Giovanni (Jean) de Sperati was an Italian stamp forger. Robson Lowe considered him an artist and even professional stamp authenticators of his time attested to the genuineness of his work. Sperati created what he called a Livre d'Or which he boasted of in his autobiography and which contained 239 favourable opinions as to the genuineness of his forgeries from numerous experts, including Dr. Edward Diena and the Royal Philatelic Society London.
In general, philatelic fakes and forgeries are labels that look like postage stamps but have been produced to deceive or defraud. Learning to identify these can be a challenging branch of philately.
Robert Brisco Earée (1846–1928) was an English priest and philatelist who was known for his studies of philatelic fakes and forgeries.
Evelyn Arthur Smythies, CIE, was a distinguished forester and philatelist, born of British parents in India. Smythies was an expert on the ecology of Uttarakhand and Nepal. His careful studies of the earliest postage stamps of India, Jammu and Kashmir, Nepal, and Canada produced groundbreaking handbooks on which philatelists rely, even today.
Russian stamps have been extensively forged. Both rare and common stamps have been forged and certain stamps, for instance those of the Army of the North, are more common forged than genuine.
François Fournier was a stamp forger who thought of himself as a creator of "art objects" and a friend of the little man.
Peter Winter is a stamp reproducer. He also trained as an opera singer.
Raoul Charles de Thuin (1890–1975) was a prolific stamp forger and dealer who was originally a citizen of Belgium but who operated from Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico, of which country he eventually became a naturalised citizen. De Thuin's work was considered so dangerous to philately that his tools and stock were purchased by the American Philatelic Society in 1966 in order to curtail his activities.
Erasmo Oneglia (1853–1934) was an Italian printer, born in Turin, who was also a successful stamp forger in the 1890s and early 1900s.
Adrian Albert Jurgens was a South African philatelist and signatory to the Roll of Distinguished Philatelists of Southern Africa in 1948 and the Roll of Distinguished Philatelists in Great Britain in 1952.
Varro Eugene Tyler, of Auburn, Nebraska, was an American professor of pharmacognosy and philatelist who specialized in the study of forged postage stamps and the forgers who created them.
This is a survey of postage stamps and postal history of the German colonies and part of the postage stamps and postal history of Germany, as well as those of the individual countries and territories concerned.
Louis-Henri Mercier, whose real name was Henri Goegg, was a stamp forger operating from Geneva, Switzerland, whose business formed the foundation for the much more successful forger François Fournier.
Nino Imperato, normally known just as N. Imperato, was a stamp forger based in Genoa, Italy in the early 1920s.
Harold Treherne of Brighton, England, was a stamp forger notable for his forgeries of the stamps of India and Australia who was known as The Brighton forger and his works as Brighton forgeries.
Edward Loines Pemberton was a pioneering philatelist and stamp dealer who was a leading advocate of the scientific school of philately and a founding member of The Philatelic Society, London, now The Royal Philatelic Society London. Pemberton was entered on the Roll of Distinguished Philatelists in 1921 as one of the fathers of philately. He was born in New York City but educated in Britain by relatives when his parents died shortly after his birth. His son, Percival Loines Pemberton (1875-1949) was also an eminent philatelist.
A. Alisaffi was a stamp dealer and forger from Istanbul known for his reproductions of the Small and Large Hermes Head stamps of Greece. Material produced by Alisaffi was included on the representative album of forgeries prepared by the Union Philatelique de Genève after François Fournier's death in 1927.
Julius Goldner was a nineteenth-century wholesale stamp dealer in Hamburg known for producing large quantities of "reprints" of the stamps of Hamburg and other states.
Oswald Schroeder was a partner in the German printers Schroeder & Naumann of Leipzig, who in the 1870s and 1880s produced forgeries of classic stamps so good that they found their way into the best collections of the day and in some cases formed the reference from which other forgers worked.
