The Stamp Collecting Report
A radio feature by Lloyd de Vries

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Too good to be true.

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

You may have seen the ads on Facebook: One hundred Forever flag stamps for half the 55 dollars you’d pay at the post office. If you click on the link, you’ll go to a website with the Postal Service name at the top.

The red flags should go up right away. First, a hundred stamps now will cost you 63 dollars, not 55. The actual web address isn’t U-S-P-S-dot-com. And the Postal Service never sells its stamps to ANYONE at a discount.

If you get anything at all for your money, they will be counterfeits — fake stamps. They’re missing certain markers and the printing is bad. In the past, the Postal Service would return your mail to you because it didn’t have enough postage. Now, the agency wants permission to just throw away mail with counterfeit stamps. You won’t know your bill payment wasn’t delivered until you get the shutoff notice.

And that’s NOT stamp collecting. I’m Lloyd de Vries of The Virtual Stamp Club.

The Stamp Collecting Report began in 1997 as a 60-second weekly feature distributed to CBS Radio Network stations by CBS News as part of its Weekend Feature Package. Eventually, longer versions were recorded for this website and a Christian evangelical shortwave service. The Report ended its CBS run in 2017 with only six repeats in some 1,040 weeks. It is now produced solely for The Virtual Stamp Club on an occasional basis.

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