The US Postal Service Inspector General issued a management alert on the problem of counterfeit postage on April 8, 2026. In the introduction of the heavily-redacted report, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) stated:
“This management alert presents issues the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General identified during the Counterfeit Postage Program audit. Our objective is to promptly notify the U.S. Postal Service about an identified deficiency in the detection of counterfeit package labels.”
According to the OIG alert, since 2020, the US Postal Inspection Service (an investigative agency within the Postal Service) noted a significant increase in the creation, sale, and use of counterfeit postage. And in February of 2026, the OIG identified a “significant increase” in the volume of packages with suspected counterfeit labels.
The report explained that counterfeit postage is any marking or indicia that has been made, printed, or otherwise created, without authorization from the Postal Service, that is printed, applied, or otherwise affixed on an article placed in the mail that indicates or represents that valid postage has been paid to mail the article.
“Although the Intercept Process has been in place for three years, the Postal Service has not updated the process to keep up with evolving trends in counterfeit labels,” the OIG’s report stated. And “Without the implementation of further controls, the Intercept Process remains vulnerable to evolving counterfeiting methods, as shown by the rise in the use of counterfeit (redacted).”
It noted that the Postal Service had piloted an update to mail processing equipment to detect and mitigate “counterfeit (redacted)” in January 2026.
In its April 3rd response to the OIG alert, Postal Service management disagreed that it had insufficient controls to detect “counterfeit package labels with (redacted),” asserting that it had the ability to detect those labels, but that its ability to intercept the packages was limited. It agreed that prioritizing detection and interception of such counterfeits was crucial to protecting USPS revenue.
The Postal Service noted it has been working on mitigation efforts along with the USPS Inspection Service since August 2025 and has been testing and enhancing a fraud identification program since January. Its target implementation date to meet the OIG’s recommendation is June 30, 2026.
Postal Service management also agreed with the OIG that the amount of unrecoverable revenue since November 2025 was $46.3 million. The full OIG management alert and USPS response is published on the USPS OIG website.
Gee, I wonder how much of the counterfeit package labels are from people involved with China goods? Seems to me there have been several arrests in the last year involving Chinese here in the U.S.A. and other counties doing this. Search the Internet and you’ll come up with numerious pages of news stories about this going back more than a year ago – just one example below. This is one of the reasons us U.S. citizens have to pay more for postage.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/united-states-files-civil-enforcement-action-and-obtains-temporary-restraining-order
Please clarify. Is this article about counterfeit computer generated labels or counterfeit stamps or both? How much revenue is lost to counterfeit stamps sold at discount from evanescent websites or on eBay and how much is from to fake postage paid mailing labels?
I don’t understand why the Trump Administration can’t go after China on this, as they did with China on fentanyl. Paging WH trade czar Peter Navarro, who went after the UPU terminal dues system that benefited China at US sellers’ expense….. And pass legislation imposing the death penalty or at least long sentences for importing and or selling counterfeit postage, and sanctions on countries that tolerate it. China can easily put a stop to this activity if they wanted to.
Similarly, the USPS could address this problem by making it much harder to use fake stamps and get away with it. The UK and Germany now mainly issue postage so that each individual stamp or label has a unique QR type code square, which makes it easier for those post offices to detect postage labels and stamps that are fraudulent, since no two stamps could legitimately have the same QR code.
Every time I see a fake postage ad running on Facebook I send the details to USPS.Gov…………and yet I’ll see the same ad running weeks later. Each ad usually has dozens (if not hundreds) of comments from people saying how they got their postage and it worked when they used it on their letters etc. It would seem to me to be an easy matter to shut these websites down……………but for some reason……… it isn’t.
And the counterfeit stamps are still rampant. They are still for sale in many different sites and social media. I’ve been told as soon as places like eBay and Facebook wack an ad, more appear.
Fraud from China is rampant. A while ago I bought two folding shelving units on Facebook. Had no idea it was from China. Professional website, responsive to emails. They never sent tracking and when I inquired, I was given a fake delivery form that they were delivered to the opposite coast. Then they went dark. Email discontinued, website gone! A month later the same ads with the same video of an American woman demonstrating the product, same website but all rebranded. Obviously a Chinese scam but Facebook apparently has very loose controls. I alerted them and got no response.
The fake Chinese produced US postage is high quality and even USPS cannot tell it from theirs. Maybe they should hire them for stamp production!