Last week at the Papermoney fair in Valkenburg, a collector came to my table with a 25 Gulden note from the Netherlands Indies with an unidentified stamp on the obverse. The text of the stamp read the two words “YERNIE” and “TIGO”. I couldn’t give an instant answer about the background of this stamp. I had never seen this text before and I was convinced these words were neither Dutch nor Indonesian.
All of a sudden, when typing the text into google translate, I had a EUREKA moment. The text should have read “VERNIETIGD” (destroyed). It seems that someone not aware of the Dutch Language has copied the text from a note with an original stamp, but did not spell the word correctly. I have seen several authentic stamps with the wording “VERNIETIGD” and indeed sometimes the first and last character were not stamped very clearly and could easily be misinterpreted. I guess a non-Dutch speaking forger succeeded to add value to a common note by adding a possible rare stamp, and – unfortunately – convinced a collector to pay for it.