Question On Mint With Gum, Unused & Regummed

There are varying levels of forgers, so are expertisers. A good expertiser would expose a lousy forger, likewise, a good forger can fool a lousy expertiser, it is like a chicken and egg problem, so we should just leave it at that.

Reperfing, currently, is a virtual guarantee that alteration will be detected. Often, all you need is a specialty gauge or trained eyeballs to detect a reperf. The fakers would need perforating equipment that produces holes of exactly the same size and shape as the real equipment to sneak by an expert -- possible in theory, but not too likely at the moment as that's real expensive. (As 3-D printing increases in resolution, and comes down in price, especially for harder material, this might change, however!)

Regumming, as floortrader and hy-brasil indicate, is a different story: perf teeth and valleys are not the obstacle to modern sophisticated regummers that they were in the old days. Good regumming jobs nowadays can be super-dangerous when they're redistributing existing OG or replacing missing gum with OG from a similar stamp; they can and do sneak by the experts sometimes.

It may seem counterintuitive, but for these reasons, as time goes on, older certs, in some circumstances, might become desirable. If gum or perfs are convincingly fakeable (but only relatively recently) then a cert stating "NH original gum" or verifying rare perf varieties, pre-dating any of the modern faking techniques, is potentially more valuable than a new cert.

Older certs done without benefit of subsequent discoveries and information or the latest technology/equipment might be preferable? Now that is a new one. Usually people complain that the older certs did not provide enough information/commentary. Which is it?

When an old cert is the only evidence you can have that the stamp was not recently regummed? Absolutely, at least if you actually care about the gum, anyway.

You still want a new cert to have somebody make sure nothing else was done to the stamp, but the old one is valuable in a way the new cert isn't.

How would an old cert be evidence of a regum?

It's not evidence of a regum. An old cert is like provenance. It's evidence of a certain condition, according to an expert, at a certain time.

If it is possible to invisibly regum a stamp (and this is already absolutely possible for some classics in some cases, but AFAIK may only be possible for some issues), it is impossible to expertise that gum. An expert can say it's not one of the crude, detectable regum jobs, but can't actually rule out the sophisticated invisible regum.

If somebody looked at the stamp before such alterations were possible, and ascertained that the gum was original and undisturbed at that time, that at least tells you that it wasn't a hinged stamp somebody bought last year and regummed to sell to you.

It isn't a guarantee, of course. The gum might have been accidentally washed off between the time the stamp was certified and now, and the invisible regum might have been done to replace it. No expertise can guarantee that the stamp is OG NH, once undetectable regums are possible. And of course, it may be possible to forge some old certs themselves.

But in that world, there will be stamps with attested, verifiable evidence of having been OG NH, and there will be other stamps with no such evidence. If people in that future have any interest in valuing gum, the never hinged stamps with provenance (old certs) will most likely sell for higher prices than the stamps without.

TBH, I think the real long-term market response in the case of rampant sophisticated regums will be simply an OG premium around zero.

But consider the case of future sophisticated reperfs. This is more important, because reperfs can change the stamp's identification entirely.

Reperfing is an even better example of why this is important -- currently it is not possible to invisibly reperf a stamp, but it's something, as I indicated, that might become possible in the near-to-medium future. There would be no reason for somebody to reperf a (sound) rare perf variety, so a genuine old cert would be proof that the stamp was actually the rare perf variety. If no old documentation existed? Well, oops, we can't tell if it's really that stamp or not. Might have been reperfed recently to look like the rare variety. Who knows?

If you are familiar with the art collecting world, there's a similar dynamic there. Provenance becomes more and more important in the face of sophisticated forgeries, and old expert's certificates are one form of verifiable provenance.

I think it all depends on how high tech the expertisers want to go. If you had watched the popular BBC documentary 'Fake or Fortune' in the past, you would appreciate the sophisticated technology being used to detect fake art such as chemical testing for paint pigments, laser technology to uncover hidden layers etc. That same technology can actually be used to detect any sort of stamp forgery, but I do not believe stamp expertisers often need to go that far to determine a tampered stamp.