Hello all!
I’ve been around the fourums for a while, but haven’t created an account until recently! Nice to meet you all finally and glad to be a part of such a vibrant community.
I recently made a purchase via auction on ebay for a CGC slab with an autograph signed by Naoki Saito, but I wanted to determine the authenticity of this signature as I have seen a few opinions on it.
I really appreciate any insight I receive, and will look into it more myself as well.
Thank you!
Regards,
I encouraged Ernest to make a thread on the forum after he messaged me privately asking if I thought this was real. I told him unfortunately I am not educated enough with this artist, but my hunch is that it isn’t real.
@swolepoke What are your thoughts? I told Ernest in the future to try and get provenance when purchasing one in the future as there have been a plethora of fake ones that have surfaced the last few years with no end in sight with the grading companies caring enough to do their due diligence.
I have these slabs as well, and just wanted to get them checked since I’m now paranoid about all my signed cards haha
The Saito is very questionable to me. Saitos are pretty consistently faked and most grading companies are not good at discerning between fake and real signatures of Pokemon artists. No personalization, no date, and if you have an opportunity to get a card signed by Saito, why are you picking a Braixen CHR?
The Arita looks good to me. I think the other artist is probably too obscure to fake at this point, so I’d lean on the side of calling your other two cards authentic.
Unfortunately I’m not confident that this is authentic. I’m pretty sure I saw it for sale by a forger in Japan on Mercari. There has been dozens of fake Saito autos sold recently on various Japanese sites.
A random seller listing this and The final price for this auction should’ve also been a red flag for you. This is an autograph that goes for thousands of dollars normally.
Agreed with others. There are many Naoki Saito forgeries on Mercari and Yahoo Japan, both on Pokemon cards but also on other items.
You could attempt to politely reach out to him for comment.
Also, something to be mindful of is that Saito’s signature is debossed on other cards, which can be easily copied/autopenned in the future.
Thank you for all the great insight, I appreciate it! I’ll try to see what I can do in regards to my purchase, but at the end of the day I might just have to chalk it up as a lesson learned.
Hope you all have a wonderful new year ahead of you!
Like previously mentioned, Naoki Saito is regularly faked, so provenance is everything here.
This card is from Incandescent Arcana which was released in September 2022.
Saito’s last 2022 signing was in August 2022. So it couldn’t have been signed at this event. Also, signed cards from this 2022 event had personalisations.
I attended his final and only signing in 2023 and can confirm all of these included a personalisation. (They gave us all a form we had to use to specify the personalization. The staff member would then check it and collect it off us, so it was basically mandatory to have it personalised as it was middle manned by staff.)
He doesn’t exactly sign a ton of cards at once for anyone on the street or at a comic market or anything. It’s usually at some structured event such as a tsutaya collab or at one of his drawing classes. So for legit autos, there should almost always be provenance or traceability to an event. At these events, they almost always have a limited slot per person system. So for this reason, like mentioned before, for someone to pick a CHR as their golden opportunity, it’s definitely eyebrow raising.
the gold slabs are cgc “witnessed” for what its worth, the silver ones are not
You’re thinking of a different auto service. This slab is CGCxJSA, not CGC Signature series (which all have to be witnessed.) This slab is gold because it received the Pristine 10 grade. If the auto was witnessed, it would have the date of signing/pedigree on the back.
oh yeah ur right guess the pristine ones look pretty similar lol
