Friday, January 8, 2010

A Good Reason Not To Trust PSA Or Any Auto Authentication Service


If you arent familiar with Kevin Burge, start learning. He has rightfully earned the reputation as the hobby devil, and he is starting to get more and more adept at what he does. I reported a while ago that he had gotten a fake Adrian Peterson through PSA's grading, and PSA tried to brush me off by saying they only authenticate the cards. Well, looks like Burge wins again, because here is the newest batch.

Here is a real Reggie Wayne rookie premiere auto from 2001. Notice all of the finer points of the signature and its positioning on the card. Here is one done by Burge's notorious account shoeless-joejackson. They dont even compare.

REAL:


FAKE:


Need more convincing? Here are the two signatures next to each other. They dont even look remotely close. Fake on left, real on right.


As you can tell, the slant of the real autograph is much more to the right and much more pronounced. The fake isnt even slanted. Also, notice the pen thickness of the fake, versus the real. Lastly, the complexity of the real signature is that so Burge is unable to replicate it. PSA didnt even bother to notice before grading this card.

Burge also has a number of graded PSA 10's on his screen name, which makes me question how PSA is really paying attention to his scams. I have received numerous reports from different PSA experts stating that they make arrangements with their biggest clients to assign more 10's than not, and after seeing how Wolverine 24 and Burges people crank out 10's, im not surprised if this turns out to be true.

Regardless of the graded 10's, im not as concerned as I am with the number of Fake RPAs he has gotten through. He has a fake PSA Todd Heap one up as well, and according to the people who collect the rookie premieres, Heap was never made in the original set.

It keeps getting better and better.

5 comments:

  1. I saw a Nightline piece where they busted a guy selling fake high-end purses on eBay. When are we gonna get one of these investigators to take on the hobby scammers?
    Thanks for updates like this.

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  2. I guess the autographs should all look nearly identical since they sign so many in a short period of time, all really close together on a larger sheet? You could compare two of my signatures from any given week and they might look different enough to call one a "fake"... I should think that signature #1 would look different than signature #6,678.

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  3. This is true, but there are two things that rarely change. Slant and letter finishes, both are off in this comparison.

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  4. Such a fake. And he's laughing all the way to the bank.

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  5. Normally one way to make things difficult for a dodgy seller is to get a number of people to create fake ebay accounts, bid on and "win" a number of items, not pay for them, but respond when they open an unpaid item dispute, then leave feedback stating "Sells fakes autos/patches" etc. However with shoeless he sells so much it won't make much of a dent.

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