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hankronAlso, as Adam quickly pointed out, there is a law requiring the full disclosure of restorations and alterations. As with autograph COA, the discloser is in the form of a document detailing the restoration, who did it, etc. Again, I beleive there is a time limit for the buyer to act if he or she has been wronged.
The key is that if a dealer had an item altered, there is no murkey area where the dealer can argue this or that or he said/she said. The dealer is required by law to disclose it on paper, and the dealer having skipped the paperwork hoop is itself ilegal.
To add to the Dali forgery history, there were a lot of forged Salvador Dali prints and such sold by various galleries around the world. These fakes would have been obvious to expert collectors of Dali, but, as with the AAA cutout colletors, these fakes were most often sold to people who didn't know anything. Due in part to these forgeries, California set up a law that all art sold over a certain price (don't now the mimimum required), had to have a LOA offering similar details as the autographe LOAs. They buyer could return it within the time frame if the LOA was wrong. I'm sure California also thought there was an autograph forgery problem, and decided to write laws for the whole kit and kaboodle called art and collectables.
Last, before all Ninja baseball card avengers reach for their tights and black masks, I beleive this law applies to the buyer and seller only. No third parties involved.