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Many of the Pokemon playtest cards were likely printed in 2024
- chungy 2y agoPunch card technology! At least that's what I thought of, with those dot patterns forming bits.
- throitallaway 2y agoThey're both forms of encoding.
- jbv9901 2y agoalways nice to see a Discourse Forum in the wild!
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- __loam 2y agoThis is something that's pretty well known in the magic the gathering community. Some of us who trade in older cards to play certain formats have jeweler's loupes to check this stuff.
- AceJohnny2 2y agoPardon the naiveté: I understand the value of authenticity for collectors, but if it's just to play certain formats, what's the problem with a print?
- lumost 2y agoYou wouldn't want to pay a premium for a reproduction.
- a_t48 2y agoIndeed - proxy cards have their place, but everyone involved should know that’s what they are.
- nemomarx 2y agoI believe official tournaments don't allow any form of proxy? you don't want it causing a complication with prize money or etc if you try to play in a regional tournament and get dqed by this I assume
- josephcsible 2y ago> I believe official tournaments don't allow any form of proxy? Is there a legitimate reason not to, or is it just a money grab?
- nemomarx 2y ago"official" means run by wizards of the Coast, so essentially the money grab. I suppose it has some benefits in terms of not getting anyone who's swapping cards there overpaying for a reproduction too.
- Ekaros 2y agoBasically two things are driving after market value. Use in tournaments and collectability. And after market value drives the demand for sealed product(one directly from Hasbro via distributors and then stores). I really don't understand why no legislation is targeting this market that is exactly like loot boxes.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoThere's no reason not to allow them. You might legitimately prohibit them if unsleeved, but in sleeves there's no difference. Tournaments that aren't run by WotC do allow proxies, though I think Star City Games limits you to 5 proxies, which isn't enough to solve any budget problems. Again, obviously, there's no reason as far as gameplay goes. SCG does traffic in used cards.
- sleepybrett 2y agoThe guys who run tourneys are also often guys that participate in the secondary market heavily. Having an 'open to any proxy' tournament would screw their bottom line. The whole point of them running tourneys is to keep excitement in the game and sell more cards on the secondary market.
- chungy 2y agoOriginal print runs will score higher resale values, especially for something rare like unreleased Pokemon trading cards made during play testing. Reproductions can be fine, but anyone can do them on the cheap.
- dr-detroit 2y ago[dead]
- gigaflop 2y agoOrganized Play official events require authentic cards, but nobody is stopping people from using a printer for kitchen-table style games. Personally, having used printed paper inserted over top of a real card, I'd rather stick with real cards. Otherwise, I'd just go digital in this day and age.
- doctrgiggles 2y agoYou can buy mid-quality proxies on Chinese sites for about $0.30/card that feel accurate and typically are only distinguishable from real ones on fairly close inspection.
- FanaHOVA 2y agoThat is not true. Try playing a $0.30 Underground Sea at Eternal Weekend and see how many rounds it takes before you get caught. Old cards have specific hues, imperfections, etc, that are not replicable in modern proxies. I have some Legacy proxies for local events that are proxy-friendly, and literally the first game I played someone noticed as soon as I put the card down that it was fake because it was printed way too well.
- RandomBacon 2y agoYour example doesn't invalidate the comment you were replying to. (And I can also vouch at the quality of proxies that I bought for dirt cheap, so that I could keep my real cards at home. I bought from a few different companies, and some are very good, some not so much.)
- tedunangst 2y agoAre judges at tournaments pulling out loupes and inspecting cards?
- __loam 2y agoNot really but the official line is you can't use proxies. Practically the only reason a judge would have to inspect your deck is if they suspected you were cheating by registering an incorrect list or pre-sideboarding or something, but most judges aren't going to care about proxies.
- strstr 2y agoWhen it comes to playing the game between friends outside official tournaments, you are basically correct (though some use cost as a power level limiter). When it comes to trading, you don’t want to accidentally pay a premium for something you won’t be able to resell. Lots of players view trading as, more or less, leasing cards. Valuable cards typically have fairly stable prices (though there are notable exceptions). Buy for a dollar sell for somewhere between 0.75 and 1.25.
- rcxdude 2y agoBasically none in practice, but there are some hybrid collector-players who like the idea of building decks from their collection as opposed from all decks, and bristle at the idea of someone else not doing that. (And of course the collectors and WoTC themselves like to push for it because it makes them money: WoTC officially pretends that the secondary market doesn't exist but their actions make no sense if they aren't crafting their ~~loot boxes~~ booster sets with the idea of rare and valuable cards driving a lot of the demand). (I personally think that if you want to force everyone to pay for product, play sealed or draft. Then everyone's on an even playing field budget wise, and it's more interesting than just net-decking. I'm sympathetic to the fact that WoTC needs to make money, I'm not sympathetic to their approach of chasing whales and making large chunks of the game basically inaccessible by their definition of 'legitimate play')
- beAbU 2y agoIsn't mtg basically pay to win because of this?
- rcxdude 2y agoIf you're playing constructed tournaments, yeah. Depends on the format, but the price of entry can range from $$$ to $$$$$$.
- __loam 2y agoNo there's usually a wide variety of viable strategies, which have different costs associated with them. There's a price of entry but once everyone is on that level you still have to play well.
- rcxdude 2y agoColloquially, I think people call this 'pay to win'. If there's not one single price of entry that delineates someone playing vs not playing, i.e. if money spent results in any power level difference between players, that's pay to win, even if there's a ceiling to how much paying more than just buying a starter deck will get you.
- talldayo 2y agoLooks like we hugged them too hard: https://archive.ph/hKXoK https://archive.ph/hKXoK
- salgernon 2y agoI always thought that a near learning project would be training an ML on “real” cards and then detecting fakes. I don’t play the games but I was always thrown by how much effort went into counterfeits, but I guess there’s enough profit for someone. There’s usually something wrong with the registration or colors.
- strstr 2y agoIf you are willing to pull out a loupe you don’t really need ML. You can just look at the rosette patterns. For Mtg cards, the green dot test is very easy to learn, and I’m not familiar with any fakes that pass it. (Edit: arguably you have to worry about rebacking with the green dot test, but rebacking is typically pretty fishy looking.)
- nilamo 2y agoPulling out a loupe and manually inspecting a card is a slow process if you have a few thousand cards (avg player).
- FanaHOVA 2y agoAvg player doesn't buy a few thousand cards at a time. If you buy a high value card from a random seller you should always check it unless you trust them from references.
- strstr 2y agoPeople only pull out slower tools for valuable, forgery worthy cards. If someone is buying 1000 $1000 dollar cards, it’s still worth it lol. Even cheap forgeries cost money to produce, so I wouldn’t expect a lot of low value cards to be forged. If you sort out the valuable cards and do random sampling, you can probably catch the most problematic cases.
- krisoft 2y ago> There’s usually something wrong with the registration or colors. That can be selection bias too. Maybe the counterfeits where there is nothing wrong with the registration of colours are just not recognised as counterfeits. Similarly how seemingly every hacker you can hear about in the news are bad at opsec. Because you wouldn't hear about them if they weren't.
- sbarre 2y agoI find it interesting that this research seems to be (at a glance from reading that first page of the thread) coming from someone who owns some of these fraudulent cards (and could have just re-sold them and kept their mouth shut).
- hatingisok 2y agoWhat a homie. Judging from their profile picture they are also a fan of "The Untalkative Bunny". What a nice person.
- Lerc 2y agoI remember reading a story about a painter who was forging works in the style of an artist that had been dead for 40 years. The police found it very difficult to investigate because no-one wanted to have paintings they had spent money on to be discovered to be fakes. The forger was given community service, changed his name to match the artist and served his sentence by painting and signing a mural.
- echoangle 2y agoI was pretty sure you meant this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Beltracchi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Beltracchi But he didn't change his name.
- throw_m239339 2y agoReminds of the fake "sealed" authentic NES cartridges going for thousands of dollars or more on Ebay. It is a very lucrative business for scammers.
- thih9 2y agoReminds me of a friend that was selling "signed" comic books in high school. He did it for pocket money, infrequently and never exceeding $50 profit. And there were many before him. Wikipedia writes that "in 2016, a relic of True Cross held by Waterford Cathedral in Ireland, was radiocarbon dated to the 11th century by Oxford University."[1] Authentic collectibles are a timeless scam. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Cross https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Cross
- sandworm101 2y agoLol, it is a running joke that there are enough fragments of the "true" cross to build a forest.
- NateEag 2y agoI prefer the version that says "There are enough pieces of the true cross to build Noah's Ark."
- kadoban 2y agoEven funnier to me, there are relics of real people around, it used to be a big thing historically. So there's some saints or whatever where there's 3 or more "arm of X" floating around, multiple heads for the same person, all kinds of fun stuff.
- Suppafly 2y agoIt's cool that printers have this technology, but the flip side is that it actually makes the printers worse at being printers for doing prints.
- therein 2y agoSurprised there is no researcher dumping the SPI flash, patching some conditional jumps and doing a write-up.
- bitwize 2y agoIt'd probably get them visited by men in black suits and sunglasses if they tried.
- hiccuphippo 2y agoNot if they print the write-up.
- albert_e 2y agoGood way to tease out if the dot pattern is only ONE of multiple fingerprinting techniques that printers use :)
- astrange 2y agoBrother printers don't do it iirc, and they're the only good brand anyway.
- josephcsible 2y agoI'd say "the least bad brand" rather than "the only good brand" because of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
- SahAssar 2y agoAre you sure? the only two on the EFF site say they do: https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d... and it also says that basically all commercial printers do have tracking dots (last updated in 2017).
- sandworm101 2y agoFYI, these yellow dots are part of a Secret Service program to fight counterfeit currency. It was big news a couple decades ago and is well understood in art/printing circles. There are host of similar programs to protect printed money. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
- illwrks 2y agoSeconded. The counterfeiters are idiots.
- jsheard 2y agoMaybe they are, but some of these fakes were authenticated by a third party whose entire job is to serve as a trusted authority for collectors, so they're even bigger idiots for not noticing such a well known tell. This throws everything they've ever graded into doubt.
- snet0 2y agoPrecisely this! This seems like a hard thing to spot from a layperson's perspective, but this is literally the purpose of their company, and these printer identification dots seem to be quite well-known in art and printing circles! This should never happen and the fact it did definitely should bring some reputational harm to CGC.
- sleepybrett 2y agoAre they? They passed off all these cards and will likely get away with it. The people left holding these cards are the ones who got 'screwed'. Though collecting, and paying high premiums, for pieces of cardboard backed by barely anything at all probably means they were screwing themselves to begin with. (IE A game of pokemon with 100% proxies is just as fun as a game of pokemon with no proxies)
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- mmmlinux 2y agoIn case anyone ever wonders why their printer wont print a black and white document when its out of yellow? This.
- thih9 2y agoOne of the many reasons to buy a brother monochrome laser printer. I mean the convenience about not needing yellow, not necessarily extra privacy - that is still uncertain. > Other methods of identification are not as easily recognizable as yellow dots. For example, a modulation of laser intensity and a variation of shades of grey in texts are feasible. As of 2006, it was unknown whether manufacturers were also using these techniques. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots#Comparable_processes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots#Comparab...
- hinkley 2y agoIs anyone producing HP LaserJet 4 reproductions? It was a ridiculously long time before anyone beat that printer.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoThe Laserjet 4000 series outperforms them, is just as secure, and is the last line developed before HP quality plummeted under Carly. The problem is the cartridges are out of production and the NOS ones have a rubber toner seal that crumbles when the sealing strip is removed. You do get 10k pages on a base cartridge which blows away modern laser printers.
- hinkley 2y agoI recall that for a decade or more there were third parties selling remanufactured LJ4 cartridges. I had someone explain to me we don't throw away the empties because we get a deposit on them. No such thing with the 4k?
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- hatingisok 2y agoNo wonder the yellow in my printer is always empty!
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- croisillon 2y agoespecially the yellow in your b&w printer!
- aaroninsf 2y agoThe way humans construct "authenticity" and negotiate the ship of Theseus is going to provide so much fodder for the AIs to entertain themselves. Like my father-in-law interrogating me about being vegetarian at the dinner table, the sardonic Socratic dialog really writes itself... "OK; but now what if I were to selectively replace the molecules of one and only one pigment with a visually identical analog that is slightly modified to be more stable over time and with respect to UV exposure—could THAT still be an original card?"
- 1970-01-01 2y agoNo, it will be detected as fake due to colorimetry. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorimetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorimetry
- krisoft 2y ago> No, it will be detected as fake due to colorimetry. That is a different question. You are answering if the usual methods would authenticate it as an original. I believe you are right that they wouldn't. Thus it would probably be worthless. But that makes sense. There are many modifications you can do with a card which will render them useless and no longer recognised as an original. For example you can burn the card to ash. They would not be even detected as a pokemon card, but they are still an original pokemon card (if they were ever) which got burned into ash.
- nemomarx 2y agoSome people in the magic community alter cards (painting over them to expand the artwork or such) and take some pride in doing this only with original authentic cards. It's interesting, since it won't even clearly resemble the original card at the end.
- krisoft 2y agoYes it would be an original card modified by you. Was this supposed to be a hard question?
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- wxw 2y agoTIL printer dots! Also curious if someone more familiar with this space/community could provide more backstory here. Reading some of the comments in the forum, it seems like 1) these "beta cards" surfaced a while ago and have been a contentious topic since, 2) a card authenticator business is involved. What's the scale of this scheme? What's the impact going forward/how much money is tied into this?
- niwtsol 2y agoIt looks like CGC - one of the big card graders - has touted their ability to grade some very early Pokemon The Card Game playing cards (even alpha test cards printed in very low numbers). Here is their grading scale on their site https://www.cgccards.com/news/article/13347/ https://www.cgccards.com/news/article/13347/ People have purchased these CGC cards on ebay assuming they were legit based on the above certifications. It looks like total cards is something like 6 test decks of 26 cards of the alpha prototype - so the rarest example is fairly small, but I think it goes up as they got to later pre-release versions. Furthermore, there are some cards that were signed by Akabane (a co-creator of the game) and those have the presence of the yellow dots - meaning those are most likely not legit pre-production cards. One of those signed cards was sold for $200k I believe - https://www.cgccards.uk/news/article/13661/ https://www.cgccards.uk/news/article/13661/ So total financial impact of this directly in low millions? This reddit thread has more reddit style conversation about it w/ some data mixed in https://www.reddit.com/r/PokeInvesting/comments/1ibjlch/pokemon_alphabeta_playtest_cards_scandal/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PokeInvesting/comments/1ibjlch/poke...
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- wxw 2y agoThank you! Looks like CGC is in a tough spot. The grading guide struck me as quite vague. > CGC Cards utilized all the tools at our disposal to help document and authenticate these cards, compiling vast resources for comparison with future submissions. A very thorough process is in place for the authentication and grading of these cards using ones verified by Mr. Akabane. In an ideal world, it seems like there should be publicly shared, repeatable methods/standards for authenticating cards to avoid issues (whether complicit or an honest mistake) like this from a single central authority.
- marcodiego 2y agoI want to buy a printer but I want it to simply print what I tell it to (which indeed is exactly how it should behave). What can I do?
- nitwit005 2y agoGood luck with your currency counterfeiting.
- MostlyStable 2y agoI'm curious how long it has been since an even half-way convincing fake could be printed on a home printer (even if it were totally unlocked). My guess is quite a while. Maybe you could do it for small denominations that don't have color shifting inks, but I'm pretty sure that paper that even sort of approximates the feel would make it not economically viable, even on a home printer.
- nitwit005 2y agoThe reason most of it gets detected is that it doesn't succeed at being half convincing.
- MostlyStable 2y agoYeah, that was my point: these rules aren't really preventing counterfeiting, because even if you were allowed to print currency on a home printer, it wouldn't work, because it would be trivially obvious as fakes. It sounds like you are saying that making trivially obvious counterfeit bills is still possible, which seems like it even further supports the fact that these rules aren't very useful.
- sophacles 2y agoThere's only like ~55 billion us banknotes in circulation (according to uscurency.gov). It wouldn't surprise me to find out that banks' counting machines scan each of them, and put the serial number and location into a database, and that database flags bad serial numbers and things like "this serial number is also claimed to be in a vault 1000 miles away" - causing the bill to be flagged, set aside, and turned over to the secret service. The working set of data needed for this type of thing could probably be stored in a couple TB - small enough to be in a single (beefy) server's RAM.
- Ekaros 2y agoIt makes one really wonder why this is not absolute basic step in the "authentication" process. You could pretty much automate this as part of documentation process.
- hiccuphippo 2y agoI guess if the cards are easily rejected then the counterfeiters will improve their process.
- MrJagil 2y agoIf you're interested in this kind of thing, Tavis King is one of the more knowledgable people with regards to mtg. Here's him mapping a booster to print sheet, to see how many Lotus' are still out there, possible to be opened: https://youtu.be/nnYe8FWTu_o?feature=shared&t=184 https://youtu.be/nnYe8FWTu_o?feature=shared&t=184 edit: If you want the very technical version, here's a video from his own channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwnYLvWdNd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwnYLvWdNd8
- eieio 2y agoI remember reading a story about a (now) well-known MTG player. It was about their experience at one of their first tournaments, and had this detail about how during the tourney he got some pointers from Kai Budde (I think) on drafting - and in particular on print sheets. My memory is fuzzy, but it was something like "Kai looked at a few of the boosters in a practice draft, and then was able to tell us (something) about the cards that should be in the remaining packs just by reasoning about print sheets." I'm sure I'm getting the details wrong here - I'm not positive that it was Kai, and I don't have a good enough mental model of print sheets to know what was possible back then. And I think these skills aren't relevant today (?) But I thought it was a fascinating detail. It's always fun to hear about the wrinkles that serious players of a game pick up on in order to find an edge. (I've searched for the story a few times and haven't been able to find it; I just don't remember enough about it now) edit: some discussion below, but I think the story here is approximately "Kai memorized all possible print runs, which was feasible to do back then, and was therefore able to back out which cards had probably been drafted and who was probably holding them" or something like that. Nothing about reasoning about runs across boosters!
- zos_kia 2y agoThere is a woman who found a way to game casino black jack and made millions out of it before getting caught. It's nearly impossible to replicate but it involved spotting imperfections in the way print sheets are cut up into individual cards. I don't remember her name but she was an associate of poker legend Phil Ivey, and there's a whole documentary on YouTube about it. It's pretty fascinating what greed and a ridiculous level of risk tolerance can achieve.
- nyczomg 2y agoPrinter dots also led to the arrest of Reality Winner who leaked an internal NSA document to The Intercept which published it unredacted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner
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- perihelions 2y agoThe KGB caught some Soviet dissidents the same way. They had a (mandatory) register of the unique imprint pattern of every mechanical typewriter. - "Nightmare for the KGB: The Advent of Photocopy Machines" - "In the early 1960s the Soviet ruling elite—in this case, the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, responsible for ideology and counter-subversion, and the Agitprop Department, the party’s main watchdog over “ideological” matters —imposed special procedures for introducing newly invented photocopying machines. The procedures were designed to prevent the use of photocopying machines for producing copies of materials viewed as undesirable by the authorities." - "Decades earlier, a similar approach was used for typewriters. Proprietors of offices and stores had to provide local KGB branches with sheets of paper showing examples of the font of every typewriter they had. These sheets enabled the KGB, using technical procedures, to determine the origin of any typed text." - "In one case that occurred at my present place of employment—the Institute of World Economy and International Relations—the KGB traced an “illegal” social-democratic-oriented journal advocating “socialism with a human face” to a typewriter belonging to the secretary of the Institute’s director. Only a few dozen copies of the journal had been produced, but this proved to be enough to put five or six young people in jail for a year. The Institute’s director fired his secretary, who had permitted her son-in- law to use her typewriter to produce the illegal copies." - "The only typewriter I knew of that could not be traced by the KGB was one I had in my home. It had been presented as a gift to my father, Soviet statesman Anastas Mikoyan, when he made an official trip to East Germany and visited a factory there that produced typewriters." https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Eroding-the-Soviet-Culture.pdf https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Eroding-the-Soviet-... ("Eroding the Soviet “Culture of Secrecy”, Sergo A. Mikoyan (2001))
- aidenn0 2y agoI remember trying to print out fake magic cards in the late 90s (I picked a non-valuable card). I used two passes: a dye-sub printer with a laser for the black text. It looked great to the naked-eye, but trivial to see the difference due to differing print technology under a microscope. I'm slightly surprised that examination of the CMY pattern in the color wouldn't have been sufficient to identify a fake. [edit] Just re-read the post and realized these were identified as fake just from the picture posted online. That makes a lot more sense.
- PaulHoule 2y agoI remember my son really wanting a copy of The Nightmare before Christmas which Disney wasn't selling at the time because, at least then, they regularly let movies go out of print. I found a "used" copy on AMZN which was obviously a fake with inkjet printing on the box and the disc, metadata on the disc indicating it was a DVD+R, etc. Served Disney right.
- aidenn0 2y agoI've gotten new movies on DVD-Rs from Amazon before. Also clearly pirated since they just played the movie when you put it in rather than a forced showing of the FBI warnings &c.
- hinkley 2y agoIn a game where there are rules about deck content, but scarcity around the existence of cards, I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use. If you add a fifth ace to a deck in the middle of a poker game, that’s cheating. If poker decks were printed without aces but aces were allowed, then why should anyone care how you got these four aces, as long as they were shuffled fairly into the deck? Just play the damn game.
- RHSeeger 2y agoBecause part of playing the game for "bring your own deck" competitions is the time/effort/money that went into acquiring the cards. It's as much about "making the best deck you can with the cards you can get your hands on" as it is about just making the best deck you can.
- eqvinox 2y agoIt would be incredibly funny if these cards are actually genuine and someone just didn't bother to set the clock (year) correctly on their printer. (But I don't believe this is the case and am not sure if available printers back in 1996 would even emit these patterns in this form. Just noting in this case the device's knowledge of date and time is also a factor of uncertainty.)
- tart-lemonade 2y agoOne way to check could be to insert the serial number into various printer manufacturer's warranty check pages to see if anything pops up. Some companies (like Lexmark) require a model number first (which was not present for the example), but others (like Brother) will accept just a serial.
- jldugger 2y agoIt seems unlikely the printer would choose 2024 if set incorrectly though.
- fredoralive 2y agoIn the thread a few prototype cards that turned up before the current ones[1] are checked and they do have 1996 dates in the dots. So at least some printers at the time did have them. But there’s also a batch identified as “high quality” that don’t have dots on the front printing, which if genuine would point to some printers not doing it at the time. [1] There were like, 3, and the thread has a spreadsheet showing that well over a thousand prototypes were graded in the last few months. Not sus at all.
- kristianp 2y agoWhat personal info is printed in these yellow dots? Are they present if I print from Linux? Brother colour laser owner here. Edit, from [1] posted in this thread it looks like date printed and printer serial number are printed. And if it's done by the printer firmware it wouldnt help to use OS drivers. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots#Comparable_processes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots#Compar...
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoNot sure but I'd expect it's handled at the printer firmware level and not controllable from the OS. It would be pretty weird to let the user modify such a "feature" without even having to disassemble their printer.
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- alliao 2y agoI don't get why yellow isn't subsidised for all the printers I'm running out of yellow despite hardly ever printing any colour or is this printer manufacturer's subtle protest
- HanayamaTriplet 2y agoThe fact that a large grading company would not check such a basic type of forgery makes it seem like they're in on the scam. This sounds similar to what happened with video game grading company Wata, who were alleged to have fraudulently inflated the value of games they were grading: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/grading-firm-wata-is-facing-a-lawsuit-for-allegedly-manipulating-the-retro-game-market/ https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/grading-firm-wata-i...
- ryanmcbride 2y agoI mean grading is a scam all its own so them teaming up with other scammers wouldn't surprise me at all.
- nimish 2y agoYeah imagine paying top dollar for a Pokemon card that has zero market liquidity.
- treypitt 2y agoPSA is a scam company?
- Ekaros 2y agoFrom stories of same exact card being graded for different ratings at different times. Would indicate that they are less perfect in their service than they might market. Difference in grade can change the value. So as whole the process is quite questionable at times. Not to even talk about some things slipping through or being questionable in documenting.
- mrsilencedogood 2y agoDifference in grade basically DETERMINES the value. Even small steps down from perfect greatly diminish a card's value. Basically IGN review scale levels of drop-off.
- ziofill 2y agoIf they went through the trouble of printing fraudulent cards, why would they print the actual date?
- tivert 2y agoSo, knowing nothing about Pokemon, it was lost on me if 2024 was legitimate or not (I suspected not, but it seems the article kind of assumes you know when the cards should have been made). This article seems to give a clearer picture: https://www.pokebeach.com/2025/01/millions-of-dollars-of-prototype-pokemon-cards-may-be-forgeries-retired-creatures-employee-involved https://www.pokebeach.com/2025/01/millions-of-dollars-of-pro... > Millions of Dollars of Prototype Pokemon Cards May Be Forgeries, Retired Creatures Employee Involved > The authenticity of the Pokemon TCG’s famous “prototype cards” are now being called into question. > Last year, hundreds of prototype Pokemon cards began to sell in collecting circles from the personal collection of Takumi Akabane, one of the original creators of the Pokemon TCG. He worked at Creatures until 2008. He recently attended events to sign some of the cards. Grading company CGC worked closely with Akabane to verify the cards’ authenticity. > The prototype cards represent the earliest days of the TCG, produced in 1996 before Base Set released in Japan. They show the progression of Pokemon cards from their “proof of concept” stage where they used their Red & Green sprites to their beta designs that used their final artwork from Mitsuhiro Arita and Ken Sugimori.
- browningstreet 2y agoI've asked chatgpt to explain to me the pokemon card craze, and it gives a long answer, but I still don't understand the videos of people shoving shopping carts full of big boxes of Pokemon cards...
- daedrdev 2y agoThe answer is they are gambling they can sell them for more later
- browningstreet 2y agoOh this is a long game? I thought there was an immediate trade/return/game involved. I didn't realize Pokemon had legs like these... so out of the (game) loop.
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- hombre_fatal 2y agoThe article doesn't explain what playtest cards are nor what is being caught by their detective work. It doesn't even mention the word counterfeit. I can guess what's happening here, but I'd like to know more concrete info about the scale and impact of this, how much people were paying for these cards, etc.
- mock-possum 2y agoYeah this is sorely lacking in context, even the title seems to expect the audience to already be familiar with whatever this is.
- ziddoap 2y agoIt seems to be a really niche Pokemon forum, so I'm not surprised that the post isn't written for a general audience.
- jedimastert 2y agoThis comment feels like a criticism that the audience was not considered, instead of you just not being part of the intended audience.
- rtkwe 2y agoUpwards of $24k USD when you factor in buyer's premium for a recent one. (Not confirmed to be fake but an example of another prototype card) This is probably near the high watermark of cost because it's one of the earliest versions but a signed one might bump it up even higher. https://goldin.co/item/1995-pokemon-alpha-prototype-25-pikachuqqwbh https://goldin.co/item/1995-pokemon-alpha-prototype-25-pikac... https://goldin.co/buy/?search=pokemon%20prototype&sort=Highest_Bids&show_only=Sold%2520Items https://goldin.co/buy/?search=pokemon%20prototype&sort=Highe... As for the article, it's posted to a niche specific community site, they're naturally going to explain less because the readers already have the context. These cards are expensive and sought after and there's a plausibly massive number of fakes out there.
- m348e912 2y agoMy theory: If you ever wondered why color printers with a separate black ink tank won't print a black and white document when it's low on color -- it's because they have to print the secret yellow dots for fingerprinting purposes and need the color ink to do so.
- Reason077 2y agoSolution/hack: buy one of those ink cartridge refill kits, but put black ink in the yellow cartridge. That way when you want to see the dots they should come up nice and clear? Obviously this is not going to work out well if you actually print in colour.
- WJW 2y agoWouldn't that just ruin the document you were trying to print?
- Reason077 2y agoWell, yes. But the OP was suggesting/suspecting his printer prints security dots even when printing in B&W. This could be a good way to reveal them for analysis purposes.
- lima 2y agoThat would permanently destroy the yellow ink path.
- Rendello 2y agoThis was in the hacker Zeitgeist a few years ago, when "Secret Dots from Printer Outed NSA Leaker", though it's unclear whether the dots were used or if it was one of the other opsec failures. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14494818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14494818
- tzs 2y agoOT: I've wondered about printed forgeries, but in the context of comic books rather than cards. Suppose someone in the 1960's had bought a printing press of the same make/model as what was being used to print Marvel comics. Suppose they also bought a large supply of the same ink and the same paper and the same staples. They then wait. Then decades later they can see which 1960's Marvel comics have become valuable collectables. The early '60s was when Marvel introduced Spider-Man, Thor, the Fantastic Four, Doctor Strange, Iron Man, the Avengers, the Hulk, the Black Widow, and the X-Men for example, many of which went on to fetch hundreds of thousands or even millions for mint condition copies. They they use their vintage press, ink, paper, and staples to print mint condition forgeries. What would their chances of fooling people be?
- whatevermang 2y agoI suppose it'd be easier for someone to buy one of each of the comics, rather than an industrial size printing press used to print comics and hold onto it for 70 years. I dont think ink, on it's own, has a 70 year shelf life either. And, aside from having the setup to print stuff with, you still need the source material (presumably printing plates or whatever) which is where the actual forging comes in. Assuming it was printing plates lets say, you'd need to copy them to a microscopic level along with every dot on a matching comic book. That's probably quite hard.
- bombcar 2y agoIt depends on if they get too greedy. One or two would probably slip in. But once you get too many, something would be noticed. Everything would match, but the ink wouldn't have been on paper long enough, that kind of thing. And the space and requirements to keep everything in wait - would be more hassle and expense than just stockpiling copies of every comic ever made.
- anyfoo 2y agoThe one factor that might be hard for them to control is "aging". Sure, the paper will likely have aged the same, but maybe the ink ages differently on paper than on a bottle. (In both potential ways: The ink in the bottle may go bad, or it may age less than on paper.) I am really not qualified to even speculate. But one thing I want to note is that this scenario does not strike me as too different from "what if I had bought or mined 100 bitcoin while they were still cents each", which would actually have required significantly less effort and even foresight. I don't think anyone originally thought that comic books for kids sold at newspaper stands would ever become collector's items with such a massive value, so it would probably have been rather bizarre for someone to do what you suggested, especially since the many factors that you mentioned alone mean that some explicit planning for this scenario is likely required for things to actually fall into place that way. I'm eager to be proven wrong, of course.
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- TacticalCoder 2y agoWhen it comes to highly valuable collectibles, the chinese are very good at making fakes. Take a pricey watch, like the Rolex Daytona 116500LN (unobtaimium at a dealership, MSRP $13 K or so but impossible to get, so they went up to $40 K used [but never used])... Well you've got chinese counterfeit, like Noob factory and others, where they even number the revisions and each revision is better than the last one. Journalists asks a counterfeiter "but how comes you improved so much between v5 and v6 and it's now impossible to tell the watch appart without opening it?" and the counterfeiter answers: "We watch your YouTube videos where you compared our v5 to a real one and see everything we missed that you noticed and we fix these". Fakes are so good now a percentage of the parts can be swapped for real ones (meaning there's also now an issue of "frankenwatch": bad guy takes one real one and two fake ones and creates two "frankenwatch", which both have parts of the original, making them even harder to tell from real ones seen that they're each partially the real thing). I've got all my Magic the Gathering cards from the nineties. Some are worth 4 digits a pop. I know there are insanely good chinese fakes now. There's one way to tell certain fakes with a magnifier but don't be fooled: chinese counterfeiters are watching all the YouTube vids about how to tell fakes from real cards and are enhancing their process. And if it requires "magic" fingerprint, they'll modify their printing process to be able to reproduce even those hidden dots. Wizards of the Wokes (sorry, Wizards of the Coast) tried to fix the issue by adding holograms and foils and whatnots but even that the chinese can of course copy and, anyway, it's mostly the old, simplest to copy, cards that are worth $$$$ (except for some unique cards like the "One ring" from the "fat goldberry", "asian gandalf" and "black aragorn" edition of Lord of The Rings. Yup, Wizards of the Wokes went full DEI, so full left that their brains fell out of their skulls and they really did black aragorn, asian gandalf and fat golderry -- certainly as an homage to Tolkien's legacy and certainly to please Tolkien's fans). So Wizards of the Wokes: from the bottom of my heart, go fuck yourself!)
- hnburnsy 2y agoI know nothing here but just assumed the card stock for all these collectible cards was unique, easily identified, and hard to counterfeit. I guess not.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago> The combined sales across all auction websites likely exceeds $10M. Individual cards were selling between four to six figures, based on the variant and the popularity of the Pokemon. Woah, I had no idea Pokemon cards could be so valuable (obviously I don't know much about Pokemon other than my kids use to play with them)
- rtkwe 2y agoThere's been a fairly high profile hype cycle around them for a few years driven by a few high profile creators/influencers making some huge stunt purchases and lots of speculation on the value of the cards. Feels very beany baby-esque to me but bubbles are lasting a long time these days so who knows how long it'll last.
- lightedman 2y agoProtip: That yellow dye is almost always fluorescent. 365-405nm light will make it light right up.
- Validark 2y agoDoes it not strike anyone else as wrong that a printer that you own has to do the bidding of the government instead of you? That you have to pay for it to be forensically watermarked against your own interests? And why have all these companies just taken orders from 3 letter agencies about this? Doesn't anyone have integrity? Isn't there anyone who believes that your own possessions shouldn't be made to conspire against you? I guess the whole smartphone thing answers that question far better than a printer...
- bobim 2y agoIn general you put your name on documents you print. But true that if you are a reporter in some country you might want to print stuff anonymously. How easy it is to modify a printer firmware to scramble those dots?
- LeafItAlone 2y ago>In general you put your name on documents you print. What do you mean? I’m confident that 95%+ of the documents I print do not have my name, or the name of anyone who has ever been in my house, on them.
- bobim 2y agoI mean when I send letters I want people to know it's from me 99.999% of the time, that's all.
- ycombinatrix 2y agoI didn't buy a printer to send letters to Uncle Sam
- vasco 2y agoMore than 99.999% of all printed pages don't have the name of the person who printed them on them. I can't even come up with examples where the large majority of the material someone printed wasn't belonging to someone else, ie, printing a book, learning material, computer generated pictures, photographs, things like this. "Printing a letter" is something I doubt anyone is doing in any meaningful percentage that this makes sense. A person printing a single small book they didn't want to buy is printing more pages just that one time than they will ever print with their name on them in their whole life.
- Scoundreller 2y ago> Different brands use different dot encoding patterns, and not all of these can be decoded. The companies don’t reveal this information so any known pattern has been cracked by someone from the general public. Ehhhhhhhhh, not always
- anonu 2y agoCan NFTs solve this problem?
- maplant 2y agoUh, not retroactively
- rtkwe 2y agoAlso probably not even going forward. What prevents me from printing a copy of a card and claiming it's the real card and the one registered on the chain is the forgery? NFTs for tracking real items is fundamentally flawed as it requires people to perfectly and accurately update the ledger and never feed false information into it. Also how do you crack a pack when they're NFT tracked? The whole economy of TCGs is built around the blind box element of loads of people buying packs of cards.
- rtkwe 2y agoNo.
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- lambaro 2y agoNo, there is not a problem on Earth for which NFTs are a solution.
- kaichanvong 2y agowith-lots this information (in the game Pokémon/Pokemon TCG*), there so many-chances for misinformation of exact-words; however, its possible to realise from Titles, much more details in-print, art-work, these almost "easter eggs" actually printed-out meta-data/"metadata", is 1 point to consider when seems "noisy", hopefully browsers take-care for having seen–noticed However, its lucky to see these almost "behind-the-scenes" look at what is happening there. Hopefully people that contribute, realise these details, more, are what is happening! (even in January, 2025) (thank-you for sharing) *TCG (Tradable Card Game)
- JAMES201 2y ago[dead]