China flooding Britain with fake stamps in act of ‘economic warfare’

Conservative MP Bob Seely said: “It is pretty appalling. It is incredibly brazen and it begs the question what are the Chinese authorities doing about this and why aren’t they cracking down, unless this is yet more undeclared conflict against the West.”

“China allows [this criminality] because it damages our society and it damages our institutions and this is yet another example of that.”

Tom Keatinge, of defence and security think tank The Royal United Services Institute, said while he believed it was more likely a Chinese organised crime group has “identified a vulnerability” in our stamps, the “acid test will be how the Chinese state responds to this information being brought to their attention”.

China is also believed to be behind a rise in counterfeit stamps that have infiltrated the United States Postal Service (USPS). Last February, USPS warned the public to be “alert” to a rise in counterfeit stamps being sold online. In one case, US border protection seized $2.5m (£1.9m) worth of counterfeit stamps that had come from China.

The USPS now reserves the right to open and destroy any post that has been sent using counterfeit postage.

But the union that represents postmasters and postmen in the UK has warned Royal Mail not to go down a similar path.

Andy Furey, of the Communication Workers Union, said post workers were facing a rise in aggression after the fake stamp penalty was increased from £2.50 to £5 last October.

He said: “This appears to be a scam on quite an unprecedented scale and it’s not good for postal workers who are knocking on people’s doors saying ‘we are going to surcharge you because this stamp is counterfeit’.

“Royal Mail has an obligation not to penalise the customer and to stop it at source and get it sorted rather than pass the burden of the blame to the customer.

“There is a sense of inertia about this from Royal Mail. I wonder if they are in denial about the scale of this [scam] and they are hoping it goes away.”