Hialeah forgeries

The Hialeah forgeries are a large group of recent forgeries originating from that town in Florida. They were first sold on eBay in 1999-2004 by seller "atdinvest", also using "cclan", "futete" and under other usernames.

The stamp forgeries are printed by color laser printer, often using low-resolution scans and will appear crude if you have seen the genuine. These have included scarce to rare stamps, gummed, sometimes imperf and sometimes perfed. They are in rather garish colors on bright modern paper betraying their printing method, and are not even always the correct size of genuine stamps. If there is any doubt, examination with a magnifier should show the spray typical of laser printing.

Overprints including errors were produced by the same source, as were forged cancels. Curiously, they were not reported to be done by laser printer. The forgeries are done using rubber stamps instead of the metal type used on the genuine stamps. They are almost always crookedly applied. The ink of the Hialeah forgeries all soak into and through the paper very clearly, being very modern water-based inks bought off-the-shelf for rubber stamps. The cancels can be inaccurate, sometimes with impossible dates of use.

As bad as these are, with so much stamp buying done online, it can sometimes be hard to tell these forgeries from genuine. Hialeah forgeries continue to appear on the secondary market and there was apparently at least one successor business using some of the same methods and materials or at least selling some of the remaining stock of "atdinvest".

 File:Liberia Hialeah forgery.jpg|This forgery lacks the detail of the genuine design, plus the overprint is printed at the same time as the design instead of being typographed on the original stamp. 