The United Kingdom has levelled accusations against China, alleging that the Asian superpower is attempting to inundate the British market with counterfeit postage stamps.

This act, reminiscent of industrial sabotage and economic warfare tactics employed during the Second World War, has led to a significant increase in the detection of forged postage stamps in the UK.

The surge in counterfeit stamps has led to unsuspecting customers being charged £5 to receive a letter posted with a fake stamp. Investigations have traced the source of these forgeries to Chinese companies, which are reportedly offering to print up to a million stamps weekly at a minimal cost.

In the UK, postage stamps are typically purchased through the Post Office or other retailers. It is believed that these counterfeit stamps are being supplied to small shops by wholesalers, who then sell them to customers, either knowingly or unknowingly. This scandal emerges just two years after the Royal Mail implemented QR-code type tracking data on stamps to combat counterfeiting. It is speculated that this new system has made it possible to detect these otherwise perfectly printed forgeries.

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A spokesperson for the Communication Workers Union criticised the Royal Mail for its perceived inaction. He accused the postal service of penalising the recipients of fraudulent stamps instead of preventing these forgeries from entering the system. He stated, as reported by The Telegraph, "This appears to be a scam on quite an unprecedented scale... Royal Mail has an obligation not to penalise the customer and to stop it at source and get it sorted rather than pass the burden of the blame to the customer."

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The Royal Mail, on the other hand, has pointed fingers at the UK Border Force, blaming them for the influx of counterfeit stamps. They argue that it is the Border Force's responsibility to intercept contraband.

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Alan Mendoza of the Henry Jackson Society suggested that the mass production of these fake stamps would likely be occurring with, at the very least, the implicit approval of the Chinese Communist Party. He argued that these stamps represent a clear form of economic warfare and called for economic repercussions for China if it fails to curb this activity.

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A representative of the Chinese government dismissed these allegations as "baseless" and "low-level."

This incident harks back to the economic warfare tactics employed during the Second World War, when Britain and Germany printed large quantities of currency to destabilise each other's economies and foster distrust. During this period, Britain and the United States also printed counterfeit German stamps to distribute propaganda to German households. German spies were sometimes unwittingly paid with forged British currency.