How many fake autographs out there?

[Kaneen]

Originally Posted by Hankphenom

Cool. Betraying my ignorance here, I know, but what does factory certified mean? Is that a new thing?

Factory certified, as homerunhitter calls it, are the Certified Autographed cards inserted in packs of new product by the manufacturing companies. (ie. Topps, Panini, and formerly Upper Deck, etc.). These are autographs that the companies claim are personally signed by the player, and personally witnessed by a company rep. They attest to that being the case on the card in the fine print.

This practice has been part of the insert "chase card" phenomenon for many years now. However, in the early days of pack-pulled certified autographed cards there were some lax standards where some companies just mailed the cards directly to the players and trusted them to personally sign them. It only took a couple of situations where some players got a little "help" signing the hundreds/thousands of cards that led to some uncertainty and bad publicity about them. To be fair, in recent times it seems that the companies do keep a much tighter reign on the "witnessed" aspect of the process. So for the most part, modern day "factory certified" autographed cards are "witnessed" and about as iron clad as you get in the autograph hobby.

There have also been examples of known counterfeit "cert cards" where both the card was counterfeited and the autograph forged on expensive cards like Mays and Jeter. So, even with these certified cards one still needs to be aware that while it is a good system, it is not 100% foolproof.