This is why I was asking about two different parties. I just though LQ and HQ/ alpha might have been printed by different people who were in connection with each other.
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I mean unless they knew they were fake and were complicit in the crime, then they were nothing but a victim of fraud imo.
Were they reckless and incompetent? Could that have been to a level of criminal negligence? I am not a lawyer and have no idea. Seems likely theyâre just not too bright and not very good at their jobs and will be out 8 figures due to it.
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They did not take the basic steps to check for counterfeit cards though. The printer dots should have been a dead giveaway that they could try and look up the date. If I photocopy a high quality Moonbreon I would hope they would look and see if there are printer dots.
The dots might not have been suspicious because they were on printed playtest cards from â1996.â However, they should have been checked for date markersâŚ
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CGC witnessed autographs on uncut sheets in 2024, encapsulated them as mounted prototype cards, and falsely advertised them as cards that were used to develop the game in 1996
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Yes they should have known about printer dots and checked for them when they were authenticating the cards as it should be their responsibility to check in every way possible. But lets be honest who would have thought of it, they probably got Akabaneâs signature looked at it for a couple seconds and called it good, I still think they should be held accountable for the people who have been affected because of them but saying printer dots are a dead giveaway is stupid most of us never even had the thought cross our minds till @pfm brought it up.
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#dontbuycgc
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Most of us are not a Certified Guaranty Company doing their only job.
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Yeah I mean @pfm did a fantastic job doing the work CGC should have done to authenticate these cards. I agree that is easy to say in hindsight. Monday morning quarterbacking is very easy for all us armchair experts to do. The amount of armchair experts out there is funny. I literally had someone in chat last night live on youtube asking me to âcheck the print dotsâ on the jungle box cards I am ripping this month on stream. They had a pretty strong suspicion that these WOTC boxes are currently being printed today, so I should look for 2025 dates. So many layers to that one I donât need to touch.
I had heard other grading card companies had these same cards in hand at one point or another as well and to be fair to them they chose to not authenticate. But to ask a little more out of what they could have done⌠why did they not share âoh hey guys these were printed this year, we can tell via the dots so watch out everyone in the communityâ. Methinks it was because they didnât know to do that either.
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Extreme negligence at best. At worst, they (meaning select employees) were an accomplice. Staying open minded and hoping for the best. I think this debacle will dissuade many of us from ever buying cgcâs newest grail they decide to slab. The reputational damage is irreparable in my opinion.
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It sounds Farfetchâd(
), but if the âmounted on cardâ terminology was ambiguous in terms of when specifically they were mounted on card maybe they did allow for uncut sheets to be cut and mounted recently.
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could it not be artificially altered to give whatever date you want?
It can be now that this information is widely known thanks to PFM which is why I mentioned no further prototypes from this point forward can be trusted. It doesnât make sense that if fraudsters knew how to fake it, they wouldnât fake it for all of them.
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Iâm not sure anyone can be blamed for overlooking printer steganography. This is extremely esoteric knowledge basically irrelevant to anyone outside security and forensic fields⌠before now.
Itâs entirely possible that everyone on their small team has gone through their entire lives without ever encountering any information related to printer steganography. Government leakers have gone to prison for overlooking the same thing CGC overlooked. Itâs easy to overlook by design.
I still blame them for incorrectly authenticating these, but the printer dots arenât why. I want to know more about the âvery thorough processâ they used to authenticate these cards apart from Akabaneâs story - my guess is that there wasnât one. Iâd guess that their process, like anyone elseâs, arrived at a verdict of inconclusive - and they were slabbed anyway.
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Sure, that could be an explanation, but a 2024 cutting and mounting project is an entirely different product from a 1996 âplaytestâ card that they claimed / (falsely) advertised was used by the creators of the TCG to develop the game.
In your scenario, if CGC allowed 2024 cutting and mounting of these cards and subsequently withheld and communicated different information to the public, then they intentionally deceived the entire market. The market of all these cards would have been slashed into fractions if its buyers knew that they were being cut and mounted in 2024. Huge red flags that would have made them very easy to avoid.
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I appreciate you speaking on this, but I have to push back on the idea that CGC is âvictimâ in all of this. They authenticated and graded these fakes, which directly led to them being sold for millions. The buyers who put trust in the process are the real victims here. Accountability is key. What actions are being taken to ensure this doesnât happen again?
CGC has lost a lot of credibility after this situation; maybe not from their wider audience, but definitely from their largest audience, that being their higher end collectors, and their lack, near silence of a proper response to this (the same going with the auction houses that were selling the cards), is deafening.
I respect you Zack, Iâve done business with you multiple times, and I will happily do business again, but I hope you can see my, and others sides in this situation.
Again, thank you @pfm for everything youâve done to unearth this information for the community as a whole.
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If you look on social media you can find pages and pages of popular threads with complete laypeople (not skilled authenticators) talking about printer tracking dots. CGC knew the cards used regular printer paper, printed on regular printers. Checking for tracking dots would be one of the most basic steps youâd need to take before authenticating these. Maybe CGC has no idea how to authenticate printer paper because itâs not normally what they deal with, thatâs fair - in that case, isnât it fair to expect they would have consulted an expert?
Or maybe they validated the dots in the first submission and then just assumed every following submission would be equally authentic? No matter how you look at it, thereâs a shocking level of negligence on display here. Thatâs not even getting to the deeper structural issue that these couldnât have been authenticated even if there werenât 2024 dots.
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CGCâs parent company literally grades paper currency, so printer stenography is something in their wheelhouse. I think this was just recklessness by the TCG division that doesnât reflect on the larger group.
People keep saying that now someone can figure out how to adjust the date on the printer firmware. While they can do that, without knowledge of the printer serial codes used, they would still be detectable.
If someone ends up sharing a hi-res scan of a known ârealâ copy with that serial number visible, that is where things get messier.
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Thatâs a decent point, but, I feel itâs worth saying: you can google this stuff pretty easily; also, printer stenography is a trope mentioned in several crime TV shows, and in all sorts of military/detective fiction - I think even a Tom Clancy novel mentioned it once. Itâs obscure, but absolutely in the public realm. Iâd expect an authentication company to know this kind of stuff, given that forgeries are common in high end collectables in general.
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If this is such a common way of authenticating then why didnât you bring this up before @pfm⌠If itâs such a common occurrence why was pfm the first one to bring it up publicly. Yes CGC should have taken more time to verify there authenticity and do a better job at authenticating but you canât say that you knew all along
Iâm just saying itâs not as obvious before itâs brought to attention,
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Indeed, it was actually one of my main concerns months ago. Though at this stage nothing in regards to this is confirmed 100 percent, the signature cut offs does raise some concerns.
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Do we have any updates on how many cards there really are? Iâve only seen a select few, which makes me wonder how many are there 
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