1952 topps Mantle how can this be real
 

seller has only one card for sale
looks really suspect , how can this be real prefectly centered and ungraded

https://www.ebay.com/itm/40468013135...UAAOSw-sJlekcZ

….Because it’s fake.

The tell is the back corners, natural wear doesn't look like that

ooh, that is definitely not kosher...

https://media1.tenor.com/m/P_zxUEZb8...-hog-yeesh.gif

I'm honestly surprised we don't have many good fakes of this card yet. Especially with it's price run the last three years, we mostly see fakes that are not even remotely close and can be dismissed in two seconds.

I dunno, he’s got almost 100% positive feedback for all the Nintendo games he’s been selling. Seems like a trustworthy guy!

Sadly eBay feedback is completely worthless. A long time scammer has 10,960 positives with zero negative feedback.

Er…I guess I wasn’t clear enough with the joke.

What's equally surprising is that people don't take five minutes to educate themselves how to spot obvious fakes. Of course self help is not part of our culture apparently, as is obvious from all the threads asking for contact information which people could have easily found for themselves with one search.

Is there a known card that has been faked so well it could fool an expert?

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any that are so good they regularly can fool a knowledgeable person who has it in hand.

There are definitely some that are pretty good and require the expert or some real research to tell. The graders refuse/refused to grade Star basketball and Fro-Joys because there were some decent fakes. I've seen some pretty good Fleer MJ's and some decent Exhibits. I don't think I've ever seen a fake Mantle that requires more than a 5 second glance at an image to tell it's a fake though. It's fakes I've seen are all very low effort jobs that are immediately wrong. It wouldn't be that difficult of a project to make one that at least looks pretty decent with a vaguely close stock in a picture.

Sadly, they don't need to fool the experts, just the other 99% of collectors. It's sort of the old "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you!" premise.

I have heard there are some modern soccer cards that regularly fool the graders, although I don't know if that's due to how good they are or to incompetence. In theory this should become more and more of a problem as the technology gets even better.

Considering even 1 heavily stained example of a Mantle is worth ~$10M; I find it difficult to believe that we won't get fakes on stocks that can pass before all that long. The ROI on putting in the work into mimicking period correct printing is just so big that eventually somebody is going to inevitably seriously tackle this as a professional quality operation.

A premium quality fake doesn’t get caught. IMHO the issue isn’t “if” they exist, the issue is counterfeiters can’t flood a market with hundreds of nice copies without raising suspicion.

I don’t believe in this conspiracy theory that the undetectable crime is being committed. We need good fakes before there are premium perfect fakes, we don’t even have good. Someone will need to produce some evidence for this. Every time it comes up, nobody has a shred.

To each his own

I tend to agree. If there were really good fakes now, at least some of them would have been caught and called out, as with the Jordans some of which are pretty damn good. But I don't think we've heard anything about really good fake 311s, just the obvious hack jobs.

and many Star Basketball from the same era

wow up to $4500 some body is going to be unhappy

The negative feedback calling the seller a "scumbag" may give reason for pause. LOL

In hand, probably not.

The best fake I ever saw was back in maybe 81 or 82. The local dealer showed me a really great 51 Mantle. And just asked me what I thought of it. (pretty amazing they'd ask a just out of HS kid that)
After the initial "wow that's incredibly nice" the doubt set in. I couldn't point to anything specifically, but I became sure it was fake. So that's what I said, It's nice, but it's sad that it's fake. but I don't know why.
Apparently that was their opinion, and the opinion of I think 5 other dealers who had been offered that same card.

Being pessimistic, I would almost bet it's gotten past PSA and is now in a holder that's at least an 8.

I think the reason is that to make a great fake you'd need an original as source material.
And it's become so expensive that it just hasn't happened.

It would be worth it to make one nearly perfect one. maybe a bit off, so it's not suspicious, but around a 7-8. what it would take is out of reach for most fakers.

Someone smart would only do that once. Maybe with a handful of other 52 high numbers to avert suspicion.
Two? It would start getting looked at more closely.
Three? Just asking for trouble.

What if you really wanted to tweak some noses?

I could see some of the more sinister elements of our hobby deciding to go scorched earth and create millions of really good 52T fakes. If done properly, it could throw the entire hobby in disarray for a while, at least until we figured out some way to reliably distinguish the fakes from the real deal.

There is a decent counterfeit 89 Fleer Bill Ripken FF card that has made it into a few PSA slabs. Many people even with it in hand say it is real.

If someone could buy a low grade one that would enable them to make a high grade one, the profit would be staggering. This to me doesn't explain it.

Up to $12k!

Seller says he will put the card in a toploader for shipment LOL.

1952 topps Mantle how can this be real
 

I’ve often wondered about this. With the exponential leaps in AI effectiveness we’ve seen in the last few years, how long would it really take for someone to start creating fakes that are so good they couldn’t be detected using some of those same concepts?

I guess a better question is would this happen to money (counterfeit) first? There is a reason over hundreds of years now that hasn’t happened, and maybe not just one.

For cards, I think the cost-benefit to do this en masse just isn’t there yet. Could someone in theory invest in the infrastructure to create a printing factory that uses the old school techniques, (halftone dot printing…) old materials, and old cutting methods? Yes.

If and when this does happen, and the market is suddenly flooded with minty, perfectly centered Mickey Mantle cards that are indistinguishable from those already in PSA 8+ slabs - what happens? Do the legitimately worn, and OC copies suddenly become more valuable because they are more easily identifiable as authentic? LOL.


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Not to mention, couldn’t your model (for example) just be a common ‘52 Topps card and not the Mantle? Maybe not, I don’t know but either way having one to produce profit on many doesn’t seem to me something that would stand in the way for long.


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For commons, it's the same process and same effort. The payday would be the Mantle. But you would probably only get one or two accepted before a lot of questioning.

The problem most fakers have is that they're mostly lazy.
The effort to get a top quality fake is a lot but the reward would be too.
On the other hand, using a cheap fake takes no effort, and apparently gets you thousands.

It's also in the range of just refunding if it gets caught, and a couple thousand probably won't be investigated. Because at that point "I didn't know" just might be all you need.
A couple million or more might cause the faker a lot more trouble.

whoops, nevermind.