Navigating the Card World: From Grading to Spotting Fakes and Beyond.
WE WANTED TO OFFER A SERIES OF BLOGS TO HELP EVERYONE IN THE HOBBY WITH A WIDE SCOPE OF CARD INDUSTRY ISSUES RANGING FROM GENERAL GRADING PRACTICES TO IDENTIFYING COUNTERFEITS, THE BEST PLACES TO BUY AND SELL ITEMS AND MUCH MORE.
Whether you submit 1,000 cards a month for authentication or never submit a single card in your life, we want to be able to offer help to everyone here at SportsAuthencation.com.
We really wanted to lead this inaugural blog with tips and examples for properly identifying Michael Jordan's iconic 1986 Fleer #57 rookie, but with all the recent counterfeit higher end Topps rookies that have been popping up lately, we want to leave MJ for the near future and address this head on.
Being baseball season, today we're going to look at one of the top stars, Mike Trout, and his 2011 Topps Update #US175 rookie.
Side by side, its easier to spot the difference between the two. However, at a local card shop, card show or even an eBay auction, not having a comparable real card right next to the fake can make it tricky to spot.
The Topps logo in the upper right, Mike Trout's name, the word "OUTFIELD" as well as the inset borders are all missing the silver gloss.
On the back, you can use a jeweler's loop to zoom in on any spot - we chose Trout's last name. In the counterfeit version, we see granular dot pixels indicating that the card has been photo copied, where the original is much more clean and dot free. The same can be said for the white area surrounding Mike's biographical information below.
If this post helps one less person get burned buying a fake, it was well worth it. Hopefully it will help many.
