China behind flood of fake stamps plaguing Britain

The Royal Mail introduced barcode stamps in 2022 in an effort to put a stop to forgeries that were costing the postal service tens of millions of pounds every year. 

The barcodes are scanned when post arrives at sorting offices and suspicious stamps are then inspected by staff who then declare if the stamp is genuine or fake. Stamp fraud has since fallen 90pc.

Royal Mail insists genuine stamps will never be marked as counterfeit, unlike those printed in China.

The Government last month revealed that China was behind a cyber attack on the Electoral Commission that compromised the data of 40 million voters, and concern in Whitehall that China was behind social media attacks on the Princess of Wales.

Official Royal Mail stamps have been printed by the same family business in Wolverhampton for the past decade. However, more than 8,000 miles away, one factory in China’s third largest city, Shenzhen, claims it employs 39 members of staff and can produce up to one million per week.

Another company in the port city of Quanzhou, in south east China, is selling sheets of 50 first class large barcoded stamps. The listing describes the fake stamps as “mint, new and read [sic] for posting”.

The biggest supplier identified is based in Shanghai. It has numerous listings for different types of barcoded stamps including stamps featuring King Charles first released last March and older iterations which feature the late Queen.

The minimum purchase order is 20,000 stamps which are sold at $0.20 (£0.15) per stamp. However, for orders above 300,000, each stamp costs just $0.05 (£0.04) – representing a 3,275pc markup if it was sold at the Royal Mail retail price of £1.35.

The price of a first class stamp in Britain has doubled since March 2019 when it was just 67p. Since then, there have been seven price rises, culminating in last week’s rise to £1.35 for a first class stamp and 85p for a second class stamp.

Royal Mail said it believes sheets of genuine stamps, which can only be bought and sold in Britain, are being sent to China where they are then copied repeatedly to produce counterfeits in vast quantities. The forgeries are then sent to Britain where they are sold to unsuspecting retailers and consumers.

Alan Mendoza, founder of national security think tank the Henry Jackson Society, said the mass production of forged stamps damaged the British economy by “robbing businesses of revenue”.

He said: “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 given its strict control over the Chinese economy. As such, it’s an obvious form of economic warfare and should be called out for what it is with economic repercussions for China if it does not rein it in.”