OT royal mail postage stamp being reused

[john west]

I had a stamp stuck on an envelope that was not Franked and so thought had never been used. So i cut around it and stuck it to a new envelope and posted it. but i got a note from the post office that i needed to go in and pay extra. As an experiment i used a stamp that i knew for sure had never been used but had been stuck on an envelope. So i again cut around it and posted it to myself and it arrived.

Does the post office have some way of detecting if a stamp had been used through royal mail even though there is no visible sign of Frank Marks?

[Fredxx]

I thought they used UV spots over the stamp to cancel it.

Some time ago I reused a DVD case by putting a stamp on an inner sleeve, which then could be wiped clean after every use!

[Nightjar]

Yes. I think it is based upon markings visible under UV light.

[Andy Burns]

I have some vague re-collection of that too.

[ss]

I believe it is illegal to reuse, however maybe the envelope paper is causing the issue.....

quote.... "I have tried this on a stamp to check the results. You spray a little WD40 on the back of the paper the stamp is stuck to. When the paper starts to go translucent you gently ease the stamp of the paper, drop the stamp on a little talcum powder to dry it off. "

[alan_m]

They have used phosphor bands on stamps for at least 4 decades to help prevent fraud. The royal mail suggests that that they can detect stamps that have been washed (franking removed) by the degradation in this phosphor. In this case the stamp hadn't been washed.

Could it have been been the wrong postage amount for the size of the envelope that resulted in the additional payment rather than the reuse of a stamp?

[Brian Gaff]

Well you just proved that they do.

I bet your name is on their dodgy persons list now.

The obvious thing is to franc with a sort of ink that glows in UV this will then not obscure the wonderful pictures on stamps. It also means that its harder for the public to know if its been sitting around in a post office sack for weeks. I'm not a fan of Royal Mail at the moment, They are pretty poor at getting things reliably to where they are going in a timely manner. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Some nut at the post office in a sw London town had a bit of a fit some weeks ago and started sticking post paid stickers over the windows in our reusable pouches even though they were Articles for the Blind free post. The meant that the pouch was no longer reusable without a lot of work by our volunteers getting the glue and bits of paper off the pouch so we could remove the address label to turn it back to outgoing. I'm sure the person meant well, covering up the slot where the label could be removed but had not thought it through. Needless to say we had a moan as there were 12 pouches to clean and it took hours, Each pouch costs a fiver after all. Brian

[ARW]

You are tighter than a Yorkshireman:-)

Are you a Scot?

[Max Demian]

You have pouches? That sound rather grand: like diplomatic pouches.

[Jethro_uk]

Does anyone remember the (alleged) scam of using copper sulphate (?) to clean phonecards for reuse?

[FMurtz]

Steam them off don't cut around.

[Nightjar]

That worked with gummed stamps. It is less effective with self-adhesive ones.

[Byron Mccorbie]

Solvents like lighter fuel and white spirits applied to the back, or around the stamp on the paper that the stamp is stuck on.. (or around and on top of stamp if its on thick card)... ease off with a thin butter knife, dry face down on kitchen roll/tissue with the cutouts horizontal... store on grease proof paper.. use a glue stick when reapplying. Alcohol can work too. There are reports in 2020 that some post offices are using invisible UV ink franking machines so even if you do the repplication very successfully, a UV light will show its been used/franked and the sender is rumbled. Cost and fine maybe be sent to sender or recepient. You take a chance a that they dont use detectors diligently or ubiquitously.

[alan_m]

Royal mail have been using UV detectable ink during sorting for many decades.

UK Stamps have had phosphor bands for the past 60 years - to identify the value of the stamp.

[Chris Hogg]

My late wife fell foul of that a decade or so ago when she re-used a stamp that had not been franked.

But one wonders why the PO do it, use invisible but UV detectable ink, I mean. If they're going to use an ink of any type, why not make it visible for all to see? It's as if they're deliberately encouraging people to re-use apparently unfranked stamps and then catching them out.

[alan_m]

Probably so the machines can see the information but not obscure any information that the postman requires to deliver the item.

These days with QR codes instead of stamps there seems to be a time limit on when the self printed QR code would be accepted. It used to be a few days but was increased during the pandemic.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

WEll, it looks better for a start of course. You can clearly actually see the stamp older francing marks often obliterated the stamp. Also automatic detection is far easier when you are outside of the visible range. Incidentally, isn't fraud against the Home Owners Club posting terms and conditions, oor is the shop unmanned?

Brian

[Peter Johnson]

The phosphor lines are visible. Hold a (blue) 2nd class stamp to the light, obliquely, and you'll see a single line down the middle, two lines, left and right on other values. The function was to ditinguish the 2nd class mail. I think the machines used to assume that any item with more than one stamp was 1st class but they might be cleverer than that now. I think non-2nd class commemoratives and special issies have an all over coating which can only be seen by a uv light but there aren't many of those used these days.