U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels

I am pretty sure I bought from a seller using this (or something similar) on eBay. It sent me down a rabbit hole of reading about this type of scam that exploded earlier this year: https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2026-04/...

Here's how it went down:

https://www.ebay.com/fdbk/feedback_profile/theperfectpart

Note that they’ve sold so much that even 1k neutral ratings are barely registering - they have “100% positive feedback”

I bought a cheap tool from this seller on ebay. Tracking number was provided showing my town as the destination. About four days later, I get an unprompted ebay message from the seller: “I monitor all my shipments and sometimes there are problems so I’m proactively sending you a new one, here’s a new tracking number.”

The original tracking number showed a message I’d never seen before “Item seized - counterfeit postage”. The new tracking number showed postage that had been bought back in January, but never entered the mailstream. Huh. I suspect that buys them time while they re-ship.

I did eventually get the item after another tracking number was provided.

My suspicion is that the seller uses counterfit USPS postage on 'x' number of packages to juice their margins. If you look at the neutral reviews, you can see a pattern — slow postage, lost package, had to replace, blah blah. Look at the positives — rave reviews at how fast things are arriving. Probably because the seller is “paying” for higher end postage via scamming the USPS.

And only when they get caught by USPS do they need to re-ship an item. They must get away with it enough to make it worthwhile

USPS "forever stamps" are (still?) being openly sold on Aliexpress and would be even harder to track.

I would love to know how this worked. Is there a hacked credential somewhere allowing for legit, but otherwise unpaid labels? Are they stolen CCs? Something else?

So the USPS delivered these packages?

There's no verification built into a USPS label?

It says that the perp is Pakistani, and that he's been charged, but not that he's been arrested -- so he's presumably still free in Pakistan.

I hear that normally what the FBI would try in such cases is to lure people onto US or extraditable territory. IIRC there were some rogue Chinese chemists, who owned companies that sold fentanyl intermediates and were under secret indictment in the US, who were "invited to a VIP academic conference in Hawaii" and then arrested as soon as their flight landed.

Seems clear that this Pakistani is a bit more circumspect.

Come to think of it, who knows how many counterfeit postage stamps are in circulation? https://mailtheft.uspis.gov/

UPS is also full of holes. No verifications whatsoever.

You can purchase a label from a reseller and then ship using that label to a different place at a different weight several times. Battled with this at a previous job.

This is labels not stamps correct? How is that even possible?

Not sure if I should be horrified or impressed. That's an insane amount of postage labels sold.

I wonder how many were returned to sender.

>Akram is charged with one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and to make and sell counterfeit postage stamps, five counts of making and selling counterfeit postage stamp labels, and four counts of wire fraud.

i would love more insight into how they come up with the number of charges. why five counts of making/selling counterfeit postage stamp labels instead of 1 charge that covers all 5 million, or 5 million charges, etc.

[dead]

[flagged]

[flagged]