to defraud the collectors, they are still fraudulent.  If you buy them, you are supporting con artists and encouraging them to keep making more.

 Illegal issues from Udmurtia and Karabakh.

A country's stamps are a matter of national pride and cultural identity.  I can't imagine waking up one day and deciding I should start printing my own stamps from Estonia without permission, or launch a new set of Elvis stamps without permission from the estate holders.  The people who do so obviously have a different concept of legality.  And we should not support this just to get pretty pictures we can stick in our collections.  Are we here to collect stamps or just stickers?

I started this post, which looks like it will now expand into a regular series on this blog, because I found some Somali Republic and Udmurtia sheets in a stack of cat topicals that I was scanning and planning to post on HipStamp.  But after looking into it and refreshing my mind on the complex history of these things, I decided to just throw them in a box.  I don't care how cute the cats are, they can sit in my boxes of extras as a reminder.  I got them when trading stamps with a collector in Poland about 15 years ago.  But it would be wrong for me to pass them off as real stamps, ask for money for them, and promote the crooks who printed them.

As a glimpse at the scale of the problem, here is the Colnect page for Illegal issues which lists over 69,000 known illegal items, often with good notes on why they are in the illegal category.  And for most of those countries listed, I can flash through hundred more in my head that nobody has posted yet.  This site has images of a few thousand more illegal stamps, mostly from Russian republics and made-up places, with a lot of information in between, everything you see there is from the 1990s to now, an ocean of crazy.

There are a lot of possible terms for these: bogus issues, fantasy issues, unauthorized issues, unofficial issues, illegal issues, fraudulent issues.  I just wish the catalogs gave a better guide to where the individual items fall.  An appendix listing the completely made-up countries would be nice.  And within a country, kudos for delisting those modern Afghanistan issues, but there are very few of these notes.  Sadly, I think most of the modern ones fall under illegal issues.  There is no justification for them other than to print money.

So as I weed out more and more of this junk from my own collection, I will write posts covering as many areas as I can.  And when I can look at the remaining pages of unlisted stamps and say "these served a purpose" or "these have some historical reason for being," I will feel much better.

I would like to see the big stamp seller sites stop allowing rubbish and focus on the real, verifiable core of our hobby.  The quantity of fakes is worse now (2000-2022 fake issues) than any other decade before.  When a third of all modern stamps fall under a shadow of fraud, it devalues the entire hobby for all of us.

Butterflies from Nagaland, 1970s, except it's not an independent nation with stamps. Fraud against collectors.

So, let's stop beating around the bush and calling the illegal stamps what they really are.  Now, the issue is, how to separate them from the real issues worth having.

This is part of an ongoing series.