One thing that could have increased chances of a poor authentication process. I seem to remember it being the case that a lot of these cards were authenticated ‘off site’ for the purposes of speed and convenience? (grading at the location of the card holders) I could be wrong about this so any contradictory information is welcome.
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I agree 100%, it matters more what information they relied on to verify these rather than what information wasn’t considered at the time. For example, other companies also didn’t know to look at the printer dots but still didn’t grade any.
I think being able to show the exact minute a sheet was printed is still mindblowing and so clear-cut that we forget that hundreds of “pokemon card experts” - including myself - owned copies and didn’t know to check for the machine code. If it was paper currency authentication I think it would be a big oversight to miss the MIC but in trading cards it’s just not really part of the necessary expertise (maybe that’s changed after this though). But yeah, I agree that printer steganography is too niche and it’s not unreasonable that we all collectively overlooked it.
As far as what information was used to positively verify these, I think that’s the issue. I don’t know what information CGC was working with at the time. I wasn’t involved and I don’t have any additional insight beyond what’s public. But from reading the articles, what I see is that the primary documentation is Akabane’s word. And that’s the word of the person who directly stands to financially gain from these.
But because I don’t know all the details, I’m personally withholding judgment on any person or company involved until we have all the relevant information. Which will probably come out in the form of future statements or even like court transcripts if it gets to that point.
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Just adding some anecdotal evidence, when I told my hockey friend about this situation, he said, “I just watched a show where they talked about print dot matrix”. Apparently its part of our zeitgeist now! 
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I disagree. They examined the prototype blastoise extensively https://www.cgccards.com/news/article/8744/pokemon-test-print-blastoise/
Had they done this same process with these cards in question, they likely would have found the issue with these cards quite quickly. They’d have likely found dots on one of the cards, and as I said in my last reply to this thread - would have felt compelled to investigate them, being a “certified guarantee company”.
Regardless of the printer dot encrypted dating - it is just inexcusable for them to take an explosion of these cards from one dubious source and not get any further confirmation from other parties involved at the time, in my opinion. Especially considering a number of the cards feature a signature that abruptly ends at the printed fraudulent paper’s edge.
Don’t make excuses for them folks.
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I mean it really comes down to this. For documented, known cards printed from sets and are very hard to convincingly fake (ie. 99.97% of cards that are submitted), the a grading company should assume the card is real until demonstrated otherwise. From a resource perspective, it’s not worth the time to “prove” every card submitted as real. Rather you are trying to identify things that would suggest a card is not real. We do the same thing as collectors. If someone asked us if a card was real, we’d look at it and either say 1) it looks good or 2) this thing seems off.
When dealing with an undocumented card or oddity, the default position should flip. You should assume the item is not legitimate until you have sufficient evidence otherwise. From a resource perspective, it’s easier to look for positive evidence than to try to “disprove” the item, especially for items where you don’t have a legitimate reference to compare against. You can run 1000 different tests that fail to disprove authenticity - in which case you’ve learned nothing and consumed a lot of time. It’s easier to build a positive case of why something should be believed in, and if you can’t then you should stick with the default position of disbelief.
In this case, there was a lot of good reason to believe these items were legitimate (and as it turns out, some probably are). They are from the right person and some match what real documented copies look like, and they were graded by a company that presumably had more information available to it than you did. That’s why I bought some, because the price was low enough for me to take on the risk of uncertainty based on what we knew at the time. It seems like the evidence was sufficient enough for CGC to make a positive determination while other companies didn’t. We have the benefit of hindsight today; I simply don’t know what CGC knew so it’s impossible to really say whether their decision justified was based on the available information at the time.
Put another way, the goal is more about limiting false positives rather than identifying true negatives. Though of course it doesn’t hurt to try to do a bit of both. This is just my opinion as someone watching from the outside.
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Or they could ask akabane who was complicit and had documentation of tons of things 
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Let’s wait for the interview that will never be released
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Given the results we’ve seen here, I doubt Akabane has access to the old printer or the expertise to actually adjust the timestamp + serials. This feels like a very low-tech scam job.
But yes, I personally wouldn’t buy anything that wasn’t already slabbed going forward.
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I think this is a bit shortsighted. Dylan is correct that printer stenography is, or at least was, a very obscure field. As @gottaketchumall has pointed out, there’s a lot of armchair experts proselytizing about printer dots being obvious when they hadn’t heard one inkling of it before. In my opinion, it is unrealistic to expect CGC to have developed printer stenography investigation practices prior to this issue. What we are seeing here is a truly unprecedented scam which could only be advanced by insiders. I understand how CGC screwed it up, especially when we consider that there are “legit” prototypes which were printed in 1996.
That being said, I fully agree with your point that CGC’s previously stellar error and test print authentication was an abject failure in this regard. I don’t know how CGC went from authenticating Disco Charizard and Protostoise to this. These are so far and away from traditional cards that CGC should have required much more evidence than what they were provided with before testifying to their authenticity. Indeed, many people including myself pointed this issue out before the printer dots were discovered:
I don’t think the positions of “CGC should have done way more investigation and verification on these cards” and “printer stenography was likely too obscure for them to know about” are mutually exclusive. My personal opinion is that some people took full advantage of CGC’s pursuit of publicity and profit at the expense of authentication. CGC is responsible and should be roundly criticized not only for their failure of authentication, but also what drove them to authenticate these cards. Again, we don’t know the full story and it probably involves lots of scam and fraud upon CGC as well, but as a grading company you need to expect that people are going to attempt to have you certify illegitimate items.
If I can expand on a point @pfm has made, the more obscure the item and the more easily it could be faked, the higher the burden of proof for authenticity should be. If the card can’t be XRF’d to determine accordance with a real card, if it’s literally just printer paper on cardstock, the burden of proof needs to be significant. I can’t speak to what CGC received in terms of proof, but clearly it was not enough.
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The way CGC handles this will determine if people can trust them anymore as a company. If they refund or follow insurance actions to help the victims it will allow their name to be respected more. If not then many people will move on to other companies to grade. It’s not a Monopoly, plenty of other grading companies out there.
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I don’t get how this is too obscure for them to know about. Should be the first thing that crossed their mind when authenticating these pieces of paper. It’s more complicated than what they usually do? Maybe. It’s still not rocket science. You are a million dollar company with an expert team. Personally I was not aware of this metadata as regular cards have other printing method, but this is not my job. I do things way more complicated in my workplace and I’m a nobody. You are telling me CGC can’t figure this out? Maybe I have very high expectations when dealing with professionals but that’s what I am used to due to my profession. I was extremely disappointed with CGC with the fake M&W prototypes and I’m extremely disappointed now with all this fiasco. Hope they do the right thing and admit they fucked up and compensates everybody but I guess it’s too much to ask.
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I expect a lot out of professionals if they call themselves a professional but I think there is a limit to knowledge I still think they should have dug deeper before grading these. Also if you don’t mind me asking what if your profession?
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Dm’d
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So… anyone want to speculate on originals that Akabane kept? Seadra Proof of Concept?
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Regarding the raw prototypes - I believe some are still floating around especially in Japan so it’s best to steer clear of any examples. The people who bought raw copies are much less likely to have a recourse for a refund due to there being no CGC guarantee. Given CGC hasn’t even refunded yet, buying raw would be a terrible idea right now.
In my opinion, CGC is absolutely on the hook for the financial reimbursement of these cards and I hope they step up to the task. Whether or not they’re 100% to blame is almost irrelevant because people already see them as the most responsible party. Until evidence surfaces of the actual people who printed and submitted the forgeries this will likely stay the case.
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Has anyone submitted their Beta cards to CGC yet? Are there any updates?
I have (3) on the way to them.
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printer stenography isn’t rare if your a company that works with currency. I was told long ago before they change the dollar bills layout and security features that printer dots are why you can’t photocopy money.
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You are likely misinformed. Currency printers don’t use the same dot-matrix encoding practices as commercial printers. Imagine if they did, and you could fake currency just by breaking the pattern and printing dots on everything. There are encoded security features like microprinting on currency, but this is a different thing than what we have been looking at here. I don’t want to seem harsh, but this is exactly the type of thing we see on social media. People claim CGC should have expertise in this but they don’t know how it works or confuse it with other practices. That doesn’t excuse their failure, but people need to realize exactly how obscure commercial dot-matrix decoding actually was.
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No updates. Their site doesn’t reflect that they have even processed my card and their email support cannot give me any updates. I am only told it could take weeks to get some news.
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