“In our expert opinion these are genuine. We are the industry leading signature authenticators, who are you?”
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Sugimori’s signature would be $10,000 if there weren’t more fakes in slabs on ebay than legitimate ones for 2 years straight.
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He’s also selling the Scyther on Reddit and has a post from a few days ago asking about fake signatures.
Good find. The seller said he bought these cards from a seller on mercari and some other cards he sent were deemed to be fake signatures.
Looks like here’s a potential source of where all these fakes are coming from.
instagram.com/poke__trader?igshid=dl2dbo35my33
He has about 8+ “Ken Sugimori signed cards. Claiming a friends dad who worked in Japan for them signed for him.
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Provenance + PSA. *taps forehead*
They look fake to me. Even after taking into account potential signing fatigue, certain characters are missing parts that make the word. Like not even a scribble to replace it.
You’re not a *true* collector unless you’ve taken hand writing analysis classes to personally judge signature cards online
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I will forever have my selfie with Arita to prove my auto is legit. Thankfully my card will stay with me forever.
As far as grading/authenticating autos goes, is PSA the lone company that does it?
still open, gotta be faster.
I’ll add something new to this thread since it got revived and I somehow initially missed this thread. As someone who was a relatively mediocre student in writing asian characters (chinese/mandarin/korean etc.) , I would still not be so sloppy to the point where somehow my characters would become like the bottom 3 cards when signing something. Note that repetition is fairly normal in learning in Asian characters, for homework I usually have to repeat hundreds of characters…there’s no way an artist like Sugimori or Arita would somehow become that sloppy with their signatures, even if it’s their thousandth signing.
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This thread is pretty informative so I’ll leave it open…but I appreciate the tag!
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Afaik cgc plans to bring their signature series to pokémon. I think they already grade autographs but put ‘unwitnessed signature’ on the label.
I actually checked with Ludkins about autos through CGC. They will authenticate the card, but nothing with the auto. It will receive a different label for just the card being authenticated or something like that. @funmonkey54 would be the one to give more info on it
The different label is for the signature series. It’s yellow (at least for comic books) and means a cgc employee witnessed the autograph.
For now they only grade the card and put ‘unwitnessed signature’ on the regular blue label.
Found my email from Ludkins:
CGC will not authenticate any signatures they did not witness. It can be encapsulated, and the card itself authenticated, but the signature will not be. These have green labels rather than the usual blue.
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Honestly this is how any company should do it. The “art” of authenticating sigs is a joke. Anyone expert enough to authenticate one would be expert enough to fake one and we all know the best in the industry don’t work at PSA for $40k a year grading cards.
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Non-native writers copying characters doesn’t look correct. It is so obvious.
There are slabbed signed cards with characters that are entirely missing strokes. And I don’t mean because the signature was rushed – just totally missing.
It is not too hard to spot at this point, but I have no doubt the situation will get worse. Autopens are another thing entirely, but they seem rare in this hobby so far.
I’ve compiled my own reference of legitimate cards (based on a number of factors) and keep an eye out for them. Any ‘newcomer’ signatures will have to come with strong provenance/proof for me to consider adding them to the list from now on.
I’m very happy to be satisfied with what I have and no longer seriously looking to buy, but I still hate seeing others being tricked. It’s such a shame.
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