While browsing a collection a dealer sent me to check I found a couple of forged Erivan cancellations. It is always useful to have some examples in order to train the eye and for comparison.

Type 1 Erivan 30 9 20

The first one was quite prominent in the collection. The date figures are way to big and the ink is unusual, too watery. I found no impression where the type character was readable. Where the date was readable it showed always 30.09.1920. All overprints beneath the cancel are fake too. It looks like the ink of overprint and cancel are identical.

Some forgers love to produce cut out pieces to make the forgery more convincing and probably also more valuable for selling.

Type 2 Kohl-Type Erivan

This forgery matchs the so called Kohl type forgeries. The clear outlines of the overprint and cancel are typical.

Type 3 Smudgy Erivan

The cancel is very unclean and ugly. It is easy to see that this is a forgery. The date figures are wrong too. The overprint is one if the “better” forgeries with the second zero not raised above the “ground line” being the easy giveaway.

 Type 4 Thin Erivan

A dangerous forgery. Overall impression: thin lines, watery ink. The date figures show the characteristics of the genuine cancel. The 100r HH overprint is fake too. The 100 Rubles are not bad, just the feet of the “1” tilts to the wrong side, but the HH part is totally different from the genuine one.

 Type 5 Unkown Cancel Type k?

At first the cancel does not look that bad. Especially the left part which is easy to see on the plain background.

But the overprint is fake and that means the cancel can not be genuine.

The zeros (“0”) tilt to the wrong side and the second zero is not rised enough. The “r” is too wide open.