Reproduction Cards

[donnab]

Recently I have had more and more worry about buying an action figure on card in great condition.  I have this fear, that with the ability to produce almost identical cards to the original, that people will try to pass them off as vintage.  Some precautions I can take so I'm not sold a fake?

[dogpoopwalker]

It depends on the toy. I'm very familiar with star wars figures and I know there are many websites that give you info and that you can send pictures where people will be happy to verify authenticity for you. I don't know that much about others, but I would assume the same applied.

As of right now most of these fakes are made by people off of laser printers at home and not manufactured by a commercial printing press. It's hard to tell in photos, but it's easy to tell if you have the product in hand to compare to a genuine one. The fakes are usually printed on two peices of paper that are glued to the front and back of a peice of cardboard. If you see a separation of the paper form the cardboard, that is a red flag. The real deal are usually printed directly onto the cardboard and will not separate.

The best advice is just to buy from sources that you trust. It's the easiest to get ripped off on ebay, but ebay will almost always protect you as a buyer and get your money back if you get scammed.

[donnab]

Great!  Thank you for information....!! 

[dogpoopwalker]

Oh I forgot to mention another thing that could be suspicious for a fake is an item in perfect new factory condition. Although it could be legit, if the price is too good to be true...then you know what they say.

But that is not all because I've seen fake items that had real damage on them, and vintage price tags, although who knows if those were fake too. And the most ingenious is to print a fake AFA authentication and grading label. Although the real labels have holograms to make them harder to fake, and that one did not, it's only a matter of time until the scammers get those. They can be easily acquired. The worst part is that if they use a real serial number of an actual graded item, if you look it up you will see that and think that it is the same one. And the only way you'll ever know is if the person who has the real one sees it and says something. That happened with a guy who used a stolen photo to try to scam a mail insurance fraud case, not a reproduction, but it was spotted by the real owner who knew his toy had not been sold.

[sharpfork]

I wouldn't worry to much as this is an extremely rare occurrence. It's practically impossible to produce a 100% accurate cardback and if anything shows up on a site (ebay) and it's clearly someone trying to pull a scam it will be swiftly reported and taken down. The toy community looks out for each other (mostly), especially when it comes to fakes. Private collectors are less likely to be pulling this kind of stuff and If you purchase or are interested in purchasing anything that seems sketchy from a random internet store or someone with no feedback be sure to ask for plenty of close up pics and share them with other members to verify.

[tztoyz]

Unfortunately, there are some REALLY good fakes out there, and as technology gets better, so do the forgeries. I have seen several Joe cardbacks where an average collector would be hard pressed to tell the difference. A guy I knew had a few, and though they had the words "reproduction" written in small print on the back, I would bet there are quite a few out there that don't have it. I held the card up with one I knew to be legit, and it was really, really close.

GI Joe seems to be a popular one to fake, but other lines like Star Wars and MOTU are being faked, as well. I've even seen G1 Transformers MIB that are counterfeit. There are some sites devoted to spotting these fakes.

As 3D printers become more inexpensive and the technology improves, I wonder what kind of impact this will have on vintage toy collecting (and collectible buyin/selling in general). It may seem improbable, but it may not be. Some of these fakes are already really good and only getting better.

[dogpoopwalker]

That's interesting ToyZ. I know that Joes are a popular faked item. Did the one you see fit the description that i gave, as in was it a single printed cardstock or was it two pieces of paper glued together?

Another thing to look out for, besides the cards is the bubbles. Those are almost impossible to replicate without the factory assembly, and they are just going to be different, since they are flimsy plastic that has a 20 year or more age difference. Those almost always give it away.

Ps. I thought of another sign to spot for fakes: the hanger tab punch. While there will be unpunched tabs on legit cards, that's another one of those areas that fakers will usually skip because they don't have the right die cutters to punch them out.

[tztoyz]

Dogpoopwalker,
It was single printed cardstock, punched, with a nice bubble. One of the tells (besides the print on the back) was that it looked a little too pristine to be more than two decades old. The piece was virtually a dead ringer.