Proxies Sold as Authentic

[Keevy Bogsbury]

I saw this auction (first link below) for what clearly appears to be a fake Mox Sapphire close for $500. The front of the card has the grainy look of an inkjet printer proxy. I've made far better looking proxies myself with my cheap, 10 year old printer (never to sell, never to trade away, and only for personal use as proxies - then I dispose of them via the shredder). The backside image is even worse! It looks smaller than it should be and is very poorly centered (a common difficulty amongst bad proxy makers). It also has a big ink smudge, which is often found on homemade fakes (the ink needs 24 hours to fully set and will smudge very easily for the first 12 hours).

To my surprise, the buyer left him positive feedback! (Could the buyer not tell??) I wish I could say this is the first time I've seen this happen, but as everyone else here has probably noticed, it seems to happen all the time.

Now the same seller is selling another Sapphire, but this time he's even admitting that it's a proxy! It looks exactly like the one he sold for $500! (After all, he printed them both out from the same picture). It also has the same, slightly shrunken, misaligned back.

Fake Sapphire

Proxies by same seller

My question to members here is: how many fakes do you think are floating around in the market right now? Given how easily some people seem to be fooled, I am inclined to think the numbers are huge! Does anyone have any idea what the numbers actually may be? How do you think this will affect the market?

[Doymecca]

I actually love good proxies, I have collected quite a few of them over the years, eventually I will fill a binder with them. In fact if anyone on this board has some good ones they want to sell, send me a scan and maybe we can work something out.

~Andy

[Keevy Bogsbury]

I'm fine with collecting and making proxies for fun. As I mentioned in my post, I have made many for myself. What I have a problem with is when people sell them as the real thing, which seems to happen not so infrequently.

[NeRo]

The picture of the 3 backsides is pretty hilarious. 2 shiny 1 matte - high quality work obviously.

http://www.ebay.at/itm/251118287206
Those corners look way off to me - can anyone tell if those are rebacked?

[berkumps]

The picture of the 3 backsides is pretty hilarious. 2 shiny 1 matte - high quality work obviously.

http://www.ebay.at/itm/251118287206
Those corners look way off to me - can anyone tell if those are rebacked?

Judging by how the backs are centered, and the fronts are off-centered to the left like all CE/IE cards, I'd hazard a guess and say they are indeed rebacked.

[Rainsford]

A long, long, long time ago (probably around 1997/8) some friends and I were speculating there are probably 5-to-1 (fake to real) ratio of the power 9.

A t least one large Canadian group pulled together an offset printer to counterfeit. (They got shut down, I think. Gary - didn't you have some insight?)

I, myself, helped the FBI look into a group in SiliCon Valley trying to set up the same thing.

And that was then. In the mean time ...

If a single group got a press up and running, with good color matching and paper, then it only takes 99 sheets of the Power 9 (plus duals and other nifty things) to double the qty in the field.

We ended up at 5-to-1 (fake to real) as a reasonable guess because we thought someone could probably get 500 sheets run someplace without too much of a problem. (Assuming access, the skill to run a press, cut, and someone to color correct.)

Best regards,

Rainsford

[Keevy Bogsbury]

Yikes...

I think someone on this forum pointed out that perhaps the rarest cards out there are those like summer farmstead, i.e. the worthless rares no one bothered to safeguard.

[mystical_tutor]

A t least one large Canadian group pulled together an offset printer to counterfeit. (They got shut down, I think. Gary - didn't you have some insight?)
Rainsford

With my memory I better not try and help.... LOL. Actually I was under the impression that the lot that came out of Canada were done in China and were connected to the bunch that came out of Hong Kong. I think there was an article in one of the rags of the day (Duelist/Inquest/scrye?) about them with a big picture showing a pile of Sapphires. Most of the ones I have from those days are terrable now as the color has changed and some were off color when I got them. Some are still really nice though.

One thing, though, It was my impression, in those days (circa 2000), that the serious counterfeiters were not putting out Alphas (which could not be legally played and priced much lower in the above rags than beta). Most of the cards I saw were beta or UL.

Good luck

Gary

[Rainsford]

Oh, absolutely! Betas and UL were what was being counterfeited.

[hammr7]

Somewhere I have a couple of Unlimited cards (Gauntlet and Icy Manipulator) that came out of the Canada / Upstate New York offerings ~ 1998. These cards may have darkened a bit, but are as good as any counterfeit I have ever seen. The only easy way to tell they are counterfeit is using the light test and comparing to a real Unlimited card (the fakes pass light, just not quite as much).

I was unaware of the China connection, having been told they came from either Rochester (Kodak) or Syracuse (Xerox), when someone got access to the Central Research equipment from one of the above companies - at a time when those companies had the best reproduction technologies in the world. This batch was all Unlimited, and included the P9, the Dual lands, and some of the other bigger or enigmatic cards from the set, such as the two I have. Batches of these showed up on Ebay in 2000, and again in 2002, from Northeast and Middle Atlantic sellers. In both cases, the cards fooled a number of big dealers and collectors. In both cases, the sellers refunded the money when questioned. In my case they let me keep the cards.

There was another batch of counterfeit cards, which included many Betas as well as some Arabian Nights and even a few Legends, that arrived shortly after 2002 and were rumored to have come out of Malaysia. These cards also made it to Ebay, with sellers from Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. I helped shut down many of the sellers back in the day when you could see who the winner was and e-mail them. You knew it was a fraud when a series of auctions, by one or two sellers and over a week or less, contained 40 or 50 mint copies of a certain rares (and not a single copy of other "equivalent" rares from the same sets).

Eventually Ebay made it impossible to shut down these sellers, by hiding the buyers and stopping individuals from sending e-mails to other Ebayers.

[Keevy Bogsbury]

Has anyone tried looking at some of these (or other high grade) counterfeits under a microscope and comparing them to authentic cards?

[mystical_tutor]

Has anyone tried looking at some of these (or other high grade) counterfeits under a microscope and comparing them to authentic cards?

Nope, but I never needed to. At least not with the ones made circa 2000. A plain old ruler in 1/32" scale (the old 3 sided engineering ruler that probably none of you have ever seen works fine) along with a regular 4x reading glass is all you need. Helps if you have a real card of the same sheet. Many of the ones I saw then did not even have the "bevel edge" on the UL.

Long ways a real card has a print area that is about 1/32" larger than the fake card and the quality of the printing can be seen with a normal reading glass.

Gary