PLAIN CITY, Weber County — Weddings are a time of joy and celebration, filled with love and happiness — but for a mother of the bride, they can also bring a bit of stress.
The costs associated with weddings, from the venue to the cake and everything in between, can quickly add up. Even something as simple as sending out invitations can put a strain on your wallet.
It was while trying to ease some of this financial stress that Margo Loftus came across an ad for discount stamps.
What perfect timing!
Loftus quickly ordered the stamps, paying $118 for $292 worth. But when they arrived, what seemed like a good deal turned into a new source of anxiety.
Loftus soon found out that her credit card company flagged the transaction, suspecting the site might be a scam.
“I need a way to find out if they’re good,” Loftus said, fearing she might be caught up in something much bigger.
“They said you can take them to the post office, but I was afraid to do that. I’ve seen too many crime shows. So I thought I was going to prison if I showed up at the post office with counterfeit stamps,” she said.
Her solution? To turn to me for help.
“I thought I’d just Get Gephardt and find out what’s right and what’s not,” she told me.
Get Gephardt took the stamps to Brook Robinson, a U.S. Postal Inspector in Utah, who carefully examined them.
After a thorough inspection, Robinson could not tell if they were real or fake by simply looking at them.
“I can’t tell,” Robinson said. “No postal employee could look at these and know that they’re good.”
Robinson explained that stamp fraud is on the rise, with the Postal Service losing between $15 million to $18 million a year due to counterfeit stamps. This led me to ask: What if I were caught using a fake stamp?
“You could get in trouble,” Robinson confirmed.
Since stamps are considered currency, using counterfeit ones could result in stiff penalties, much like attempting to pass off fake bills.
However, Robinson also pointed out that many people who fall victim to these scams are just that — victims, out money for worthless products.
Robinson says that they typically contact the customer to ask where the stamps were purchased and work to shut down the fraudulent website and seize the bogus stamps from the supplier.
In February, Postal Inspectors seized $118,000 worth of counterfeit stamps at the Chicago International Mail Branch.
Robinson said that they’ve even raided warehouses that store large amounts of fake stamps.
While it may be difficult for postal inspectors to identify counterfeit stamps on the spot, there are methods used to identify them.
“There is some machinery that will detect it,” Robinson explained, referencing the technology used by the Postal Service to flag suspect stamps, which are then sent to a lab in Virginia for further inspection.
The U.S. Postal Inspection Service advises consumers to only buy stamps from approved postal providers to ensure authenticity.
So, what does this all mean for Loftus? Well, it seems unlikely that she will end up in jail — but she should be cautious. No one should sell stamps at a 60% discount, and using those stamps might lead to all of her wedding invitations being flagged and sent to the East Coast for further inspection.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.