Peter Winter (forger)

Peter Winter

Peter Winter (* allegedly 1941) became internationally known as a stamp forger in philately in the 1990s .

Act

In the sources that report on Winter's career as a postage stamp forger, isolated claims claim that he was trained and originally worked as an opera singer ( tenor ). It is also claimed that in the 1980s, Winter tried to reproduce rarities from a wide range of collecting areas as part of an interdisciplinary study of philosophically differentiated views of the “collecting behavior of people”. What is certain is that Winter subsequently created “collector's items” in a wide variety of collecting directions, and he also created various “new rare stamps” from several philatelic collecting areas. He is said to have often dealt explicitly with collectibles that were previously considered very difficult to forge, and developed new approaches in the process.

Even if the majority of the "Phila collectibles" are certified by Winter as poor quality and many of his products are referred to as " joke articles ", individual objects are said to have achieved a high level of perfection, so that even international experts wrongly attested to the authenticity of some of Winters "new creations" . An example is a successful counterfeit of the Inverted Jenny , a US airmail stamp with an aircraft mistakenly upside down.

For this reason, Winter is referred to in some philately publications as “one of the last great stamp forgers of international standing”. Although no fraudulent intent could be proven in Winter, the stamps he made became the objects of fraudulent activity, as the inscriptions that identified them as reproductions were easy to remove and unsuspecting collectors could be easily deceived.

Peter Winter made the American Philatelic Society (APS) an offer to sell it his inventory for a total of one million US dollars and to cease his counterfeiting activities. Although Winter's sales activities, which were sent shortly afterwards, showed that the association did well to turn down Winter's dubious offer, for many years there were still fake works from the production of Peter Winter (so-called "winter fakes") in relevant file exchanges.

In 1999, Winter claimed to be in possession of a British Guiana 1 ¢ magenta , a stamp that is officially considered to be unique. This stamp was certified as genuine by two European experts, Rolf Roeder and David Feldman, and the British stamp collectors' association, the Royal Philatelic Society, London, found it to be a falsified four-cent stamp as early as 1989.

literature

• Deutsche Briefmarken-Zeitung , issue no.3 from 1988
• Special supplement Markt & Marken - Der Spiegel, No. 22 from 1995
• Stamp Magazine, February 2000
• Philately, No. 335 from May 2005
• Postage stamp mirror, No. 3 from 2007
• Peter Winter - “What can it be?” In: Wolfgang Maaßen: Real or false? That is the question! Counterfeiting and Counterfeiting in Philately . Phil Creativ, Schwalmtal 2003, ISBN 3-932198-48-4 , pages 162 to 169
• Deutsche Briefmarken-Revue issue No. 8/2005, p. 11 f

Web links

• Peter Winter, “Wrong Tones of an Opera Singer” last accessed on May 5, 2013.
• www.phila-kompass.de - Peter Winter - “What can it be?” (PDF; 422 kB) accessed on May 5, 2013.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Der Spiegel , in the "Plagiarism" section, May 29, 1995, last accessed on May 5, 2013.
2. ↑ Schwanke  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Auction house for international philately, last accessed on June 25, 2013.  
3. ↑ Schuyler Rumsey Philatelic Auctions, Inc. , auction house for international philately, last accessed on August 24, 2014.
4. ↑ A forgery only arises through an inadmissible declaration of a copyright and usually implies an intention to fraud, which Winter could not prove, because Winter marked his works (at least in part) with small inscriptions such as " Fake ".
5. ↑ Sheryll Oswald, Peter Winter and the modern German forgeries on ebay , July 28, 2001, last amended on April 7, 2011, last accessed on July 21, 2013.
6. ↑ site with examples of dubious online article from the area Stamps , briefmarken.ag - Your Stamp newspaper , for example, here is a March 27, 2006. EBay advertised stamp Zepplin 4M polar flight from the production of Peter Winter for 190, - Euro. Retrieved June 15, 2013.
7. ↑ website of ebay with currently in the trade full forgeries German. Reich , May 10, 2013, last accessed June 26, 2013.
8. ↑ Sheryll Oswald: Peter Winter and the modern German forgeries on eBay (July 28, 2001)
9. ^ British Guiana 1c, 1856: World rarity or fake? Association of German Philatelists (BDPh) e. V. (PDF, 373 kB)