I 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).
I 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.
I had a friend whose home was full of movie memorabilia. The boxing shorts from Rocky, the journal from Raiders of the Lost Ark, props from Star Wars, etc. all professionally displayed in shadowboxes along with autographs and photos.
The only thing is that they were all fake. My friend's hobby wasn't collecting memorabilia, it was making fakes. He was quite open about the fact that none of it was real and would happily describe how he created each piece.
That’s an entire hobby, making replicas. It’s only “fake” if you’re trying to convince people they’re real.
There's a whole fun additional layer of ethical replica hobbyists figuring out how to make replicas that are satisfyingly accurate to the original, but difficult for an unscrupulous third party to pass off as real.
One of my favorite examples is Gibson replica guitars with period-accurate serial numbers, but the serials are intentionally stamped during the wrong step in the painting & finishing process to signal that they weren't assembled at a Gibson factory.
If you're not trying to pass them off as authentic, I think they're just called replicas, not fakes.
>He was quite open about the fact that none of it was real and would happily describe how he created each piece.
His heirs probably won't be so forthcoming.
I remember a case where a man was accused of forging a will. They figured out it was a forge because it used the Calibri font, Microsoft only added Calibri in 2007 and the document was supposed to be from a few years before.
Surprisingly many forgeries were exposed due to Calibri, Wikipedia has a short list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibri#In_crime_and_politics
I feel like I remember the topic having its own list article but can't find any trace of it.
This makes me want Microsoft to change the default font every decade just to make these cases easier to solve.
Well, they've recently change the default font to Aptos, so we're probably going to see these stories come up again soon.
Reminds me of this:
In some parts of the world a will must be written by hand or needs an attesting notary.
Similarly, there's also Rudy Kurniawan, who was a wine counterfitter. Went to Federal prison, deported, and now is in demand to produce wine again in Asia because of how good he was at it.
There is a film essay by Orson Welles called "F for Fake" about art forgery, an artist that creates forged works that gain value by being works of art in their own right, that then takes a sudden turn. I don't want to spoil it, but it's a fascinating look at art, truth and lies.
> changed his name to match the artist and served his sentence by painting and signing a mural
If you kill Santa Claus, you must become Santa Claus!
I was pretty sure you meant this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Beltracchi
But he didn't change his name.
That's who I thought as well, but I think it's more likely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Sim
That was the one, but I find it strangely pleasing that there are several near matches for the scenario described.
I have to wonder if the fakes made by this unique forger aren't works of art in their own merit...
Not the same person but see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_van_Meegeren#M._Jean_Decoe...
From what I understand in the topic the original Pokemon card inventor is involved in this as is a renowned card grading company (knowingly or not I leave out of the question).
So if this stirs up a large controversy, it might actually make the fakes, especially the signed ones, collectibles as well. Probably never the value they first had, but I hope the wistle blower can recover some of his losses.
Yes imagine if Andy Warhol were alive and involved in selling forgeries of his own work... is it still a forgery then?
The whole point is that they were supposed to be genuine prototypes from the 90s.
Real-deal forgeries of old prototypes sounds even more exclusive than just old prototypes. They'll be worth a lot in the future.
An old employee using his home printer in 2024 to print up old mockups sounds more exclusive than actual prototypes from the 90s? What is your reasoning there?
Old employee prints out old mockups, fools everyone when he has them graded and sold at auction is also an exciting and rare story. Rare and interesting enough to make the rounds beyond the pokemon scene (as evidenced by us talking about it).
I'd agree that original prototypes would be cooler and more exclusive, but these cards are also unique thanks to the events around them. They are not just any contemporary printouts
If he said he painted them in the 70's, yes.
Well, it works for Damien Hirst (allegedly).
You can tell they're fakes because they're the Facebook logo in different colours.
The poster acknowledges this: "I will lose thousands".
https://www.elitefourum.com/t/many-of-the-pokemon-playtest-c...
If you're spending thousands of dollars on collectible pokemon cards, you probably aren't strapped for cash.
What a homie. Judging from their profile picture they are also a fan of "The Untalkative Bunny". What a nice person.
If 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
edit: If you want the very technical version, here's a video from his own channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwnYLvWdNd8
I 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!
There 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.
Cheung Yin ‘Kelly’ Sun. The tactic is called edge sorting [1], they played Baccarat and had the dealers turn certain cards 180 degrees "for luck".
Here's a great doco about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEkl2yAdoHw
Lots of coverage around the gambling news sites too:
https://highstakesdb.com/news/high-stakes-reports/phil-ivey-...
I thought this sounded familiar, and yeah it was covered here in the past https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226725 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7631091
>It's pretty fascinating what greed and a ridiculous level of risk tolerance can achieve.
I feel like it's less greed when they're gaming back casinos that already have a house edge.
Counting cards ,being able recognize cards, it seems like anything where a person might use their brain to deduce what's next is "cheating"
Greed and cheating needn't be realted. The players are following this strategy to make money, presumably more than they should want. Whether they're taking it from moral or immoral sources should be a separate issue, imho.
They were actually changing the deck in way that survives shuffling, not just looking at the differences.
They were using the offset on the printing as a way to tell orientation of the card. Since auto shufflers never rotate the cards, any rotation they added would persist allowing a way to tell good from bad cards in future hands.
Reminds me of Michael Larson’s breaking of Press Your Luck.
I thought it was less that you could predict across packs and more that you could infer what card had been taken given what was left. That meant you had a better chance of not getting cut during the draft.
Yeah I'm sure I've fumbled some details here (sorry!) - I'm searching for this story again and haven't found it, but have found a few things about draft techniques that use print sheets[1] that focus on what you describe - reasoning about the original pack based on the current contents. The technique is pretty interesting!
[1] https://imgur.com/a/how-to-use-print-runs-to-gain-advantage-...
Most of MtG’s secondary market value is protected by how difficult it is (or how costly it is) for cheap printers to match Cartamundi’s (and other global printers) offset printing processes. The number of counterfeit tests (green dot, black layer, Deckmaster, etc) that are simple and useful for basic users to determine counterfeits all trace back to the printing processes WotC uses.
I am amazed by how much value is protected by such a small technological detail
> 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)
The 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-i...
That theory doesn't make too much sense; if they were both in on the scam and aware of the printer metadata, surely they would have asked for a different version before signing their name to it.
IMO it's more likely that "grading" is just a joke.
This is a good point! My assumption was that they actually do have a high baseline of fake rejection and gave these a fair analysis, given that they would want to maintain credibility and have multiple write-ups on their web site about how they closely analyze submitted cards to detect counterfeits. I wonder if there are any independent tests out there on how well they actually detect and reject fakes sent in for grading by normal people.
Yeah, we had a global financial meltdown in 2008 because it turned out the people who graded securities didn't look too closely at what they were grading; turns out customers wanting their bonds rated wouldn't choose rating agencies that applied an inconvenient level of scrutiny.
It'd be naive to expect the pokemon card industry to be better regulated.
Technically, it was the lenders that weren’t verifying borrowers’ income and work histories.
Theoretically, there is much less chance of “liar loans” due to digital real time records via services like The Work Number and ADP.
I don't think you're talking about the same thing.
Part of the 2008 financial crisis was that lenders were giving loans out to anybody, and then even though information was available showing the low likelihood of paying back those mortgages the rating agencies rated the bundles of mortgages as high quality low risk.
So the problem starts with loans going to anyone, but the crisis was caused by ratings agencies wanting to keep clients rather than do their jobs.
Inability to verify borrowers income had zero relevance to “liar loans.”
Banks had plenty of options, they purposefully decided not to use them.
It's easily possible that this was overlooked because when being in on the scam one will be less diligent about such things.
It sounds like they suspect someone who helped design the original Pokemon trading card game - Takumi Akabane. A prominent investor claims to have gotten the cards directly from him and doesn't care if they're fake as a result.
Maybe the original designer wants to make a few more dollars.
Akabane or the buyer could be the original source of the fakes, but the grading company CGC was responsible for "verifying" that they were authentic before they were sold at auction:
Easier to assume the person grading this just didn't do a great job.
I mean grading is a scam all its own so them teaming up with other scammers wouldn't surprise me at all.
Yeah imagine paying top dollar for a Pokemon card that has zero market liquidity.
PSA is a scam company?
IDK about PSA specifically, but I've collected comics, video games, toys, etc and the one commonality between all of them is that there are these big "grading" companies that charge money to seal your stuff in a plastic box with a label at the top that indicates its "grade" and there is always a scam of some sort. Sometimes they're not actually investigating the goods with any real scrutiny, sometimes they have a conflict-of-interest involving a well-stocked seller, sometimes they're directly manipulating the market. There's always something with these guys.
Also a lot of their income comes from convincing people who aren't educated on the market to grade extremely common items that will never be worth any significant amount of money no matter what "grade" they get; not actually a scam in that case but it shows you what their real priorities are.
I've also seen them set up booths at sci-fi conventions where you can pay to have them "authenticate" things you got signed by celebrities. In this case the authentication is entirely separate from the signature so there's nobody who can actually testify that they witnessed William Shatner signing your crap, only that they know your crap and William Shatner were in the same convention center at the same time.
I don't think it's an overt scam, but let's put it this way: as with auction houses, there is a disconnect between the service the company is providing and what the buyers think they're getting. And the companies have no special interest in correcting that.
For grading companies and for auction houses, the goal is to move the highest possible volume of goods at the highest possible valuation. They're not going out of their way to root out non-obvious fraud. They operate with the assumption that 99% of the traffic they're handling is legitimate, and of the 1% that's forged, only a small fraction of the buyers will ever find out. On the rare occasion it blows up, they can apologize and settle for an amount much less than what it would take to investigate every specimen with great zeal.
From 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.
Difference 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.
The issue is people have done careful tests where the send the EXACT SAME card multiples times and get different grades.
ETA: And I don't mean a "reasonable people making subjective judgements" type variation ... I'm talking about like a 6 vs an 8.5 or 9 (out of 10).
Something can be subjective, without being a scam.
Are you suggesting they are deliberately misleading people, or are you saying grading is not consistent and is subjective based on circumstance around when the item is graded.
The service being sold is the objectivity of the grading process, otherwise anyone could just decide they have a high grade item.
This sort of thing happens all the time in grading – a later reveal shows that earlier gradings were obviously incorrect in the mind of any collector. That means that they have such a poor objective process as to be no better than subjective analysis.
Graders ultimately sell reputation. Like currency, grading only works if you believe in it. Don't believe the grader? Then their word isn't worth anything. This means as more and more of these issues happen, graders will struggle to retain that trust, and when it disappears it disappears rapidly.
I'm not a collector, but my understanding was that the point of grading a card was to have a verified, objective rating of the card's condition.
If grading is subjective, then I don't see the value of the process and would consider it a scam, personally.
> my understanding was that the point of grading a card was to have a verified, objective rating of the card's condition.
> If grading is subjective, then I don't see the value of the process
This made me curious to check the PSA grading standards, turns out it's both.[0]
Personally, as a very young kid I collected baseball cards, unfortunately for me, this was the very late 80's & early 90's. While I have some cards that are my favorites, would be pointless to grade cards that are practically worthless.
[0] https://www.psacard.com/gradingstandards
>> While it's true that a large part of grading is objective (locating print defects, staining, surface wrinkles, measuring centering, etc.), the other component of grading is somewhat subjective. The best way to define the subjective element is to do so by posing a question: What will the market accept for this particular issue?
>> Again, the vast majority of grading is applied with a basic, objective standard but no one can ignore the small (yet sometimes significant) subjective element. ... The key point to remember is that the graders reserve the right, based on the strength or weakness of the eye appeal, to make a judgment call on the grade of a particular card.
I guess the scam is more like current cryptocurrency.
I 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.
In 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.
> I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use.
Neither does most of the community. We call it proxying. Of course it's not allowed in sanctioned play because the purpose of sanctioned play is to sell cards, but I've never been around a table in someone's basement who cared that the sol ring I just played is actually a mountain with "sol ring" scribbled on it in sharpie as long as there was no way of telling it from the other cards in the deck, it would be legal for a real sol ring to be in that deck and I played it according to the rules governing sol ring. There are different formats to magic and the one with the most extensive, and therefore expensive, list of permissible cards has competitive decks that run into the tens of thousands of dollars invested (https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/vintage#paper). If you had to buy all of that every time you felt like playtesting a new deck people simply wouldn't do it.
I never played anywhere that allowed fakes but most players were ok with you taking a otherwise worthless card (hello Lapras my old friend) and marking the face to count as something else in Pokemon or otherwise.
Actual fakes were problematic as you can tell the back of the card apart generally.
Card sleeves are now generally required, at least in Magic the Gathering, because of double sided cards.
I have a (casual, goofy) deck with some proxies and I earnestly cannot tell the difference when they're sleeved.
What we used to do when I was a kid (before online stores were common to use, and had ~4 hours to the closest store selling magic cards so only got a new pack once a fortnight) was to use plastic sleeves for the whole deck. Then you can't really ser from the back if it's a printout or a real card.
Yeah I can't really imagine not using sleeves, any cards left unsleeved got worn out incredibly quickly.
you're going to sleeve it anyways, unsleeved card backs are too easy to mark. I've never played against or with an unsleeved deck in a magic tournament, even a draft.
I'm actually working on an open source digital card game with this in mind.
My favorite digital card games feel half way like scams in that if you really need a rare card for a deck, you can easily spend 50 or 60$ on packs and come up short. It's impossible to just pay 10$ and get the single card I need.
I don't think I'll be able to match the production values of MTG( the cards don't even have art, which is a both a stylistic choice and my own limitations), but I want something self hostable anyone can play.
You may be interested in the excellent rules engine and frontend to MtG. All FOSS and with real cards and art. I can't imagine the "official" games ever being as good.
Outstanding!
I played with the Android build for a bit. Still not ideal since it's ultimately uses someone else's IP, but it's very cool.
I hope to get my own prototype up by this summer. The logic is all server side ( to prevent cheating), so you could even roll your own client.
I'm getting ahead of myself, but I imagine a bunch of related projects. Want to play from a Rust cli app, go ahead!
I look forward to playing your game and escaping the nonfree assets (and commercially driven rules changes).
I know that MtG scene in my city plays basically 100% on nicely done proxies ;)
Nobody has an issue with it. The courtesy is that it'd be nice for you to work towards a real deck if you play with it much, but it's not a hard rule or anything.
My understanding is that the inherent rarity of some cards is actually part of the game's balancing. If everyone can have every card (or worse, multiples of every card), then some vaguely game-breaking cards, or combinations of cards — that normally don't matter / aren't theory-crafted, because of their rarity — would suddenly be everywhere, in every tournament deck, creating a "dominant strategy" for the game, in turn necessitating those cards be banned. Even though those cards/combos would have been perfectly fine and fun and not-broken, had they stayed rare.
(Or at least, that's how MtG was originally designed to be balanced; I think this may have changed with MtG Online.)
That's usually balanced more by banning or restricting a card than by rarity. It may have been part of Garfield's early design to use card rarity to limit the meta but it simply doesn't work (instead of limiting the cards it would limit the competitive players to those who can afford the cards). Instead there are multiple formats with different sets of permissible cards, from the most permissible (vintage, which gives access to any card that has ever been printed and is not banned or restricted to 1 copy per deck) to the least (standard, which only gives access to cards from the most recently-printed sets). The deeper the card pool, the more expensive the format as those cards are not reprinted due to their gamebreaking power.
And then it was discovered that it is effective tactic to make money. You could sell all cards in the set for 50 or alternatively you could sell bunch of packs mostly filled with filler for 150 and get people buy quite lot of them to chase the limited set of strong and competitive cards.
I thought this is governed by point-buy systems where you have a certain number of points to spend on your deck, and powerful cards just cost more points. Not an MtG player though, and I assume this also varies from play to play.
Now that people are having this discussion, I am remembering I have a family member that plays 40k, and they have both point buy systems and proxies, since the models are so damned expensive and change every four years.
Speaking of 40k, I'm curious if anyone has created a FOSS 40k-alike game, where every unit has a standard 3D-printable model that is itself a FOSS asset.
Not that that'd be too interesting on its own; but it'd almost certainly spawn a community of people creating and sharing derivative works of those standard models. Could be entire apps / package repositories / "character customization engines" built on snapping together standardized unit components like LEGOs and then printing the result.
Not sure about mainline 40k. But for Horus Heresy (official 40k spinoff of an earlier edition) there was an absurd amount of free or borderline free (think 5$ for a set of files to print an equivalent unit box that would have cost you $60 from GW, but you can print as many boxes as you want) community created content for resin printers. Not just units or vehicle models but also mix and match bits similar to what you're talking about (helmets, arms, legs, torsos, weapons, to customize both official and unofficial models). I remember being blown away by how many of the models were on par with or even better than what GW was offering for a fraction of the price. If you had or knew someone with a resin printer you could print 400-500$ armies for 20-30$ of resin. Most of the group I played with had at least half of their army printed out. And in a lot of ways it's "truer" from a hobbyist point of view because instead of buying a box of generic troops from GW and painting them according to their faction you could wildly customize beyond what the official troop boxes came with with printed bits and greebles. Some people came up with really creative and impressive stuff.
I always figured Lego was the way to go here. But Hasbro would never be dumb enough to license those properties.
It would be cool however if someone took a standard Lego set and rearranged the pieces into a number of units. So everyone knew if you wanted a DingleHopper you would buy this kit and get one DingleHopper and three Jiggamadoos, and trade those to your friend for a pair of Whatsits.
There are indeed formats which work this way (https://canadianhighlander.ca/points-list/), but unfortunately the most-played formats (Commander, Standard, Modern..) don't have any such restrictions which means the investment required for competitive play is prohibitively high.
On the other hand, the ridiculous costs mean it's very easy to find like-minded people to play casually with using bootleg cards.
You definitely don't want actual counterfeits to exist in the game at all. Even if they're for personal use, they'll end up getting into the supply, and someone gets screwed over because they don't know any better. Instead we use "proxies" which aren't meant to be passed off as the real thing, but represent it in-game. They usually have a different art, or a different card back, or some other obvious difference from the real deal.
> In 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.
Where there are high prices of cards, any convincing counterfeit would be poor optics. Game play with non-convincing counterfeits is accepted in many places (i.e. proxies).
Yep this. We should be fighting 'pay to win' systems like this. Afterall the wealthy person who can afford these rare cards will have a natural advantage.
Imagine if dnd was sold in a way that only a few player's handbooks had fireball and if you had it, you could cast it.
Its a shame these systems caught on instead of more ethical systems. I hope Gen Z ends up burying this consumerist junk.
Not just wealthy, but also the charismatic. The couple of weeks when I knew about baseball cards and they were still something anyone cared about, I realized that one of the kids I knew was trying to sweet-talk everyone into trading them one card we had for a few cards he had.
I had no idea what the meaning of the trade was, I just knew that I was probably being tricked, based on the vibes he was putting out. And that was the last time I was interested in loot boxes.
Pokemon is significantly better at this than other trading card games (like Magic):
- The rarest cards in every set are usually just alternate art versions of other, more common cards from the set.
- They release products with more powerful cards that have become popular recently, to increase the supply.
- They release good decks based on what is popular in tournaments at a good price ($25-$40, iirc).
- They release copies of tournament winning decks at a really good price (like, $15 for the whole deck). These are proxy cards—they have a different back, they, don't have foil, the printing isn't as high quality. But if you wanted to try out a good deck, they're incredibly cheap.
TCGs are inherently predatory, but Pokemon seems to realize it's played mostly by kids.
Because 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.
But that effectively just makes it a game about measuring how much disposable income you have.
To put it another way, any 15 year old kid can put in the time and effort to assemble a great deck, but may not have the money. Should that kid not be allowed to compete on that basis alone?
Someone else made a subtle assertion that the sponsors of the event expect commerce to occur at the event. I don't have any reason to doubt that's the case.
> I'm slightly surprised that examination of the CMY pattern in the color wouldn't have been sufficient to identify a fake.
If I'm understanding the post correctly, these counterfeit cards were claimed to be from an early playtest which would in fact have been printed on normal consumer/office grade printers and not using a commercial large scale printing process. Some of the fakes are noted to actually have two sets of dots, one set from the original printer and another from whatever was used to make the fakes.
I 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.
I'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.
So, 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-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.
I'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...
In 2020 during COVID influencers like Logan Paul got into it and made it a fad again.
The answer is they are gambling they can sell them for more later
Oh 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.
Some of it is scalping. Buy product that's not going to be reprinted and sell it for more soon after. Pokemon generally will reprint big sets as needed though so it's less of an issue.
What 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#Compar...
Not 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.
You could add decoy dots or areas of negative yellow
That's exactly what uni dresden developed: https://github.com/dfd-tud/deda
TIL 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?
It 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/
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/
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/poke...
Thank 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.
> TIL printer dots!
Are these dots why some printers refuse to print b&w when you have no yellow left?
No, that's just because the function of inkjet printers is to transfer as much money as possible from you to the printer manufacturer.
Uh, I mean, because it's because colour ink makes your blacks blacker. Yeah, that's it.
It'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.
Brother printers don't do it iirc, and they're the only good brand anyway.
Brother B/W laser don't, Brother CMYK Laser/LED do.
Brother CMYK printers only skip printing the MIC if they think they're printing an internal test page in maintenance mode.
That was a very interesting bit of phraseology there my friend!
Guy A: winks winks nudges nudges
Guy B: LOOK EVERYONE, "GUY A" WINKED AND NUDGED!!
I'd say "the least bad brand" rather than "the only good brand" because of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
Are you sure? the only two on the EFF site say they do: 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).
Yes, it's very cool that I can print some protest leaflets or political posters, and have the police at my door the next day because "my" printer betrayed me thanks to a literal corporate-state conspiracy.
Even better; get a printer that doesn't do it, but manually add the id dots from the printer of someone you don't like.
Surprised there is no researcher dumping the SPI flash, patching some conditional jumps and doing a write-up.
It'd probably get them visited by men in black suits and sunglasses if they tried.
Not if they print the write-up.
Good way to tease out if the dot pattern is only ONE of multiple fingerprinting techniques that printers use :)
OT: 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?
[delayed]
I think the problem is that people didn't know comics would be valuable. If you knew that, then just buy a bunch of the comics and store them safely. It's probably a lot less work, won't get stuck with fakes if you can't sell them, and it's 100% legal.
I 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.
The 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.
It 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.
I 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.
What is missing in the context here is that the cards mentioned in this article are not actually real. They never existed, and therefore they are not "counterfeits" of a real one, they are just made up. Someone just claimed to know someone that had playtest cards from back in the day. They are not a commercial product.
See here for a bit more background: https://www.cgccards.com/news/article/13347/
If 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.)
Pulling out a loupe and manually inspecting a card is a slow process if you have a few thousand cards (avg player).
Avg 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.
> 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.
I built one of these several years ago for MtG cards. Trained a neural network with a binary classifier on a cheap $20 USB microscope looking at examples of the backs of real cards vs. fake cards.
Sadly never got around to shipping it, because it worked really well. Ported it to the web, but never figured out the billing issue, and so it died during the delivery phase. From time-to-time, I still wonder if I should resurrect this project, because I think it could help a lot of people.
If they went through the trouble of printing fraudulent cards, why would they print the actual date?
The 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.
Yeah this is sorely lacking in context, even the title seems to expect the audience to already be familiar with whatever this is.
It seems to be a really niche Pokemon forum, so I'm not surprised that the post isn't written for a general audience.
It 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.)
In 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.
One 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.
It seems unlikely the printer would choose 2024 if set incorrectly though.
Printer dots also led to the arrest of Reality Winner who leaked an internal NSA document to The Intercept which published it unredacted.
The 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-... ("Eroding the Soviet “Culture of Secrecy”, Sergo A. Mikoyan (2001))
This was a plot point in the oscar-winning movie "Das Leben der Anderen" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others)
Note that having the "only typewriter that can't be traced" soon becomes easy to trace, once they know it exists and the text doesn't match anything else.
Ideally she would be pardoned but only if she agrees to go by Leigh so we can stop pretending it's normal for someone to be named "Reality Winner".
Personally I think it's like the coolest name ever lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_Riddle is a close second
Punch card technology!
At least that's what I thought of, with those dot patterns forming bits.
They're both forms of encoding.
In case anyone ever wonders why their printer wont print a black and white document when its out of yellow? This.
One 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#Comparab...
Is anyone producing HP LaserJet 4 reproductions? It was a ridiculously long time before anyone beat that printer.
The 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.
I 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?
They exist. Quality may be suspect.
Yes, I would be stunned if a major mfg like Brother didn't have their own method of fingerprinting.
I think this rationale is defeated by the existence of monochrome printers.
Anyway, users also report this problem when running out of cyan or magenta. Either rich blacks are enabled or the printer is just a bad product.
I 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
This 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.
I 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.
This 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.
Pardon 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?
Basically 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')
Isn't mtg basically pay to win because of this?
No 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.
If you're playing constructed tournaments, yeah. Depends on the format, but the price of entry can range from $$$ to $$$$$$.
Organized 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.
You 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.
That 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.
Your 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.)
Are judges at tournaments pulling out loupes and inspecting cards?
Not 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.
I 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
> I believe official tournaments don't allow any form of proxy?
It doesn't solve the problem, but I thought I saw something about tournaments allowing proxies for a card that's present but in unplayable condition.
The few annual tournaments in Vintage typically do allow players to show up and register their deck is present, then put it away in a travel safe and play with proxies. That's for decks that can easily be worth 50-100k.
MTG cards are among the best investments of the past 20 years. I think it beats out everything except bitcoin.
I know of no tournament that is run this way - can you name an example?
Would an example of that be something like "This is my pretend black lotus, and here's my actual black lotus in this graded plastic box"?
If this is authoritative, I don't think so. It's really for the card got damaged in the current tournament so it's a marked card in a deck, or the card is valid, but only available as a foil which would feel different than other cards unless you were playing a foils only deck.
Originally the rule was specifically for cards damaged during the tournament. If a card was in acceptable condition at the start of the tournament but became marked during play you'd be required to substitute it for a proxy, and then acquire a real replacement before the next tournament.
There are unsanctioned events that allow proxies but it can put a store's wpn status at risk. For most competitive tournaments you need real cards, but a lot of competition for legacy and vintage are on mtgo (the old online magic client) now which is much cheaper and has rental services.
Imagine governments allowing money for gold that's present but locked away. And later for gold they don't have!
Bridge tournaments don't require the players to bring their own royal court to hold. Everyone gets to use cards proxying the various kings, provided by the tournament.
MTG tournaments become a test of playing skill, deck building skill, and the skill to have enough money to buy important limited production cards. It is what it is, but sometimes it feels gross.
> 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?
"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.
Basically 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.
Where do you think prize support for tournaments would come from if no one had to buy the cards?
Entry fees?
And sponsorships, and vendors and etc.
There's tournaments for _all kinds_ of games that don't require loot-box purchases to compete, it's not exactly an unknown problem.
The Mtg Pro Tour is free of entry and has a $500,000 prize pool. Tournaments encourage people to buy cards.
Is there a legitimate reason for collectors to value an authentic card more than a counterfeit card?
well if you're collecting something, it's age kinda matters?
maybe a counterfeit that's also from the 90s would have a similarly interesting story, but one from last week is much less interesting than the possibility of a beta card from the first set of a game inherently, and so less collectible.
There'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.
The 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.
When 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.
You wouldn't want to pay a premium for a reproduction.
Indeed - proxy cards have their place, but everyone involved should know that’s what they are.
Original 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.
FYI, 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.
EURion is a funny[1] kind of DRM, what caught the fake Pokemon cards is Xerox DocuColor[0], a watermarking technology.
The difference is that DRM is designed to prevent you from copying something, while watermarking is designed to make you dox yourself if you copy something. I've yet to see evidence that EURion et. all actually stop counterfeiting, but watermarking has been very effective at finding counterfeiters.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
[1] Most DRM is intended to enforce copyright; but the state is not asserting copyright over the image of a banknote. There are cases where it is legal and moral to completely reproduce a faithful image of a banknote, and those cases are much broader than the various exceptions to copyright that exist.
> but watermarking has been very effective at finding counterfeiters.
Whistleblowers, too. That's believed to be how they got Reality Winner, because the documents published by The Intercept contained those tracking dots.
>watermarking is designed to make you dox yourself if you copy something
Is that a legal requirement on paper somewhere?
It seems like an expensive feature to add if not required.
Eurion is part of a series of programs that stop some high-end scanner, printers and editing software from handling currency. Try scanning/editing/printing a eurion note and you will run into roadblocks. That makes it a type of DRM.
Seconded. The counterfeiters are idiots.
Maybe 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.
Precisely 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.
Are 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)
I guess when I called them idiots the context in my mind was "how could they think they could get away with it using digital printing".
They've committed fraud, plain and simple. As a consequence now all things like this may get closer scrutiny and fakes like these will be binned.
For some reason I'm reminded of the fake wine guy... taking advantage of the fact that valuable wines are kept as investments, so he faked them... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Kurniawan
Art forgery is a crime. The original creators could, theoretically, be jailed for this.
Is it still art forgery if the originals didn't exist? I think it's unclear whether these prototype designs were ever real or part of the scam.
Yes. There have been cases of a "lost work" being discovered and then later it's found out that the work was a forgery. Here's an article with some examdples: https://magazine.artland.com/the-art-of-forgery-art-forgers-...
Reminds of the fake "sealed" authentic NES cartridges going for thousands of dollars or more on Ebay. It is a very lucrative business for scammers.
Reminds 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.
Even 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.
Lol, it is a running joke that there are enough fragments of the "true" cross to build a forest.
I prefer the version that says "There are enough pieces of the true cross to build Noah's Ark."
It 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.
I guess if the cards are easily rejected then the counterfeiters will improve their process.
The 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?"
No, it will be detected as fake due to colorimetry. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorimetry
> 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.
Some 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.
But what happens when we ship of Theseus the AIs themselves, which as information are infinitely copyable and arguably have no "true" identity?
Yes it would be an original card modified by you. Was this supposed to be a hard question?
Looks like we hugged them too hard: https://archive.ph/hKXoK
My 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.
There's a couple of problems with the theory.
First, the reason inkjet printers use color ink for monochrome documents is pretty well known. While there is no doubt a degree of "profit optimization," there's a printing benefit to doing so. Most inkjet printers, because of the properties of the ink used, cannot produce very good blacks with only their black ink. It's standard to use some magenta and blue to 'deepen' the black which produces a subjectively better result. On many printers you can toggle this off, either on the printer or in the print driver. But, and here's where the profit optimization comes back, on a lot of cheaper printers especially you can't (although this might have more to do with the general lack of configurability of inexpensive printers). This technique is unnecessary for laser printers because of their different properties (toner is an opaque material bonded to the surface of the paper; ink is a liquid with a degree of transparency that is absorbed by the paper).
There's also an argument made by inkjet manufacturers that cycling the color cartridge is important to keeping the print head ready for use, although I don't think it's really that big of a motive since with some firmware work they could just run the cleaning cycle on the color cartridge for each print job (although, once again, a lot of this comes down to cheap printers being built around commodity controllers with very little configurability or intelligence in general).
Second, MIC-type dot markings are associated only with laser printers. The concept was developed within the laser printer industry and does not work as well on inkjets due to the higher level of bleed and poorer halftoning of very faint colors. I am not aware of any inkjet printers that print these types of dots; I would not be surprised to learn that there are a handful (particularly in the higher-end photographic market) but it's certainly not common. The EFF, for example, says that no inkjet printers do so. There's probably not much value to printing tracking dots anyway, because inkjet output is usually more obviously different from offset printing than laser (poorer color saturation and density), which makes inkjets unappealing for counterfeiting. There are, of course, a whole different class of "giclee" printers with excellent output quality (is HP Indigo still king?) but they're specialty devices and tracking dots only appear on consumer and office equipment.
If a better black color comes from mixing pigments, why not mix them and put it in to the black cartridge, instead of at print time?
There's a couple reasons that I know of, plus I suspect it may be cheaper for the manufacturer. One is that the media type selection in the printer driver (especially glossy vs. matte) changes the ink composition used for black, and you wouldn't have the ability to adjust that if it was premixed. Another is that "automatic" use of color inks for black is an RGB thing; when printing CMYK the same thing is done but it's actually part of the original data. That is, a "deep" black in a CMYK image will have non-zero CMY. Another way to put this is that the whole "we have to use color ink to produce black" is basically an artifact of a mapping problem between how RGB additive-color and CMYK subtractive-color look for black. If you prepare a CMYK graphic you can put down a sample of "100% black" or CMYK 0,0,0,100 and whatever your editing tool considers "black," like CMYK 60,40,40,100, and you'll find that they look quite different printed. But people working in the CMYK space expect to be able to control that to their preferences; people printing documents get it done automatically as a convenience.
Photo-quality inkjet printers sometimes use two different black cartridges, I'm not sure what exactly goes into the composition of the two. Art reproduction inkjet printers (giclee) can use 10, 11, even 12 different pigments to get optimum reproduction across the whole gamut. It gets very technical.
Short answer: black ink pigment is used in other non-black colour as well. If they come premixed, they are less useful for other colour.
For most modern inkjet printers, there's a simple reason: there must be ink inside the printhead at all times[1] or some of the nozzles will dry out and clog.
[1]: https://superuser.com/questions/409473/how-to-print-in-black...
Solution/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.
The real solution/hack is to just print your doc at FedEx for 50 cents the three times a year you need something printed
Yep. Last time I thought it'd make sense to have a printer, cause I was printing lots of stuff for a wedding, it ran out of ink oddly quickly then broke soon after I refilled it. Also jammed a lot and wasn't easy to get the right drivers for it.
I forget what I spent, maybe $150 by the end and 4 hours of dealing with it. Never again.
The ink cartridges that come with the printer aren't full, and have never been as far as I can remember. That's one of the reasons a cheap printer costs as little as a set of ink for the same printer (the other obviously being the "give away the razor, sell the blades" business model employed)
I figured it was that, which is why I even bothered buying more ink. Problem is the printer completely died.
Wouldn't that just ruin the document you were trying to print?
Well, 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.
That would permanently destroy the yellow ink path.
> they have to
Is this a federal (US) mandate or a law in any other country?
I've looked into it before and I didn't find anything suggesting that it's a law. It appears to be willful collaboration with the feds and other nation states, possibly to avoid the attention of regulators, but it's all done in secret so there's not a ton of info.
Along similar lines, scanners and commercial software packages like Photoshop attempt to detect EURion dots and the digital watermarking that replaced it in currency. Obviously open source software has no such thing because it would be pointless, and it's not illegal that it doesn't.
For whatever reason, these antifeatures seem to also be missing from commercial digital cameras.
> Is this a federal (US) mandate or a law in any other country?
No, its a backdoor regulation in the US (probably using the threat of actual regulation premised on controlling counterfeiting to get firms onboard) via agreements from manufacturers to act without regulation.
It is in the US
Which statute mandates this?
There is no law, but is it assumed there is a secret agreement with the government https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots#:~:tex...
Strictly speaking, no such law exists. My understanding is that it’s a request from the secret service that all of the printer manufacturers have agreed to comply with for counterfeiting reasons.
I 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?
We got open source 3d printers you can build at home __before__ open source regular printers that you can build at home
How come?
Because people aren’t okay with manual feeding, print times in minutes to hours, and 0.4mm resolutions on printed text.
open source plotters that fulfill these requirements do exist. Commercial solutions are just far more mature and accessible for printed text.
2-d printing is a hard, boring problem and many people increasingly print very little, especially hackers.
Because no-one, especially the kind of person who's into open-source, uses printers often enough for the problems to bother them, and because the existing commercial products are highly optimised and effective.
While most of the printer is pretty simple mechanically and electronically, inkjet heads and laser drums are going to be beyond the ability of most home hobbyists. Even dot matrix heads would be pretty complicated to fabricate with lots of tiny precise parts.
I don't think this is the reason because someone could harvest the heads from an existing printer and make everything else open source.
It genuinely seems that a 3D printer is easier to build; the precision and resolution required is significantly less than for photo-quality (or even document-quality) printing, right?
Previous discussions on hackernews (see this comment [0]) claim that the paper handling hardware is part of the problem. It's apparently quite difficult to do reliably (thus all the 90s jokes about paper jams) and all the known solutions are locked up under patent
I wonder if part of that problem could be solved by going back in time, and printing on something like the accordion-folded paper favored by dot-matrix printers, or even a full roll of 8.5 inch wide paper that then gets sliced into 11 inch long chunks after the ink is applied?
Then we just have to solve all the other problems :)
Truly high-speed printers do that.
Think of the printer that prints out all the Chase credit card statements for millions of customers. It uses a "roll to cut sheet system"
Example: https://offtechne.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Roll_to_Cut...
I kinda don't buy patents at this point. There were very decent printers in 90s and those have any patent expired already.
The commercial printers are fine for all normal uses and absurdly cheap. Ink, less so.
Whereas 3D printers are a niche tech for tinkerers; playing with building the printer is as much a part of the fun as actual usable output.
Monochrome laser printers don't have tracking dots.
(* That I have seen evidence of.)
I wonder if a pen plotter could replace a BW printer, probably adequate only for certain types of documents.
Buy Fuji Dimatix print heads and build your own.
Good luck with your currency counterfeiting.
I'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.
The reason most of it gets detected is that it doesn't succeed at being half convincing.
Yeah, 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.
There'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.
If, in our current world, the only reason you see for privacy is to commit a crime, then the shame is on you.
In our current world, I don't see a reason to own a printer.
If there is someone sending out printed communications that needs that level of security, and wasn't committing a crime, I'd love to hear about it. Because it'd seem like they'd have to completely avoid the mail system, leaving fingerprints, or licking the envelope.
No wonder the yellow in my printer is always empty!
especially the yellow in your b&w printer!