Hey, had an account shared with me a couple of times this week on Instagram as their collection at face value looks pretty incredible.
Looking a little closer though there is something shady going on as half the cards posted have been altered with AI or have cert numbers that do not match the PSA or BGS database. I am not sure what the motivation behind this is but I can only presume it isn’t innocent.
I highly recommend that anyone buying through social media takes extra time to look into any cards in detail and doesn’t take things at face value as this particular account “poketime23” is getting a lot of attention.
An example where the cert number does not match the card. I was not sure if it was an 8 or a 9 on the end so check both. I also tried a 6 instead of a zero which also didnt match.
The reason I did was because half of the cards on the page are real. It seems to be a mixture of both. I also saw people in the comments asking to buy cards which was concerning!
Just a bad use of AI to enhance the photo imo, prolly the SMM has no idea on how to use AI or just uses a shit ton of AI.
The cards match the ones seen in this video, from a quick search they are related to a luxury watches store known as Roma Time which looks fine.
Personally, I have no idea if they’re trustworthy and who they are, but I’d say the photos are results of ignorance and poor use of AI rather than something shady.
When I started selling on eBay in 2012 it was generally accepted that on your ‘ban list’ of countries that couldn’t view or purchase your listings you would have places that were active warzones like Afghanistan, Somalia, Congo etc. and then Italy as well.
It has a long history of being a country with a higher proportion of scam activity on any platform. Mail scams, false chargebacks, returns with the wrong item sent back.
AI typically refuses to duplicate copyrighted material. I was lazy and tried to get chatgpt to generate “action photos” of my 10 lego dragonights but it refused. It also wouldnt make any images with pokemon but there are tricks around it, like when i made my son a birthday card i asked chatgpt to create a large silver winged bird that definitely wasnt lugia.
I recently pivoted to only purchasing high-end when the PSA label consists solely of AI garbled alpha numeric characters. No strong preference if I’m purchasing from an Italian seller or elsewhere.
A lot of shenanigans go on in Italy. Many large TCG stores and experienced collectors do not buy from / sell to Italy because of the country’s rampant and extensive history with TCG collectible scams.
This isn’t to say that Italians are bad people or scammers, but that Italy disproportionately contains the largest number of TCG scammers in Europe. This trend first started with MTG decades ago, but has seemed to expand to other TCGs especially in the past 5 years.
Here’s a large story from 2023 concerning 439k euros. And that’s chump change to what has occurred in the MTG space over the years.
Unfortunately, these long-standing scam rings have tainted the name of an entire country. Hope this helps to provide context.
