Royal Mail have added a new stamp scanner to the Royal Mail app that will enable customers to check if a stamp is a known counterfeit.
This comes on the back of considerable pressures on Royal Mail which led to them stop the imposing hugely unfair fines of innocent recipients of a letter with a fake stamp, something recipients had no control over. Royal Mail already switched to fining senders in April this year, but their biggest issue is how to prevent genuine stamps being mis-identified as fakes.
The stamp scanner has been designed to provide extra reassurance to customers who may be unsure about whether a stamp is counterfeit or not. Customers can use the app to check whether it is a known counterfeit, preventing them from inadvertently becoming victims of fraud.
Once the barcode on the stamp is scanned, the customer will be told whether it is scanning as a recognised counterfeit or not. If customers did not purchase their stamps from Royal Mail, the Post Office, or another reputable High Street outlet, they are advised to scan their stamps on each occasion before use.
This stamp scanner doesn’t solve the issue of those to claim to have purchased stamps from a Post Office, or in a few cases even stamps from Royal Mail were supposedly identified as fake.
Royal Mail did say that they will bring back the £5 charges for recipients of fake stamps once an online scanner was made available which they claim will be capable of determining if a stamp is genuine, so watch this space and see if the unfair fines return – it’s hardly your fault if someone else sends you a letter with a fake stamp so fining recipients is something we couldn’t disagree with more.
