A super experienced eBayer for 15 years nearly lost his shirt, also chasing a supposed £900 "bargain" - buying stamps that simply did not exist, as you can see.

Myself or any real dealer would gladly pay TEN times that for a genuine mint 1913 Roo set.

Excuse the horrible photo - that is all the seller listed on eBay. Another reason alarm bells should have been ringing SUPER loudly.

I do not think they were even real Roos - just the fuzzy colour photocopy fakes on white office paper, that you can buy all day long on ebay for $15 a set.

Facially those look pretty good, but of course have no watermarks, and are allegedly stamped “REPLICA” on the reverse.

eBayer “de66” jumped in and bought the Roos - David Elsmore, experienced Exhibitor, 15 year eBay member, and fellow “Stamp News” columnist.

Astute readers are ahead of me here I think.  Yep.  Elsmore paid up, and the stamps never arrived.

Seller took his money and ran chuckling into the distance, causing Dave to waste hours wrestling with PayPal etc for a refund.

A full month after the sale closed, “de66” left eBay feedback saying: “A £900 sting - BEWARE”. Gave same feedback re the non-existent NZ stamps he “bought”.

Elsmore confirmed on stampboards that he managed weeks later to get his money refunded for these, and the New Zealand stamp “bargains” from same seller.

He was very LUCKY that PayPal refunded.  No-one likes to see anyone dudded out of £1000.

Had the UK seller mailed him a Registered envelope filled with a few sheets of white paper, there would NOT be a £1,000+ PayPal refund I am thinking. Food for thought.

The Ireland 60p seller “murrayheadhelen” in this case does seem legit, as good feedback was eventually left.  But what a RISK to take with $1,000+.

eBay now hides/disguises the buyer ID handles of the genius top bidder, as fair play and transparency is not in eBay’s interest, in any way.

That makes them less money, as their fee is based on FINAL price, and the old system allowed the armies of Shill Bidders to be more readily identified.

For years eBay has allowed rampant shill bidding to occur with impunity, even when they are clearly advised it is occurring, and the Shill accounts identified to them.

Shill bidding – i.e. having several of your own fake accounts push up the price paid by the genuine bidders, creates far more revenue for eBay, and that is the company motto.

In days of more transparency, the naive or over-trusting high bidder could be pre-warned by others, to open their Registered Letter in full view of their Postmaster etc, in case it contained a sheet of blank white paper, as occurs more and more these days.

eBay today do not care one iota if stamp collectors are ripped off with stamp fakes, forgeries, regums, and non-received goods etc.

They have pocketed their high fees from the seller's proceeds, and that seems to be their sole mission in life these days.

Stampboards.com has 100s of messages posted a month re specific stamp seller rip-offs occurring on ebay. Not every bidder reads them, sadly.

eBay is a great place to chase up $5 topical sets and so on, and stray values from sets etc you are missing, or obscure items or covers etc.

But for 4 figure stamp pieces, eBay is in general NOT the place to be buying - especially not off newbie sellers, with zero feedback.

This 1919 Ross Smith Vignette sheet shown nearby was offered on eBay in March for $A4,500 by an aptly named Adelaide seller “imoo-vabull”

A screaming bargain right?  After all, I sold a superb MUH example to a client last year for $A15,000.

Well surprise, surprise - this Ross Smith Vignette offered on eBay was EXACTLY the same one as sold to my client.

I’d been talking to my NSW client only the day before, and no mention of any recent stamp Burglaries from him!

This con-man eBay seller “imoo-vabull” simply stole my photo shown nearby off the internet, and listed it up as if he owned it, hoping to suck in a Bargain Hunting Bunny.

tinyurl.com/RossSmith is where stampboards members exposed him, and reading his pathetic attempts to deny it, and ham-fisted attempts to swap over photos etc, is a scary lesson to all.

In this case the vigilant eyes of stampboarders nabbed the scam before it took place, but sometimes it is too late to do that.

Google the EXACT eBay seller name as well as check the feedback. Often they have been mentioned negatively in dispatches on global bulletin boards. 

Do not get me wrong, there are plenty of legit stamp sellers on eBay, and checking feedback of sellers is essential for all bidders.

Indeed I make large sums each year as a de-facto middle man or wholesaler to many such sellers, as I do not have the time or inclination to break down large lots and collections etc.

The KOSHER sellers hate the near non-enforced eBay “rules” on Shill Bidding, fake material and non-existent material, as it hurts confidence in them.

One catalogue I got in the mail recently is well worth a mention, as most readers of this magazine collect and/or stock these areas.

This new “Western Pacific” Edition is in a new far more sensible format – now like the SG GB “Concise” or SG Australia etc. The previous large quarto size was silly.

This catalogue provides a comprehensive priced listing of the stamps issued by the countries of the Western Pacific.

Local retail is $A65, in line with the UK shipped price, and for over 300 pages in full colour, it is a bargain. I've sold quite a few.

Countries covered include - Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

The listings up to 1970 are generally extracted from the 2014 Commonwealth and British Empire Stamps catalogue. 

Later issues have been updated and priced for this edition, and are found nowhere else in the SG listings.

Inverted watermarks, shades, plate flaws, missing colours and major errors have often had large price increases over the last Edition many years back.

Listings are from the earliest issues, up to recent, with the level of detail familiar to users of the SG "Part 1" British Commonwealth listings. 

Fiji has some considerable changes, with new errors on early issues added, and NZ stamps used in Fanning and Washington Islands are now listed and priced.

The complex modern surcharged 2006-2013 Fiji Definitives have been totally over-hauled and re-vamped.

Listings on these are exhaustive, and MANY are valued £100+, so owning this book is worth it for those alone, as I see them all the time, and never knew what was what.  Some are $1, and others $200.

Things like recent PNG has pages of new issues cat £15 or so apiece, mint or used - would YOU have known that?

The catalogue contains:

• Fiji
• Gilbert and Ellice Is.
• Kiribati
• Nauru
• New Guinea (German New Guinea, Australian Occupation)
• Papua (British New Guinea)
• Papua New Guinea
• Solomon Islands
• Tonga (and Niuafo’ou)
• Tuvalu 
• New Hebrides
• Vanuatu

If you need to check a QE2 inverted watermark - often £100s apiece, missing colour, or stamp booklet etc, you MUST own this volume.

I suspect no home on earth has had a swimming pool modelled upon a postage stamp design?

Dealer Rodney Perry did just that, and had an architect design his massive new home around a swimming pool, based on an Australian stamp he admires.

The pool as you can see in nearby photo, was made into the outline of the famous Aborigine “One Pound Jimmy” stamp silhouette.

The home was Rod and Madel’s first new build, and the national Fairfax newspaper chain ran a story on it earlier this year headed - “The House That Stamps Built” - tinyurl.com/Alkira

The Perry’s have the home for sale, and as Rod says in that article, they plan to travel the world when the sale is completed.

I will not get tacky and touch on the asking price, but unless you have a lazy 8 figures or so at your disposal, it may not be quite in your league!

“Alkira” looks quite spectacular as I need not mention, and Rod says it is sited on about 75 acres of Daintree Rainforest in far North Queensland.

The selling agent states the asking price is around what it cost the Perry’s for the land, and then building the massive home.

Rod said obtaining permits alone took a year, with the design necessitating water to be pumped from a nearby creek to a man-made lake the house seemingly “floats” on.

tinyurl.com/AlkiraSB is the stampboards thread Rod started on the unique property. With a ton of room inside, and a private beach nearby, sounds like quite a getaway from the madding crowds! 

Exactly as I typed this column Tropical Cyclone Ita was about to bear down on far North Queensland, so fingers crossed it stays well out of the area of “Alkira” - and all other readers.  Sounds like a huge one.

Rod Perry has always had interesting choices in accommodation, over many decades.

For much of the 1980s, his auction catalogues had a vignette of his location/home on the covers and folders and bidding sheets - the “Ravenswood” Mansion in Melbourne inner-city Ivanhoe.

Perry later made a most astute purchase, of the four story Victorian Gothic “Old Tramways Building” building in 669-675 Bourke Street, right down by the Spencer Street Station.

Rod and family lived on the top floor, and I recall visiting Geoff Kellow’s wonderful research library man-cave, which occupied almost another entire floor, with masses of compactus filing systems.

There was also Rod’s stamp retail set-up on a lower floor.  He told me once what an electrician’s bill was to re-wire it all “to code” ran to, and it was the GDP of a small country!

Public records show that building last changed hands at about $8 million in latter 2008, after an earlier sale that year fell through.

It was on a very large 923 square metre block – the building went WAY back, and was indeed on a far larger land footprint than the suburban home block most readers live in!

The “One Pound Jimmy” story is a tragic but interesting one. The 2/6d stamp with inverted watermark is one of Australia’s rarest post war issues. Cat in current SG is £5,500 in used.

I spent days researching the life of “One Pound Jimmy” - full text is here:

tinyurl.com/JimmyStamp - a truly interesting read, if I say so myself. 

“Australian Geographic” magazine are looking at turning that into a longer story I was advised this month.  

It ranges from the account of a white vigilante posse who murdered his family in the outback, to a son who sold an Aboriginal art painting for $2.4 million.

That painting was bought by the Commonwealth Bank in 1977 for $6,000, and over the next 20 or so years it “got lost”.

It ended up on the wall in their staff training room cafeteria. In 1996 it appeared in an obscure art catalogue, with an estimated value of $A3,000 to $A5,000.

“Jimmy” was illiterate, and died penniless as far as we know, in April 1965 whilst on “walkabout”, in remote desert country outside Alice Springs.

Stamp dealers buy Estate lots all the time, where folks have stored spares and duplicates in old cigarette and tobacco tins, and cigar boxes etc.

I often get dozens of such boxes and tins in oldie lots, in some cases stored away 50, 75 or 100 years back.

They are the right size for stamps, near everyone smoked, and guys of that generation were the "waste not" thinkers, and threw NOTHING away!

I sold an old wooden box full of dozens of 100 year old Ogden's "Guinea Gold" and similar type and era, fancy metal tobacco tins.

They were stuffed full of mostly unopened bundles of 100 South Australia and States stamps mostly, from a century and more back.

I just do not have time these days to mess around squinting and peering at such lots for hours for cancels or watermarks etc!

The only one I opened had a few ½d green South Australian blocks 4 in there with nice central Squared Circle cancels, as you can see.

The sheet selvedge he had wrapped that in has a red "CA" monogram ... maybe of a 1d red KGV Australia 1913 - retail $100s had he left it on the stamp!

A member of stampboards bought them at a modest sum for the stamps, to check for postmarks etc, and he was happy with the contents, as they’d been unchecked for over a Century.

Someone in the UK later asked me for his contact details, so he could make an offer for the manky old tins, that I'd allowed absolutely zero for.

They did a deal this month I was advised, at $A120 for just 4 of the empty and tatty old tins, and both seemed most happy with that. 

All except me, as I had no idea there was any value in tins in such cruddy, rusted out stuff.  “Knowledge Is Power” - and this time I lost out!

A good dealer friend collects all things to do with HMAS Sydney - mostly stamps and medals etc, but any other interesting items that catch his eye.

He saw the nearby little rusted out tobacco tin offered on ebay with a low start price, and thought he’d like it.

Start price was only $12 and seller guessed the tin was 1930s. (It was actually WW1 era.) It had the HMAS Sydney ship image on lid of box as you can see.

The box was in pretty appalling rusted condition, inside especially, but attracted 27 bids and went for $A2,264.98 for seller “decodetails”

Only on ebay. You can buy a £2 First Watermark Kangaroo stamp used for that kind of money - literally!

Auction was February 16, and lot number was 261394084443 for anyone interested. Ebay seller was “decodetails” who must have wondered what on earth went on!

He was obviously clearing out an oldie’s house, and near all the other ancient tat was selling for a few dollars an item in most cases.

tinyurl.com/SydneyTin is the direct ebay link – it sold for $A2,265. The rusted old tin received an amazing 27 bids.   

I started a stampboards poll on tinyurl.com/StampTin asking for folks to guess the value of the tin and of course most guessed at a few $$s as you can see!

Many more photos and comments on that discussion link - tinyurl.com/StampTin - take a look!