Attempts to interest law enforcement
Upon realizing that the stamp scammer could evade eBay security with impunity, Kopecky and others stepped up efforts to get law enforcement involved.

For the first time, he said, they had eBay’s support.

Kopecky said the auction site’s security chief, Rob Chestnut, responded aggressively after becoming aware that the site’s stamp category was full of fraud, creating a “stamp watch committee” in to monitor auctions and appointing Kopecky as a member.

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Kopecky said Chestnut also assigned a member of site’s security squad — the “trust and safety team” — to work with him to try and find a law enforcement agency willing to prosecute the mastermind of the scam.

After documenting at least $450,000 in fraudulent sales, eBay approached the U.S. Postal Inspection Service with records linking numerous eBay accounts used in the fraud to the former dealer, but couldn’t persuade the agency to prosecute, according to Kopecky and officials of the philatelic society.

Durzy, the eBay spokesman, said he could not confirm that the site's security team had approached law enforcement concerning the stamp scam, citing the site’s privacy policy. He acknowledged, however, that creation of the stamp watch committee was "related to fraud."

Kopecky, philatelic society officials and Patrick Lemon, a retired FBI agent who also is a stamp collector, also sought to interest law enforcement in the case, including postal inspectors, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York and the New York Attorney General’s Office.

In each instance, they said, they were rebuffed.

Ex-FBI agent ‘very disappointed’
“I’m personally very disappointed with all facets of law enforcement in regard to this situation,” said Lemon, who handled numerous stamp fraud investigations during his FBI career. “There are a lot of people doing it, but this guy is by far the most prolific and most notorious.”

Robert Lamb, who recently retired as executive director of the philatelic society, said he didn’t believe his organization’s complaints were taken seriously.

“Law enforcement agencies tend to think of stamps as something that children collect and not understand that we’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars” in fraudulent sales, said Lamb, who also is a former assistant secretary of state and ambassador to Cyprus.

Thomas Moehring, a postal inspector in New York, confirmed that both he and his predecessor had looked into the case and had determined that some of the post office boxes used in connection with the eBay sales were indeed opened by the former stamp dealer. But he said that they concluded that the former dealer was “flying just below the radar of what’s prosecutable”

“In this specific case … it wouldn’t meet the guidelines for the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York,” Moehring told MSNBC.com. “They have finite resources and to go in and say ‘Maybe this guy took a $60 stamp and was able to sell it for $80,’ that’s just not going to fly.”

He also said that even if prosecutors did bring a case, it would be tough to win because of the subtlety of many of the alterations and the fact that the auctions often carried disclaimers stating that the purchaser was buying the goods “as is.”

“It would be a battle of the experts,” he said. “Combined with the disclaimers, it would be very, very difficult.”

Greg West, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Northern District of New York, said he was unfamiliar with the case in question, but confirmed that federal prosecutors do have guidelines that help them determine whether to pursue a case.

‘We have leeway’
"They’re not absolute, and in the case of a persistent fraud, we have leeway," he said. "... They are exactly what we characterize them as — guidelines."

West referred inquiries about the stamp case to two investigators in the agency's Albany office who did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesman for the New York Attorney General’s Office, who spoke with MSNBC.com on condition of anonymity, denied that the agency had rejected the case, saying that an investigation remains open.

"We are continuing to gather information and trying to determine how to proceed," he said.

Lemon, the retired FBI agent, said that as a former lawman he understands the reluctance to take on a case where the victims are spread far and wide and individually didn’t lose large amounts of money.

“The FBI obviously has lots of other priorities, and local jurisdictions have no interest because small dollar amounts and the case reaches outside their jurisdiction,” he said.

Nevertheless, he said, it galls him that no agency will go after a crook who is causing grievous harm to a hobby that is enjoyed by millions of collectors around the world.

“All they would have to do is make an example out of a couple people and it would come to a screeching halt,” Lemon said.

Kopecky made a similar point, saying prosecutors will never find a better vehicle for sending an anti-fraud message.

“If what I’ve assembled here doesn’t justify prosecution of some sort, they might as well give up policing this, because there will never be better evidence,” he said.