Quote:
Originally Posted by Exhibitman
I wouldn't necessarily say that either projection is accurate. The art world has had its share of forgery scandals. I recently watched a documentary on Netflix about a master forger in NY who fooled everyone for years. The solution is provenance. If you can trace a card's ownership chain back before the years when counterfeiting was technically feasible, then you have something that may be valuable. What we need is a new kind of registry, something like a catalogue raisonné (a comprehensive, annotated listing of all the known works of an artist either in a particular medium or all media) for high profile vintage cards. If I have a T206 Wagner that I got in 1977 and have had all that time, I could register it with a high-def scan. If/when I sell it, I could notify the catalog of the transfer and the chain of title would be clean. if I consigned it to REA, it would show the auction sale and the new owner would be registered. You could even assign fictitious names to the owners with the actual owners' names kept private.
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I think many of us who want to avoid altered cards have been doing exactly as you suggest--which is to look in VCP or other online resources to look and see who first sold the card we are interested in buying. It is not a perfect process but it does reduce the risk. Again this requires that the collector doing this has a detailed history of the bad apples in the hobby to make that research as accurate as possible.