So this is how crappy gold companies like Goldline screw you out of your money:
Click for full-size.
(From The Big Picture, via Gawker)
Philately pays off
For 81 years, it passed through hands as a curiosity — the last 40, it sat in a box in an attic. Then, it was put up for sale on eBay. That’s when the emails started:
Meet me downtown, it reads. I’ll pay a substantial sum of cash.
…
“We were afraid some villain might break in and steal it like in a James Bond movie. One night I woke up in a sweat thinking this is Da Vinci Code stuff and my wife says to me, ‘Get that thing out of my house.’”
Turns out that the item — not a real stamp, but a printer’s proof on paper, made before the actual stamps, was more than a little valuable.
Only nine stamps — made for a commemorative flight across the Atlantic that never made it — survive.
Some are in private hands, others are in the British Library’s stamp collection while a mint copy of one of the semi-official labels is on display in the Smithsonian.
The full story summarized in this Toronto Star report: