What strikes me most is how crude the imitation stamps are - most aren't even trying to emulate the genuine printing techniques. It's all quantity over quality, trying to minimise the cost of producing counterfeit stamps whilst hoping to sell bulk loads of them to naive (or unscrupulous) customers.
It sounds like the biggest problem is the conflict of interest that the Royal Mail has, since they currently get to keep the fine payments as revenue. They have no direct incentive to stop the sale of counterfeit stamps, let alone deal with a tiny proportion of false-positives from their scanning machines.
Perhaps the answer is for the Royal Mail to be required to forfeit the revenue from fake postage fines, but be absolved of the responsibility to deliver these letters. Therefore, false positives in detection would simply be losses for their reputation, and they can decide, as a private company, whether or not this is an issue for their shareholders.
Personally, I would go the other way, requiring that the Royal Mail always deliver letters with fake stamps without issuing fines, but have proper independent investigations into both the origin of the alleged fakes and the reliability of the scanning machines. This isn't going to happen without an Act of Parliament, unfortunately.
http://www.jolschimke.de/briefmarken-und-ganzsachen/erste-ge...
What strikes me most is how crude the imitation stamps are - most aren't even trying to emulate the genuine printing techniques. It's all quantity over quality, trying to minimise the cost of producing counterfeit stamps whilst hoping to sell bulk loads of them to naive (or unscrupulous) customers.
It sounds like the biggest problem is the conflict of interest that the Royal Mail has, since they currently get to keep the fine payments as revenue. They have no direct incentive to stop the sale of counterfeit stamps, let alone deal with a tiny proportion of false-positives from their scanning machines.
Perhaps the answer is for the Royal Mail to be required to forfeit the revenue from fake postage fines, but be absolved of the responsibility to deliver these letters. Therefore, false positives in detection would simply be losses for their reputation, and they can decide, as a private company, whether or not this is an issue for their shareholders.
Personally, I would go the other way, requiring that the Royal Mail always deliver letters with fake stamps without issuing fines, but have proper independent investigations into both the origin of the alleged fakes and the reliability of the scanning machines. This isn't going to happen without an Act of Parliament, unfortunately.