A death certificate for Torres' wife and son in Cuba in 1891 was found by the Spanish vice-consul of St. Louis who had cause to examine his luggage.

[2] In about 1862s Torres was an apprentice lithographer when he met the book editor Elia Carlo Usigli (1812–1894) who was also one of the first Italian stamp dealers.

Acceptance by Moens enabled Usigli to place Torres illustrations in the magazines of other dealers such as Arthur Maury, Pierre Mahé, Henry Stafford Smith and Stanley Gibbons so that they were propagated internationally.

[4] By 1871–72, Torres was running a stationery shop in Livorno (Leghorn), on the western coast of Italy, in cooperation with Usigli.

[8] It was Elia Usigli who first sold on as genuine, proofs of illustrations that Torres had prepared for publication, but the pair soon began to collaborate on producing and selling a wide variety of forged stamps.

[11] Back in Spain, at the end of 1874 Torres opened a shop in Barcelona named Centro General Timbrológico Español.

Suspicions that the errors are deliberate are bolstered by changes that appear to be jokes, such as substituting a laughing face for a fleur-de-lis on one stamp.

[19] In 1879, Torres published a world stamp album titled Álbum Ilustrado para sellos de correo.

[20][21] In October 1886, Torres began a European selling trip, starting in Ipswich, on the east coast of England, where his accomplice and translator Attilio Biffo, an Italian waiter working in England, visited the dealers Whitfield King and Co. Stating that he was acting for Torres's alias of Rosendo Fernández, Biffo presented a variety of genuine and fake material, accepting a reduced offer for an immediate payment without expertisation of the items.

[22] In 1890, Torres proposed to the Andorran general council that the tiny state, positioned between France and Spain, issue its first postage stamps.

[24] Christer Brunström has suggested that the use of the word republic may have been a deliberate error on Torres part in order to pander to Andorran republican or independence sentiment.

[24] Andorra did not issue its own postage stamps until the 1920s (Spain) and 1930s (France) when a dual postal system run by those countries was established in the state.

In Galveston, Texas, dealer Vincent Gurdji denounced him to the police who obtained an arrest warrant from the local court.

[27] In 1893–94, Spain was engaged in the Margallo War, centred around the Spanish enclave of Melilla in North Africa which came under attack by local tribesmen.

[28] Torres produced 51 different types of stamp which were supplied to the soldiers who applied them to the envelopes and used them to write home,[28] despite their mail already being free of charge.

[29] In addition, Torres produced extra mail pieces which were sent to his friends and associates and retained many stamps for sale to collectors.

[28] Varro E. Tyler credits the idea for the scheme to the forger Miguel Rodriguez Sanchez, who worked with post office employee Gabriel Jumanez who procured cancellers for the manufactured covers.

[29][30] The Philatelic Journal of America, writing in 1894, also attributed the whole scheme to Sanchez and additionally reprinted in translation the official decree by which the soldiers' mail could have been sent free of charge.

[31] Torres and his collaborators were all arrested in April 1894[29] when they visited the Malaga post office to pick up a fake canceller that they had ordered.