It may be the stickiest scam on the Internet — a nine-year saga of deceit that has seen thousands of altered postage stamps sold to unwitting collectors on eBay and other Internet auction sites. More ...

The rising cost of stamps has been fuelling an illegal black market where shoppers can buy them on eBay for a quarter of the price. First class stamps have risen from 60p to 67p in the past five years ...

According to the article, various buyers have documented the sale of stamps purchased in poor condition and then cleaned and/or altered in a variety of ways to appear more valuable to collectors. The ...