Replica creators are getting good at creating fake Pokémon cards and they’re now mimicking PSA slabs as well. Today an Italian Instagram user has been reaching out to people asking if they want to buy his PSA 7 Illustrator or PSA 10 1st Edition Base Charizard:
These cards and the cases they’re in are quite obviously fake if you know what you’re looking for, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before someone loses a lot of money believing these are real.
The seller who has over 20,000 followers on Instagram is of course only accepting Bitcoin making any transaction impossible to reverse after a matter of minutes.
If you compare this card with a real PSA-graded 1st Edition Base Set Charizard the differences stand out quite a lot.
Always do some level of due diligence when buying cards online, especially when purchasing using cryptocurrency.
And yes, I know not ALL Italian collectors/community are like this, but a enough of them are that I’d never deal with an Italian buyer/seller unless I knew them personally or they were vouched for by somebody I knew well. It’s an instant no from me dawg.
Man, Italian sellers getting all the hate already…not sure where the stereotype is coming from or if there is actual evidence that so many Italian people in the Pokemon community are scammers, but there are plenty of people from other countries who are scumbags too. Tbh I have encountered more black sheep while buying (or trying to buy) from Japan than while buying from Italy. Special mention goes out to ebay’s Italian mirmex who I have bought multiple higher level cards from and never had any issue with.
My point is, don’t get lulled into a false sense of security when you are buying from someone living in a “stereotypical country of integrity”.
Someone alerted me that they’ve since changed their username. Fortunately you can’t change your actual Instagram ID, so they can’t really escape by doing that. They were kingjoeg13 yesterday and they’re now 13_giu_g_13 - for some reason they’ve also made their account private now.
For future reference their Instagram ID is 193068070 - that’s enough to find them again if they change their name.
As for the above comments, I’ve bought from and sold to many Italian collectors and have never had any problems myself, so I don’t think we should be holding the entirety of Italy accountable for a few bad eggs. I believe these fake slabs were actually created in the US and I think this user has simply bought one of the fake slabs and is now trying to scam people with it.
@pichufan , So I’m confident in my ability to discern fake cards most of the time with a clear picture, but something I’m woefully unprepared for is fake graded cards. It comes up pretty often here that someone posts a fake PSA slab and mentions how obvious it is and I’ve been too timid to ask what makes the fake slab so obvious. I usually cannot tell what the big giveaway is - at least from the front.
So for me and what I imagine are other readers afraid to ask - how can you tell from this blurry IG story screenshot that the slab is fake? It always sounds like there’s a significant factor that I am overlooking. I have a 1st Shining Charizard I’ll need to buy in the next few years and these cards are frequently faked. I am wary of fake slabs taking over by the time I can actively afford it.
@stagecoach I scaled down the screenshot to make it fit better in the post. The picture was much clearer on their Instagram story which has since expired. Here is a larger image of the Charizard:
Whilst it may be a blurry/fuzzy image a couple of things which jumped out to me immediately were:
The card is a bit too round;
The font isn’t accurate - it’s a bit too bold and the ‘Fire Spin’ attack text is far too close to the energy cost;
The plastic on the case is far too clean.
I had said in my last post that I think this is a fake which originated in the US but based on taking another look at this I think it’s a bit too basic. My guess is that this is actually nothing more than an etsy case with a fake Charizard inside.
There are a lot of issues with both the card and the case but I’m reluctant to make a full list as that’s something scammers could use to make the fake even more realistic - though I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before that happens. Fortunately PSA already do have quite a lot of security features on their cases and are working to add even more in future.
@pichufan , Ooooh, okay. So all this time I thought there was a clear giveaway with the case itself, so I was super-focusing on the slab to try to find out what about the plastic itself was so obvious at a glance. It makes me feel better that most of the tells are still the card itself since that’s what I’m used to looking at. I was just focusing too much on the case/label.
I’d say there are just as many issues with the case as there are with the card, but again I’m reluctant to list them. If you take a look at a similar-style PSA case (e.g. i.imgur.com/uKh77u6.png from PWCC’s auction archive) you’ll probably see quite a few discrepancies with this fake case.
This just reiterates the fact that the bigger Pokemon gets, the more of this sort of nonsense we are going to see. The best thing we can do as collectors, as it always has been, is to educate yourself as much as possible. Just a shame for newer collectors who fall victim to it and it gives a bad image to what I have always found to be a great, inclusive, and welcoming hobby.
@unseenforces20 the PSA logo on the newer cases is a lot harder to see unless light is reflecting on it at a certain angle. I’m not sure why they made this change, but it doesn’t really help in the case of identifying fake slabs.
Here is my what recent unlimited e-Series 1 Pichu graded case looks like:
It still stresses me out quite a lot that I don’t seem to have “the eye” for this. I really can’t see what’s wrong with the plastic. I can tell the card is bogus, but the case just looks like a normal slab to me and that sucks. I honestly want to buy a fake slab on Etsy to compare it side by side with mine, which I hate to do because I don’t want to give money to a grifter selling fake cases. But I also clearly have a long way to go with identifying fake slabs if other collectors can take a glance at this low res photo and instantly identify a low quality fake and I cannot.
