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Nice Try

The Stamp Collecting Report, I'm Lloyd de Vries. 

It turns out what appeared to be a really rare stamp on a Florida absentee ballot was a 
fake. Most stamp collectors thought so.

"I was fairly confident from the original computer scan that this was a counterfeit."
RUNS :06

Mercer Bristow is the director of expertizing for the American Philatelic Society, the 
nation's biggest stamp collecting organization, which sent him down to Florida. Expertizing 
is using scientific methods and expert knowledge to determine if a stamp is genuine.

One reason stamp collectors were skeptical was it would have been pretty easy to print out 
a copy of one of the Inverted airplane stamps with a computer, although this wasn't done 
that way. 

This counterfeit was printed by the offset or lithograph printing process, while the genuine 
issue was printed in the intaglio process."
RUNS :10

Another reason is that stamp collectors know where practically all the original hundred 
copies of this famous stamp are.

"We've been able to track all of them, except five right now."
RUNS :04

And at two hundred thousand dollars or more each, those stamps are usually well guarded.

Of course, it's possible someone's crazy aunt got into a collection. Then there's the time a 
maid vacuumed up a copy that had fallen out of an album. And of those five missing Jenny 
Inverts....two were stolen and never recovered. So it COULD have happened. But it didn't.

I'm Lloyd de Vries of The Virtual Stamp Club. For more about stamps and stamp collecting, 
visit virtual-stamp-club-dot-com

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