Buyer Beware - Fake Pokemon printing plates sold on Ebay

pfm · October 11, 2023, 10:21pm

There was a question on discord regarding these “Pokemon Printing Plates”. A printing plate is the metal object that is attached to the offset printer rollers that transfers ink from the roller onto the uncut sheet. Each roller is responsible for a different color (cyan, magenta, yellow, black, plus spot colors like the white for blocking out holo, black to make the text sharp, yellow for the border on WOTC cards).

So there actually exist printing plate sheets out there. But consider the following listing:

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They were sold by the seller “i-like-cards”, a sports card seller. The descriptions don’t offer any information about what these are or where they came from. Most sold for $20 each, but the EX Dragon Charizard went for $80.

The first impression may be to immediately reject them as real, but you have to remember these sheets have existed at some point and unless they were all destroyed, still exist somewhere.

The first thing that I question is why they are not in a sheet and why they have rounded corners. This implies they were intentionally cut to individual cards and intentionally had the corners rounded. However, this appears to not be an unusual thing to do in sports cards:

So there’s a chance these Pokemon ones could be legitimate. But after consideration, there are multiple red flags that lead me to believe these are very fake.

Flag #1 - Choice of cards

If legitimate, you’d expect all the cards to come from one set or one era. However, we have cards that were printed for WOTC, Nintendo, Media Factory (old back and new back). These cards are not printed by the same companies or for the same companies.

This was already enough evidence for me but I’ll continue.

Flag #2 - They look like trash

Printing plates are made from digital files that separate the colors into layers. Here are some sports examples:

They are made from the original printer files. They are sharp and it’s very clear what should be printed and what is blank. In contrast, the Pokemon ones are very much not that.

But this could be due to damage. I don’t have much experience with plates so I don’t know what they look like when damaged. Either way a red flag.

Red Flag #3 - Spot colors

As I mentioned, the border of WOTC cards are printed on as a spot color. This means that it’s just a glob of ink and doesn’t have a rosette pattern. The text is the same way. This is speculative on my part but I don’t think you should see the text on all the layers. It’s also smeared and inconsistent. Even worse this the borders. Consider the border below:

You can see the edge of the card!! This makes no sense! It seems like these are a scan of already cut cards.

Red Flag #4 - Holo patterns

You can see evidence of holo orbs in the scans. This makes absolutely no sense. The orbs are part of the blank sheet that is printed on, not on the plate. Pretty much the nail in the coffin here.

Conclusion

These are not real. My guess is that they are actual printing pates but made from scans of cards. Someone tried their best to split the colors into CMYK but it’s basically impossible to do properly without the original files. My hypothesis is that they were actually used to print cards. Fake cards though. If you’re printing fake cards why not sell the fake plates too? I’ll give the seller the benefit of the doubt and assume they picked it up from somewhere and just didn’t bother or have the ability to authenticate them.

You can see them all below.

D3F14NC3 · October 12, 2023, 1:06am

Great write up and reference having all of the photos together. It will help a lot of people I’m sure. I see questions about these almost daily on other sites. I’ll be sending them this link from now on.

deku · October 12, 2023, 1:50am

Oh man, I haven’t used this account in 5 years but I dusted it off just to reply here. I’ve been seeing people post about these plates all over the place. At first I so badly wanted to believe they were real but the red flags just kept piling up. Thank you so much for writing this, it really summarizes everything so well and will hopefully prevent more people from getting scammed by these.

One additional huge red flag that was really the biggest tell for me is that offset printing plates aren’t inverted. Look at any offset printing plate and you’ll see this holds true. These plates literally could not have been used in offset printing. Once you realize that, it becomes incredibly obvious that these sadly aren’t legit.

Edit: I noticed some of the example plates are inverted, so I might be wrong on the above point.

ProfessorRex · October 15, 2023, 12:44am

Put together a couple short videos on the printing plates that discussed the reasons to suspect they might’ve been real but also the nail in the coffin for why they definitely aren’t.

A small update: the seller did offer a full refund so there was nothing lost on my end

Short #1: https://youtube.com/shorts/UqDtBrgTWnw?feature=share
Short #2: https://youtube.com/shorts/KLQcTy4xT74?feature=share

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