Totally legit, nothing to see here… THE HOLY GRAIL: PIKACHU ILLUSTRATOR CGC AUTH MINT- MOST VALUABLE POKEMON CARD | eBay
Lol.
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I’ve seen tons of fakes throughout the years but that’s legit the worst one. Looks like it printed on an inkjet printer
It’s going to fail authenticity guarantee so doesn’t rly matter other than time wasting
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Correct me if i’m wrong but i believe the authenticity guarantee isn’t applied if the buyer is outside US so it’s not bulletproof, anyway ebay’s buyer’s protection should do the trick unless the buyer doesn’t do anything about it
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So ebay’s authenticity guarantee is bullshit is what I’m hearing. 
I also submitted a report. Granted when I tried to provide details and a screenshot of CGC’s description of QA, it wouldn’t let me submit it as it said the details were “invalid” somehow. Had to report blank.
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Ebay will not remove a trading card listing for being counterfeit unless the seller excplicitly states somewhere on the listing that the card is not genuine.
I always get a chuckle at the number of people that expect some random eBay rep (who probably doesn’t give 2 shits about Pokemon) to authenticate a card from listing photos. Particularly when a meaningful percentage of actual Pokemon fans can’t consistently tell if cards are genuine (here’s looking at you /r/IsMyPokemonCardFake/)
It’s not surprising to me that a card returned “QA” is not good enough to get removed. CGC itself is saying that it’s not 100% certain it’s fake although I’m not sure why they decided to take that route in this case. Maybe they didn’t want to take responsibility for calling it fake either lol.
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Just so we’re clear - authenticity guarantee and reporting a listing for being counterfeit are two different things.
That’s actually a really interesting question though - would this pass authenticity guarantee? It’s being sold as “QA”. Raw cards with authenticity guarantee get sent to CGC for authentication, and they’re the ones who returned this as QA.
My assumption is that it would fail authenticity guarantee because it’s not encapsulated. You could send the QA label along with any “copy” of the card so it doesn’t mean much.
I don’t expect an ebay rep to be an authenticator. But I do expect that if you have a report feature and you have “this is counterfeit” as an option that it would be more than the equivalent of a regex search for the word fake in the title.
It’s not like there’s no cost to leaving it up. Images like the one below are brand damaging and also confusing in the way @azulryu interpreted it - that ebay is saying it’s legit, not that they will check that it’s legit after you fork over thousands of dollars.
Ebay is a tech company. It’s trivially easy for them to implement a system where you give people a reputation score for accurately reporting fake listings and leverage the knowledge of the users who use your service. You’d clean up ebay overnight. Think of all the listings below the authenticity threshold where so much time and money is wasted on fake items. Though I think ebay benefits too greatly from counterfeit listings and that’s primarily why they won’t do anything 
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Imagine laughing at someone reporting a fake illustrator because it’s the right thing to do. Couldn’t be me.
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That sub is actually pretty accurate for free crowd sourced information. Most posts get answered quickly and people point out the concerns with a wide variety of card and products that get posted daily. Definitely helpful for people who are buying higher value cards than they are used to or for people who dont know what to look for.
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I completely agree with you. My point was more that you see the same types of obvious fakes posted over and over again which suggests there are a lot of people who have no idea what legitimate cards are supposed to look like.
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Imo this is a bad faith argument. Authenticity guarantee is well established and available across a number of verticals - it’s generally known what authenticity guarantee is and how it works. It’s also pretty darn effective at protecting users who are purchasing expensive trading cards (and other luxury items like purses, watches, etc).
That being the case, the fakes that have the potential to monetarily damage users are for cards worth <$250, and I’d argue that the vast majority of them are actually in the $5-10 range (gold metal fake cards, etc).
I agree that some sort of reputation system could be interesting for those listings which are under the authenticity guarantee threshold, but I also don’t see it happening. Ebay certainly does benefit from these cheap/fake listings, but the bigger issue is that there are millions of them. It would cost eBay a fortune to validate the initial flood of reports to establish user reputation for accuracy - I don’t see it happening for that reason.
Not sure how it’s a bad faith argument when I’m relying on an example in this thread from someone who has been around the hobby for over 10 years.
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Honestly if you’ve been in the hobby and buying cards on ebay for over 10 years you have 0 excuse to not know how authenticity guarantee works.
This is a pretty broad statement for something a couple years old, only applicable for cards over a couple hundred dollars, isn’t available in all countries, and has weird quirks like not being applicable if two cards are being sold as a lot.
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If they were going to print a label… they would have printed one with a grade on it
QA is just because this card is expensive, if it was a cheap card they would have had no issue grading it.
I have no issue with this listing, blame CGC
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