Welcome to the forums, and sorry if you feel like the forums are offending you in some way, but I assure you no one is doing that.
If you browse the forums enough, you would know that each member types in its own way, and while Cullers may seem like he has a hidden agenda based on his “reaction”, I can assure you he’s just replying normally with informative posts with a hint of sarcasm.
The main point he’s trying to make is the importance in what he’s saying. No counterfeiter would try that hard into faking Pokemon cards because there’s no financial benefit to it.
Pokemon cards are very expensive and hard to fake, and it would be a hefty investment for making counterfeit cards, let alone making fake PSA counterfeit pokemon cards. Furthermore, anyone who has intermediate experience in the hobby can tell a “good” fake card instantly, and anybody who has beginner experience in the hobby can tell a “bad” fake card instantly. Seriously, those are laughably bad. I would say the times when you require more professional experience is if the case has been tampered, scratches on the card after encapsulating, card trimming, fake 1st edition stamps, etc. No one has yet to be stumped by a 100% fake counterfeit card as of yet in the Pokemon hobby.
However, let’s assume your scenario where Team Rocket decided to fund a counterfeiter with a 100% perfect PSA Pokemon Card replicating machine. This would entail:
-
A perfect factory print machine that prints perfect pokemon cards that are in the 1999s (since those are where most of the valuable card lies), which already is different from current printing standards of Pokemon cards since 1999s Pokemon TCG was controlled by WOTC and the illustrator etc. has different backs/probably different printing standards than what they have now.
-
A perfect PSA card encapsulating device.
-
The right cardboard stock for Pokemon Cards
-
The right plastic cases for PSA encapsulations
-
Having the correct serial numbers for the grade you’re assigning to the card.
Now let’s just assume you are still trying to make a profit but your front cost is sunk and not counted for since it’s sponsored by Team Rocket.
You made yourself a perfect Pokemon Illustrator.
The question now is, how many can you sell before people start being suspicious of what you have? Not even counting the fact that red flags would be sprung almost immediately as soon as a rare trophy card pops up, but what are the chances of you trying to sell to a low knowledgeable collector who is willing to drop like 50k+ on a card? The answer is, probably at most 1. Not only would it be suspicious to already pass off 1 PSA high end card, but passing off 2 with the same serial is practically impossible. That would mean that you would need a database log of all PSA cert numbers of high end trophy cards, which not only by itself is a hard feat, but eventually you will bump into a collector who can see that their card is being sold and alert PSA for counterfeiting.
Furthermore, top trophy cards like the Big 3 trophy cards and illustrators have such a small population that even if you manage to have all serial numbers of them in the PSA database and made perfect duplications that you can sell, there is a finite amount that you can sell. I would say all the big end trophy cards ALL TOGETHER have less than a population of 100. Even including all charizards, or any valuable cards worth more than 5000$, this population at the moment is less than 1000 in the PSA database.
Now after all this complicated scheme, how much money can you make off of all this? A few million? Now if you were willing to spend all this time and money to invest into this scheme, why the hell would you choose Pokemon and not just make much easier counterfeits…like money. In the USA alone, counterfeit money circulated every year is between 70 to 200 million dollars, meaning if you invested all this scheme to fake money instead, it would not only be much more profitable, but much less detectable than fake Pokemon cards. The market for Pokemon cards is so much less liquid than money, and much easier to detect as the collectors who buy these cards usually know what they are doing when collecting and buying.
Now another question you would probably have in regards to this is what if Pokemon cards increase in value, won’t fakes be more prominent? Now that is a definite possibility, but it’s still not even close to happening, because:
- Fakes are still super easy to detect, as no one can replicate perfect fakes even close to the quality of it being detectable
- There are other collectibles that are much easier to fake (like yugioh) for mass print
- No fake pokemon card has yet been approved by PSA (aside from 1 I think, but it was pointed out immediately and PSA paid the buyer back in full)
- PSA regularly updates its cases, so counterfeiters need to catch up to that too. If you are wary, just buy cards in new cases.
After even all this, you can still point to stuff like “but this painting has been faked”, so it will hit Pokemon cards etc. etc.
With painting or other high end collectibles now worth millions, if Pokemon reaches that high, counterfeiters will also face even much harder challenges in delivering these counterfeit goods.
- Selling counterfeit goods worth millions when caught guarantees you jail time/fraud, or being sued
- Paintings are backed by nobody, since the artist died so there isn’t much copyright infringement issues whereas Pokemon cards are backed by at least two Public corporations that most likely wont bankrupt anytime soon so prepared to be sued to oblivion if you make a huge Pokemon counterfeit scandal happen
- These PSA cards are heavily tracked by the community and unlike older collectibles prior to the internet age, these can be pointed back to select owners and pretty hard to pass off without alerting someone in the community.
- Factory created items are much harder to fake without the proper equipment, and those equipment are usually worth millions. With two companies at play here, Pokemon cards and PSA encapsulation, you will be doubling the cost of capital in order to make these fakes.
I hope this answers your question thoroughly. I know you are trying to judge most of posts by emotional reasoning behind the posts, but some of us are reacting harshly not because it’s an emotional reaction, but more because most of us know about the nuances of creating perfect fakes and we have this great community that can help us detect them when we are unsure about a card being authentic or not. If you stay around, not only will you realize how fast news spread around about high end cards, but you will learn a lot about authenticity and other parts of getting the Pokemon collecting experience. Of course, feel free to ask if you are unsure about a card!
Of course counterfeiting is affecting the Pokemon market in some way, but if you’re specifically worried about counterfeiting in regards to high end cards, this is much less likely to pass off. Most counterfeits nowadays go for the current “standard” cards, and those cards are pretty low quality and mainly trick beginner collectors.
