Ending in a few days, on Probstein Auctions, are a couple of BGS authenticated autographs, that do not sit right with me. At this point in time, unless proven otherwise, I’m 100% these are some of the best forgeries we have seen in the hobby to date.
Below are some snippets of what I find wrong with the Crystal Charizard, but I also believe the other BGS authenticated slabs (Pikachu, Charizard, Venusaur) are also forgeries.
Whenever assessing if an autograph is authentic, there’s always room for inconsistency, since no two autographs are 100% alike. In this case howeveer, there are too many things either off or fully wrong for it to be authentic.
This example below is just flat out wrong and so bad, in so many ways. I’m not sure who is authenticating at BGS, but it appears they’ll slab just about anything.
There is a video recording of every item that was signed that day. The card on the right is easily identifiable and was signed at the Q&A panel on the 26th. The card on the left was not signed at the event.
The personalization has two issues with it. Nobody received the personalization “Ash”, and the person who made this didn’t have a reference for Himemaru’s English handwriting. That’s not what it looks like.
I’m also seeing an odd similarity between the “Ash” on the Reshiram and the “Ash” on the Charizard a couple posts earlier. The only letter that differs between them is the lowercase “s”.
I won’t bother with this Charizard above as it’s a much more obvious forgery.
Having directly seen hundreds of Mr. Saitou’s autograph over the years, it appears to me that there are enough factors noted above to make them at least “questionable” and shouldn’t have passed authentication without additional evidence. It could be down to variance, but as those variances stack up, the burden of proof should also increase.
