Last week, a Russian seller listed this lot in ebay. It didn't sell the first time he listed it and had it relisted again. In the description, it says that the collection covers the British Commonwealth countries, organised from Aden to Zululand.

There are 3 parts in the collection, the first part consists of mostly of mint stamps from 1840-1955 in 90 volumes of album. This is estimated at £1.55 Million based on Stanley Gibbons 2010 catalogue. The second part is the used stamps particularly strong on the Queen Victoria, North Borneo and Western Australia and is estimated £0.32 Million. The third part consists of postal covers and stationaries said to be from as early as 1720-1955, and is estimated at $0.4 million.

Now to the most important question - Is this whole thing a reliable business or is it just one of the biggest scams ever attempted in ebay? The seller put a but it now price of $880,000 and starting the bid for $800,000. But from the seller's feedback of merely 9 and the fact that the owner would not ship anywhere and requires the buyer to go to Moscow for local pick-up, raise some suspicions to say the least.

The owner provided about 10,000 pictures here. I only looked at the North Borneo, Labuan, Sarawak, Brunei and Malaya stamps and to be fair, the stamps are just perfect and some are exquisitely rare! It is possible that somehow, someone in Russia really has such a great collection, but who knows what would happen once you click the "Buy It Now" button and send your payment? This particular auction has also been discussed more thoroughly in Stampboards.com.

I don't know much about the other countries collection and I'm only interested in the British Borneo and to a little extent, the Malaya. So I went to look for these countries among the collection. There are literally thousands upon thousands of pictures provided and if you have an old computer, you'll risk crashing your machine in no time. Anyway, here's some of the pictures for the North Borneo and Labuan collection:

To look for more pictures click below:

1. Mint North Borneo & Labuan collection starting here.

2. Used and CTOs N. Borneo and Labuan starting here.

3. All other stamps in the collection here.

I've been waiting since last week to see if there's any wealthy bidder or buyer who has a spare $800,000 for this collection but nobody bided so far. I certainly don't have that much fund to begin with unless I can steal the CT scan or the MRI scan in my hospital and sell it in ebay for a fraction of it's original value. :) But then again, even if I manage to get the money, I'll still be hesitant to bid for the lot...So I'll stick with what's normal rather than an unpromising venture.